<Begin Segment 4>

HH: Talking about your sharecropping around Fort Collins, you used the term "we." How many people were involved in --

TM: Oh, gee, I don't know, about ten.

HH: Ten?

TM: Uh-huh.

HH: I see. And were you all from Amache?

TM: No.

HH: Who made up this group of ten people?

TM: Some from Amache, some from... what's the one in Utah?

HH: And these were all Japanese Americans?

TM: Yeah.

HH: At that point, you were still single?

TM: Yeah. And my father and mother joined me. My mother did the cooking. In fact, we lived in a motel for a while, while we built our own house to live in. Colorado, yeah. And then we didn't have any, another little side comment would be that we didn't have any ration book, so we were eating chicken all the time. Boy, you get tired of chicken, if that's all you got to eat.

HH: But that's because you grew your own, I mean, you raised your...

TM: No, no, you could buy chickens without ration books.

HH: Oh, I see. That wasn't rationed?

TM: No.

HH: I see, I thought that was rationed, too.

TM: No, no. But anything else, rationed, we had plenty of gasoline ration books because we were farming. But nothing to buy beef with, pork.

HH: Just chicken?

TM: Just chicken. You got sick and tired of it. [Laughs]

HH: You did that for one season?

TM: No, no, we got ration books eventually. So we weren't eating chicken all our lives there.

HH: How many years --

TM: One year.

HH: One year at Fort Collins?

TM: Yeah.

HH: And then that's when you decided to move? You were able to move east?

TM: Well, I went back into camp, because I wasn't quite sure what I was doing. And people were leaving camp at that time to investigate different farming possibilities and such. And I listened to everything that people had to say about the Midwest, and none of that sounded interesting to me. So I left there, went through Michigan, because Michigan has quite a viable vegetable industry. And then I came to Philadelphia and I went as far south as North Carolina to investigate the possibilities. But all the time I was doing that, I was always keeping my back to the wall because I didn't want somebody to slug me from behind. So even when I was doing that, I got picked up by the local police, the state police, and eventually Naval Intelligence. So I figured the heck with this, I'm gonna go back to the Philadelphia area where the Quakers are and see what's there. And that's how I got back up into this area.

<End Segment 4> - Copyright © 1994 JACL Philadelphia. All Rights Reserved.