Transcript
Craig Nagasawa: "There was this idea, especially for the young males, it was all sports, sports, sports, sports, endless sports. There were like The Dois, Wally Doi was the head of the Doi family. I believe he was from Hawaii, but he was also in the 442 and he had a wooden leg as a result of his combat over in Europe. But he already had practiced judo and all this stuff. I remember he had what's called cauliflower ear, one side anyway, it's all like curled up and it was from doing so much judo when he was a kid. So he was extremely, intensely into both football and baseball. He would coach little league teams and do all of this stuff with the kids.
So during the summers, every other day, we would go out into the back, the big open dirt lot that was behind all the stores down that alley. We could go through the stores, so Aloha Cafe, everybody came out to the back and there was a big dirt parking lot. And he would be a coach to us. He would get us out there and make us warm up. We'd have to run back and forth, run up and down the back parking lot to get in shape, and then we'd play catch and then he would–Oh! What was great was when you were playing catch, it was fierce. It wasn't just sort of lobbing the ball. You threw it as hard as you could. He would hold up his mitt and the ball had to go right in his mitt or otherwise he would just let it go by and he'd start yelling at you, “What's the matter with you? You got a crooked arm or something?” Plus he had his wooden leg so he wouldn't even try. He would just stand there and you had to go shag it. So we got to be very good aims with throwing the baseball. And then he would pitch to us. We would draw a square on the back of the building. It was the back of the judo club, actually—it was a cinder block building—on the wall in the back. We would draw a square that was the strike zone and he would pitch just like full-on fastball. I was always terrified. His kids weren't. Wade and Robin Doi, and Kimmy, that was the Doi family. They played baseball all the way through high school and they played football. They were like real team athletes, but it all started with Wally and little league back there. He would just throw these sort of sizzling pitches past us as little kids and I was just always terrified that I was going to get hit with one. And of course, we never got hit. He was good. But we didn't have helmets or all the gear that they had. We're just out there with our tennis shoes and our baseball bats.
But here was the thing. There was a huge warehouse across on the other side of the back parking lot. I think it was like two and a half stories high. It was an inner warehouse. I don't know who it was run by. It might have been part of the Greyhound Bus Depot. But if you hit the ball onto the roof there, it was considered a home run and you got to stop practicing for the day. So we would always be trying to hit a home run. I think I probably never did., but Wade and Robin every once in a while would hit these home runs up on the top. And as a reward, we got to, first of all, it was always in the summer, so it was sizzling hot. So we wanted to hit that home run so we could go inside. But somebody would hit one. And we'd go straight through the back of Aloha Cafe. We'd go sit at the counter, Wally would make us any soft drinks we wanted, malts, shakes, whatever you wanted, and a piece of pie. That was our reward for practice. We got to do that even when we practiced, but we got to cut short when somebody hit a home run. So that was one of the things that would happen. And then after a while, the Colonial Hotel was quite high and there were windows along that alley. So the people who had apartments that looked out that way could watch us down in the back. So after a while, it became a thing where all of these old guys were up there two and three stories up and they'd be yelling things at us out their window. “That looked like a strike to me!” “What are you guys doing out there?” You know? There was just this whole thing where everybody knew each other and even the parents would be out there, or Wally would be out there, coaching us."
]]>Craig Nagasawa: "At the fish market itself, the Sunrise, we had a number of things that were our own brand, and one of the things I remember is we had this rice called Sun Boy Rice. It came in 100 pound sacks. I guess it came in smaller ones too, but it was mostly 100 pound sacks and there were these cotton bags that were silkscreen. My dad made this—I have one somewhere over at my studio. Sun Boy Rice—there was a big insignia on the thing and the rice came from Arkansas. The rice came in a train car from Arkansas and it was loose. It wasn't packaged. So it came to us just in this big train car. And when it would arrive, they would assemble all of the older guys. It was like shovels. They'd go down with shovels and they would offload the whole train car into a warehouse still loose into these big bins and they’d put all the rice in there. Then once it was in there, it would slowly get strained and be put into the 100 pound bags and sewed shut. We supplied that rice all over Salt Lake. it was the early days where it was actually hard to get short grain rice that the Japanese use. That was that kind of interesting thing. There was always this rice thing going on.
