Working at the Sunrise Fish Market
Transcript:
"One of the things that was funny was that, of course, we were running around all over the place all the time. But there was this Japanese thing that kids were not to be seen in the business. I don't know if that was because they were worried about getting accused of child labor or something. I don't know what the thing was, but I think it was mostly just a tradition. That a business—you can't have your kids running around inside the business. And so one of the things that would happen is we'd be playing around in there and then as soon as the door would open. we'd have to go running into the back room as fast as we could to stay out of sight. So that was one of the things.
And of course, we were all assigned jobs and so one of my main jobs that I remember—I must have been only like six or seven years old—was to take all of the—people would come in with the—all the soft drinks and beer and everything were in these bottles with deposits on them. So all these people would bring bottles in to get their, I don't know what they got, 10 cents or something. My job was to take those bottles and take them far into the back of the market. In the back, there was a big—you could drive down an alley over by Colonial Hotel and it wrapped around the back and there was a big open dirt parking lot. So all the businesses accessed—all the deliveries and stuff came through the back. So there were these long buildings, you know, long buildings going inward off the storefront. I had to take all those bottles back there into the back and put them in their respective crates so that when the, for instance, the Coca-Cola guy came, he would take off with all the bottles."
Audio
Images