-
Los Angeles
- University of Hawai'i Press
- Chapter
- Additional Information
141 Los Angeles The first house we had in Los Angeles was an old four bedroom house on Koehler Street between Seventh and Eighth streets. After settling in, I went to a walnut ranch in Covina, twenty miles from Los Angeles, to work as a cook for a camp of about twenty Japanese laborers, getting paid twenty-five cents per laborer fed. Leaving Kiyo and Kenji, eight and seven years old, with Papa, I took along Joe and you, five and three. But after a few days Papa brought Kenji out to the walnut ranch to stay with me because after midnight, when Papa went to work, Kenji would get lonesome and cry. A fire broke out one night next door to the house on Koehler Street, which scared Kenji so much that, to comfort him, Papa started taking Kenji along on his milk route. On the rounds Kenji would get sleepy and nearly fall out of the milk truck. This was too much worry and strain for Papa, and he brought Kenji to Covina, where he’d be safe on the ground. As a result, my wages were reduced because I had so many children to feed. Cooking on a wood-burning stove and doing laundry for my children—there were no washing machines then—along with all kinds of chores, I was dizzy with work. 142 part iii Joe kept me happy, though, with his boyish games. He had a toy wagon in which he rode as he ordered his Mexican playmates to push him around, “Magari-ando!” (Turn!) “Tomari-ando!” (Stop!) “Massuguando !” (Straight ahead!), his idea of Spanish [adding the Spanish gerund to a Japanese command]. There was a Mr. Kamiya, of Wakugawa, who agreed to work cooperatively with me and share half the earnings. He climbed into the trees and shook them while I gathered the nuts from the ground. I worked there for fifty days and came home with one hundred fifty dollars saved. It was a big help in setting up housekeeping for the first time in Los Angeles, which cost a lot of money. To add to Papa’s salary, we asked a Mr. Toguchi, a gardener, to take room and board with us. We had heard he was looking for a place to stay, but he refused, saying that when he needed shade, he would rely on a big shade tree. Toward the end of 1927 we moved to a two-story frame house at 712 Merchant Street, so that we could have more rooms to rent to boarders. The house was furnished with only the barest necessities—beds and bureaus, kitchen chairs, a kitchen table. No rugs. But there was soon a steady stream of visitors and boarders—summertime vacationers from the Imperial Valley, people from Peru or Colorado or elsewhere, whole families on their way back to or from Japan, university students, medical students, migratory workers in between crops. Some paid for their keep and some did not. In February 1928, with the encouragement of Mr. Hamamoto Tokko, who was a wholesaler in the produce market on Central Avenue, Papa gave up his milk route, a night job, bought a stall in the market, and started his own business there, another night job. He gave his milk route to one of our tenants, Mr. Shindo, who said he was from a samurai family. When he found the route too complicated to learn, he gave it up, returning to being a “blanket boy” migratory worker. For years after that he sent the family a lug of delicious grapes or peaches or some other fruit from Sacramento or wherever he had migrated to. Soon after starting his own business, Papa, Mr. Hamamoto, and three [44.213.80.203] Project MUSE (2024-03-28 21:08 GMT) los angeles 143 of their competitors, Kanashiro Isokichi, Yamashiro Kingoro, and a Mr. Sakamoto, joined to form the Corner Produce Company, specializing in peas, green beans, bell peppers, artichokes, and asparagus. One of our upstairs rooms became the company office, and Mr. Hamamoto was the president. They tried rotating the task of bookkeeping, but the accounts always returned to Papa in a mess, and he finally took over the responsibility for it. He stayed with that extra task without extra pay until 1942, when the business had to be abandoned because of the wartime evacuation . In the spring of 1928 Tamaki Shigemori came running over to our house to announce his good fortune, finally the birth...