<Begin Segment 3>

RB: Definitely have more questions about the Friends, but since we're talking a little bit about childhood, I'm curious if you could share some other memories that you have of growing up in your household and also some of the community groups that your family was a part of, other memories that you might have of being in the meeting?

MM: So we grew up in a farmhouse on Fellowship Road, and there were several iterations of that house. We were right up against the apple orchards in the back side of the house. It was a country road, there was one elderly couple who lived in this, what I thought, brick ramshackle house across the street. So we had no really close neighbors, but there was constant activity because it was a working farm. And during the summer months, we had... what would you call it? Workers who came up mostly from Puerto Rico, later from Jamaica and some other Caribbean countries, but they were contracted through a, I don't know, New Jersey farm labor organization that I know was in Glassboro. So I guess during the summer months, we must have had fifteen-plus men down in the barracks, and my dad provided housing and blankets and cots, et cetera, wasn't fancy. So growing up on a farm with parents and grandparents who were just working all the time. The kids, we kind of took care of ourselves to a certain extent. My mom would say, "Don't go near the irrigation pond, it's really deep, and you guys don't swim." [Laughs] "So stay away from that pond." I got to roam all over the farm, and I'd get mad at my brother who would be teasing me, and I'd just take the dog and we'd go for a long walk. And I was reading a lot, I think. I am remembering that we didn't go to summer camps, but my mom somehow found the time to take us every two weeks or whatever the cycle was, to the Moorestown public library and bring back a stack of books. And as we got older, the World Book, there was not a TV for quite a long while, it was a black and white TV with tubes, so you banged it if it was not working right. So we had, the four of us pretty much, with occasional exchanges of some kids from the other farming families or whatever, kind of showed up for meals, and kind of free to roam and to read and to go look for the kittens in the barn. I remember just sort of the... so apple blossoms are white, right? And there's one vivid scene of there's a storm coming up and the sky is dark behind, and it's just this, it's like the hanami, it's like the Japanese sakura blossoms, just an explosion of white blossoms. Tagging onto that, my grandfather was very gregarious and he and, I suppose, Grandmother was involved as well, but they would invite their Issei friends, and they would come out for a hanami, a viewing of apple blossoms. And then my grandfather had built a whole picnic ground down by the stream at the far end. I pulled up a picture of Laurel Marutani and her mother, Vicky, who just recently passed away. But sitting on the back end of the family station wagon, and he would just go, oh, scene from the past. [Laughs]

RB: Yeah, I remember seeing some of those photos as well, actually. Was this a thing that was done on an annual basis?

MM: I think on a regular basis. And then later, because of connections we had with the Shimanouchi family, and I can't tell you how, but one of those, that family, was they were New Yorkers, and they would bring a whole crowd of Japanese, probably Issei down from New York to do the same thing. So that was perhaps in later years.

RB: If you had to guess, what is the kind of date range that that was being done?

MM: I'd have to look that up. '50s into the early '60s. I mean, I was going off to college in '67. And Grandmother had died when I was... so I was seventeen. Grandmother had died with I was about ten, just early years, one of the kids running around.

RB: So then thinking a little bit more about the farm, I know that Tak continued to expand until his farm, I've heard it described as at one point the largest fruit orchard that was in New Jersey.

MM: I know at one point there was an article in the Sunday Enquirer magazine section about Tak being the biggest strawberry grower, and I think he was growing, like, twenty-five acres of strawberries. I think we were probably in school, but there was a picture of Grandmother and Grandfather and Mom and Dad. They would say a prayer before every meal, and there was probably some other article with Grandmother sorting apples or peaches on the production line. And a really good story is, so the workers would come up and they'd have a flat of eight quarts of strawberries, and my mother, grandmother would hand them, it was piecework, so she'd hand him a ticket with their number for every quart of strawberries, and then they'd know how much they'd get paid. So Grandmother's been watching these pickers, and she picked up a quart and she dumps it out in her hand and there are clods of dirt in there. Didn't have to pick as many strawberries that way, and she just dumped the whole thing out. So she spoke no Spanish or English, and he spoke no Japanese, but they knew who was, the boss's mother. [Laughs] So she was out of control.

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