<Begin Segment 3>

LG: What were your parents' names?

TM: My father's name was William Toshio Maebori, and my mother's name was Michiko Alice Takaki.

LG: And what sort of work did your father do?

TM: My father worked for his brother-in-law in Auburn, my uncle Tony owned a pottery, and so they made flower pots or clay containers, so he worked there for him.

LG: Was that something that he picked up in Washington, or was that something new?

TM: Well, I think he learned from his brother-in-law what to do. My father was very adept at knowing how things worked and how to operate things, so I imagine that he could do that quite well. My mother, on the other hand, was very well-educated, and she went on to graduate from the University of Washington, had a BA or a BS, I think, in clothing design, and one interesting bit of information was she said that when she went to the guidance counselor, the career counselor to find out about job opportunities, when she was about ready to graduate, the person told her, "I don't know why you got a degree, you'll never get a job," meaning that people of Japanese ancestry will not be hired. So she didn't, even though she had this degree, she didn't utilize it until after all of us were in school. She did dressmaking at home, and so she had lots of customers who came, and she altered clothes and she made wedding dresses and so forth, and she also taught at the high school in evening classes for adult evening school, so she taught.

LG: Do you know if she ever did face racism or discrimination, looking for work?

TM: If she did, she never talked about it, but I'm sure she did, just given the climate of the time. She was very good at dressmaking, and so some of the part-time jobs she got in the community were, she worked in a fabric store, and I was with her when she got that job which was very interesting because we were in a fabric store, and the clerk was kind of overwhelmed with all the customers. You have to realize at the time, many people did sewing. And so my mother just kind of stepped in and helped, and, I mean, she saw her opportunity and she took it, so they hired her.

LG: What sort of clothes did she make?

TM: She could make anything, she could make anything. I remember many people came to her, like I said, for wedding dresses and for bridesmaids' dresses and for special occasion, she did a lot of alterations as well. I can remember seeing her when a customer would come to the house, and she would be hemming their skirts, measuring the hemming, so they'd be standing up on a stool and then they'd be turning and turning and she'd be marking. So the interesting thing was at ninety-eight years old, she was still doing alterations. And she was legally blind at that point, but she had a huge amount of magnifying glasses all around the house. And I think just by the feel of things, she lived in a retirement community, and when she died, she had a pile of clothes by her sewing machine. And so we said, "We don't know who these belong to," so we had to take them up to the reception desk and say, "We don't know who these belong to, could you make an announcement that my mother couldn't get to them?" So they found out very quickly that that was something she could do very easily. And she made all of us clothes, and I remember one time when a neighbor friend, their little girl, she made her a dress. And we didn't have a lot of money, there were a lot of us kids. And I said, "Why did you do that?" Because we were barely in clothes. She said, "Well, it's just nice," just a thing that she thought she could do, and easily do, so she made a dress for one of my sisters' friends, just as a nice gesture. So it's something you remember as an example of, I guess, neighborliness or friendship.

But later on, when we were all in school, the government services, general services administration, the government, came to town and we were all in school, so she got a job in their what they call testing and development. Because she had a university degree and she had taken courses in chemistry, she qualified to be in that lab testing different materials that the government would buy. So she worked for the government for seventeen years, and that was good because the government work, you get pensions, and it was good for her.

<End Segment 3> - Copyright © 2023 Densho. All Rights Reserved.