At the market itself in the back, we had a special—we called it the rice bin room. It was a whole room that was raised off the ground and the bottom was made out of metal, like galvanized sheets of metal and the sides were made out of wire cages so no mice or any rodents or anything, nothing could get to it in there. And in there were these big stacks, at any given time there were like 20 stacks of 100 pound bags of rice. We were allowed to play in there if we took our shoes off because there were these cotton bags. We would go in there and we would build stuff out of the bags. We would build forts one on each side and then we’d throw stuff at each other and have games in there. It's a miracle we never got crushed in there, none of them fell on us. It took two of us, we could barely lift a hundred pound bag because we were so little. I remember when we finally got old enough to—by the time we were teenagers, we could actually put a whole hundred pound bag of rice on our shoulder and carry them. Because we used to deliver them too, sometimes they just get delivered down the street so they'd be like. “You need a workout? Take this hundred pound bag down” and they'd throw it on your shoulder and you'd carry it a half a block down to one of the restaurants or something. The older guys, like my uncles and Robin Doi—some of the older guys, could carry two.
There would oftentimes be a big shipment that would go out. So we'd have to load like a huge truck out of the back of the fish market with say about 20 bags. I don't know where they went to, Ogden or something. They’d just put the call out—rice loading day. And all of these young guys would show up and they used it as a workout. They thought they were all macho and strong, and the big thing was they could carry two so they'd hoist one up—they could pick them up too—so they'd hoist them from the ground and flip one on one shoulder and then reach down the other, flip one on the other. I remember the pose was like this. You had to have your arms out like this so the bag wouldn't slide off. They'd walk down the street like this with two bags of hundred pound rice sacks on their shoulders or they take it to the truck and offload them. The trucks were up high, right? So you'd walk up and they would flip them up onto the back of the truck when they would load them up. That was another part of—there was a lot of activity that nobody saw."
]]>Transcript
Craig Nagasawa: "One of our daily routines was after we closed at the fish market, we would gather the family and we would walk down the street up that alley, cut through the alley all the way through to the Greyhound bus depot, and then kind of kitty corner across towards this Emeril Avenue where my grandparents' house was. Some of it was walkable, we'd walk back and forth. One thing I recall, I was quite small at the time when we first started walking back and forth. My dad's family, my dad was the oldest, but there were some younger brothers and sisters and one of my dad's brothers, Eddie, he was a sort of football player at West High School and he used to carry me on his back in the winter because I would always complain about getting my feet wet and cold because it would be covered with snow. Those back alleys would be all iced and slushed, full of big puddles and ice, frozen over puddles. So he would carry me back. He would carry me all the way over there to the house on his back. And then we would sit down and sometimes we'd bring our dinner from the sunrise, the ingredients for our dinner, and then we'd sit down over there and eat dinner and all of the brothers, my father's brothers and sisters, would gather there. So it was a big meeting point right there for our family."
]]>Transcript:
Craig Nagasawa: "Once I went—I was in the Mihoya and I got a manju. Well, first I went into the Mihoya. and my grandmother was working there. So I went in there. And I had gotten all dirty because I was out in the back playing baseball. So I was all covered—my face was all dirty and stuff and she was just aghast that I was so dirty. And so she takes me to the sink. We have these huge restaurant style sinks in the back that are about three feet deep, those big stainless steel things. There was a bank of those that had like three or four things. They were almost like a bathtub. Anyway, she takes me over there and she holds me up over the thing off of a small ladder and douses my head with water and then pours [emphasis] Tide. That was the only soap she had, I guess. She reaches under there and she pulls Tide clothes detergent out and she pours it on my head and she washes my hair with it and my face and it stung like crazy! I was screaming! But I was clean [laughs]. Then she rinsed me off and for suffering through that—she was afraid I was going to run back to the other end where my mom was and my mom would come down and they'd get in a big argument because she washed me.
