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This oral history is from an interview conducted by the Oral History cluster of the Landscapes of Injustice project.
Oh, well this might have been a barrel that he might have stored nails in or that he bought nails inbut darned if it doesn’t say on this wooden barrel, which is with the staves have all fallen out of their round rings that hold it together, if it doesn’t say it on this barrel 'product of Japan’
Oh, heck yeah. Some person built their house by cutting down the trees and nailing it right there and buying the windows.Maybe the nails they used came from Japan?
Oh, the Japs would do it this way.It would just sort of be followed, this is the way. Dad never spoke about them in a racist way, yeah. Do you think ... It seems that everything has stood the test of time. Do you think he took pride in being asked to hold this stuff? That his mother was? Yeah. Oh, quite ... I would think that, yeah, that he was impressed at the time and maybe more and more impressed as years went on that my grandmother was the quality of person who would have been a friend and someone to trust and someone to turn to in a time of absolute terrible trouble. He would have known that about her, of course, but would have taken this as a privilege for her and thought my grandma was somebody who, yeah. That didn’t surprise him that that was who she was. And this really was more of a request to your grandmother than to your ... Yes, to my grandmother, yeah. My goodness, you know, I wonder, I think, actually, my dad must have got this stuff, he did get this stuff when my grandmother died. Not when my grandfather died many, you know, like decades or more later. If it was in our home when I was young, which is what I remember, hm, maybe, I could be remembering that wrong. Yeah, I can’t see it being part of my granddad’s kind of continuing itinerant life.
Tip: write the names of your classmates in ink on the back of your picture. You will be glad of it someday.Isn’t that funny