Blog Thread
- BECOMING AMERICAN
BECOMING AMERICAN
Jul
11
Dad practiced Racial Integration, Service and Being True to Himself
I was born in Bully Creek near Vale, Oregon, because five pioneer families had migrated with all their possessions in a caravan of a couple cars and three trucks, in 1937, to the Treasure Valley area on the Oregon side of the Snake River that separates Oregon and Idaho. They pioneered east, not west, from Kent/Auburn valley, south of Seattle. A covered wagon pioneer going west, left a diary entry at the Treasure Valley Library saying, “…desert so rugged, so dreary and…changes of thousand and thousands of years won’t yield anything worthy of consideration to the support of human life.”
The opening of the Owyhee Dam provided new row crop faming opportunities, and a few earlier Japanese leaving Mountain States railroad work had bragged about raising onions twice the size they were raising in the Seattle area, Kent Valley. The story is, because of racial discrimination worry, they had to go as a group and caravan in case of vehicle breakdowns or troubles along the way.
I was 4-years-old when Dad, age 35, bought this 30-acre property in Sand Hollow where he built our one-room house with an equipment shed, twice as big as the living quarters, attached. With two horses and borrowed equipment, he cultivated the land into growing onions for income and hay for the horses. Our address was Route 3, Caldwell, Idaho. That’s across the Snake River from Vale, not far from Boise, Idaho.
Dad was also pleased to help build this one-room church east of our farm. According to the current website, it’s now called the Sand Hollow Baptist Church north, of Caldwell on the old highway 30. I think it was non-denominational back in the late 1940s when we were there.
One Sunday when I was six-years-old, Mrs Talkington was teaching us, Shirley, Phyliss, Dickie, me, with two or three others, Bible stories in one corner. Several adults were in the main section. All of a sudden there was a commotion with many harsh words. Dad and Mr. Nelson had gotten into an argument about a passage in the Bible. Mr. Nelson countered, “What does a ‘JAP’ know?”
I remember, the parishioners all pouring out of building and forming a circle on the sandy, sage brush bordered desert parking lot, with five-foot six inch Dad and six-foot Mr. Nelson in the middle with clenched fists. It never came to real blows because Dad was carrying my 1-yr-old baby sister. But, we did change churches. We drove 8 miles on gravel roads to Notus Baptist Church after the incident.
Dad often had coffee and made friends with neighbors several miles around and got to know them. I remember driving to Mr. Nelson’s place. Dad must have made up with Mr. Nelson, because his daughters were our baby sitters when Dad had to take my Mom to the hospital and follow-up doctor’s appointments the following year in Caldwell. At age 28, Mom almost died of internal bleeding after her Hysterectomy operation. She also lost all her teeth and had dentures.
We were invited to Sunday, after church dinners, with people like the Lenz family or the Barns family from the Baptist Church in Notus. Our neighbor were the Randalls who went to the Seventh Day Adventist Church and Dickie was one of my best friends. I spent a lot of time at their house. One day, I got too close to their dog when it was eating. I can see the scar on my nose where I got bit and had to go to the doctor in Caldwell for stitches.
We often visited the Carters who were Nazarene up north on highway 30. Mrs. Carter picked me up to go to Vacation Bible School in the summers. When I started school Shirley Talkington became my best friend and we used to pan for gold in the creek that ran past her house.
In 1948, Dad sold the farm and became the “Fishman” with a grocery delivery business out of Ontario Fish Market. Ontario is part of the Treasure Valley in Eastern Oregon where, contrary to the other small towns in the area, Mayor Elmo Smith welcomed the Japanese who had to relocate with Executive Order 9066 and welcomed the Japanese who chose farming to start over after 110,000 of us with Japanese heritage in the USA were incarcerated during WWII. Most of the families coming to the Treasure Valley were some of the 9000 incarcerated at Minidoka in southern Idaho.
Dad was not good at making money. Dad played the violin, harmonica and a musical saw. He sang in the church choir and took Sunday’s off. Influenced by my Mom’s complaining and community gossip, I considered Dad a loser because he didn’t work all seven days a week to get ahead like all the others in the Japanese American community.
Dad had a four note musical horn, on which he played a tune, as he drove onto the driveway of each of the farms of his bi-weekly customers. The wives who were often out in the field heard his arrival and came in to shop out of his van. Those days, farmers were poor and their only vehicle may have been a pickup or truck for farming. They also didn’t have time or resources to go in to town for groceries. Dad and the Ontario Fish Market had a big drawer of credit customers who paid after their harvest.
One evening during my high school years, Dad had come home around 9pm from his Nampa, Idaho, route. I asked him, “A bunch of the Japanese kids are going to take dance lessons.” The lessons were at the Japanese Community Hall, out by the airport which Dad helped build.
Dad answered, “No, I don’t want you to do that.” I knew the church people considered it a sin to be involved in bars where there was dancing.
“I hate you”, I yelled back as I left him eating dinner at the kitchen table and went to my room.
I graduated from Ontario High School where there were 12 of us with Japanese heritage, out of the 117 1956 graduates.
I am now the same age when Dad died, 83-year-old. I’m realizing the importance of how Dad ignored being discriminated and was one of the older Nisei striving to be seen as American, who lived out his purpose in life developing friendships with his neighbors, as well as being helpful and serving wherever needed.
- If you are a bloguru member, please login.
Login - If you are not a bloguru member, you may request a free account here:
Request Account