So she gave me a manju that I could eat. So I went out in front and I sat on the curb and I ate my manju. I got up and started walking back, but I was so preoccupied with eating this manju that I ran smack into a parking meter pole. There used to be these things, you know? I looked up— I'll never forget that—I looked up and it was just like there! It hit me square in the head and it knocked me out. I just fell backwards and I was laying on the ground. It was the first time I ever hit my head that hard. You used to watch cartoons where Donald Duck would get hit and stars would come out. It was just like that. I was like, “Oh my God, that's true.” You see like little spots and stuff. And so, of course, there was all of these other people and businesses so people came running out, and instantly I was completely taken care of. They came with ice packs and all this stuff and walked me back home. That's the kind of thing where. if this happened today, you'd probably lay there for an hour before anybody even stopped to check you out. "
]]>Transcript:
Lisa Imamura: "Matter of fact, in Rose Park, there used to be this place called Earl's Pharmacy. They had a soda jerk there as well, but they had copious amounts of candy. So when they would come into town, especially Uncle Ben, all of us kids would be like, “Oh, Uncle Ben’s in town! Oh my gosh!” and he would take us and he'd hand us like a dollar, right? Dollar nowadays isn't going to buy you much, but back then—if you got a dollar of penny candy! Are you kidding me? And sometimes when he was really, really, really overly generous, $5."
]]>Craig Nagasawa: "One thing I thought of is why don't they make some core drillings? Just make these like 8-inch diameter core drilling in various places all over there. You probably could still do it without hurting hardly anything. Just drill down through there. Go as deep as you can. Go like 20 feet or something, pull these cores out, see if there's any like timelines and ideas about what existed there—the actual dirt. So see things like that, if you had an exhibition or place where that could be displayed, even if it was a case, say in some sports complex you had a whole big glass case with a changing—can you imagine having those cores in there? With stratas and maybe nothing's in them anymore, but with the stories. Here's what existed right here under us in this dirt! Those kinds of ideas go further than a plaque because I think a plaque's valuable, but, you know, people look at them, read them, and then they leave and go off somewhere and that's it."
]]>Craig Nagasawa:"If there's going to be more development and ideas, it doesn't seem that far-fetched to me to, for instance, why not have a community center? Put into one of these places where people could meet or both a community center and since I'm an artist, a kind of museum exhibition space whose work was to recreate some of what happened there, the stories on the block, right in the community there, somewhere. I know it will never be the same, but at least it commemorates the idea that it was there. I'd like to see the commitment in terms of whatever is going to get developed, or if it gets developed, which I would assume it probably will because of the monies involved. It seems to me the commitment could be bigger than what's already being proposed. To like push even further into what are ways to have the history right there.
So say you went to a sports center, but in the lobby of the sports center, there was a big thousand square foot space that was all about the stories, with video, with paintings, with, I don’t know, written stories. That could change. It could be, it could change, it could be curated, it could be a changing kind of idea. And at least artists could reconstruct the businesses, make a storefront, stick it in there for a while. Those are the kind of, I know they're more grandiose ideas and they're hard to politically make happen. But I think there can be much richer ways to reconstruct some of this."
]]>Transcript:
"They ran the bar or the cafe, whatever you want to call it, inside Pal-D-Mar and my parents would bring me every Friday night with them when they’d go to practice. As soon as we would walk in, Bill would come and pick me up and say, “Okay, she's coming with me.” He'd take me into the bar and he'd give me all the maraschino cherries that I wanted and he'd make me as many Shirley Temples as I wanted. Him and his wife Shirley would just sit there and play with me until they were finished bowling and I loved every second of it. And their boys, Steve and Stan—Steve’s really a nice guy, he's pretty even-keeled. Stan, he would always go, “What a brat.” But, I told them, I’d go, “That's okay, you still love me.”
]]>Transcript:
Craig Nagasawa: "My Mother, for instance, used to say, "Oh, the FBI would come to the house once a week." And go through their house, just walk in like a search warrant, look around and open drawers, go through all their stuff. "
]]>Transcript:
Craig Nagasawa: "It says the Rojin Club or Don's Pool Hall. Don's Pool Hall was what it was. On the ground floor there was a big pool hall. It hardly seemed like anybody was ever in there and what was really going on was there was this I don't know what Rojin means, but there was this club and basically there was gambling going on. So in the back, the pool hall was sort of like the front and in the back—I guess it was legal, but they were probably secretly exchanging money. There was always some strange either mahjong or poker going on back there and you would never know unless you could enter from the back. So as kids, we used to go running through there and people would scream at us, “What are you doing in here?” And so on."
]]>