Interviews

1. Education in a Buddhist temple and a country school

2. Learning to do farm labor at a sugar beet farm

3. Blue-eyed doll

Sumida,Alice

(1914-2018) Founder of the largest gladiolus bulb farm in the United States.

Learning to do farm labor at a sugar beet farm

After about 2 weeks there (Assembly Center), a man from the sugar beet field came. They wanted to recruit some young men to work in the sugar beet field in Nyssa, Oregon, and my husband said, “Hmm, this might be a good time to get out of here before we got sick” So I was the only woman. I volunteered to go and work in the sugar beet field.

In the first group, there were about 20 men, including my husband. And I was the only woman. They put us on a train at night. All the shades were pulled down and we didn’t know where we were going. In the morning, we came to Nyssa, Oregon. We got off and each family had a tent, a canvas tent to sleep in. They had 2 cots and a wood stove in a hundred degree weather. Summer time gets very hot there. Then they told us we have to have work clothes, work pants, work shoes and a hat and a hoe, short-handled hoe, and a file. Get those, go to the warehouse…hardware store and get them. So we all went, trotted over there to buy these and I think we bought out the store.

And 6 o’clock next morning, pick-up came and the farmer came to get us. So we all hopped on the back of the pick-up and away we went. And when we got to his field, the plants should be that tall, be easy to thin. You know, you leave just one plant and you knock off the rest of the plants and leave another plant about a foot apart. So boom, boom, boom. And all the time, you are bent like this. Oh what a backbreaking job.

Another family was with us – Uchiyama family. They were father, mother, maybe about 6 children. All experts, you know. They’re used to doing that. So they go boom, boom, boom, boom. They go up and down the row, you know. And my husband and I had never done it so we go boom and set up the plant and boom, set up the plant. It was just awful.

One day, I was…"I gotta do this right and I gotta move a little faster.” I was determined to do it right. And I was doing this and here…I almost hit a bull snake. It was curled up in the sugar beet field. You go “Oh!” and I thought, “Whah!” I screamed and yelled and ran out of the field as fast as I could. Anyway, I told my husband, “I don’t want to do sugar beet work anymore.” I said that’s the end. We were so slow, they paid us 35 cents an hour.

agriculture sugar beets

Date: December 6, 2005

Location: Oregon, US

Interviewer: Akemi Kikumura Yano

Contributed by: Watase Media Arts Center, Japanese American National Museum.

Interviewee Bio

Alice Sumida (b.1914) Alice’s parents immigrated to California from Kumamoto, Japan, and were farming in the Central Coast area when she was born. When she was six years old, Alice’s parents placed her in a dormitory at a Buddhist Temple in nearby Guadalupe, where, until the age of twelve, she learned Japanese reading, writing, customs and culture. She then attended a country school where she first developed a love of dance when the teacher encouraged everyone to dance at Thanksgiving, Halloween and Christmas celebrations. Later, while in San Francisco taking voice lessons, she met her future husband, Mark, a Portland resident ten years her senior. At his insistence, they were engaged after three days and married in two weeks. After the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor in 1941 and the United States entry into World War II, Alice and Mark were ordered to an “Assembly Center” in Portland that was built over the foul-smelling stockyards. After two weeks, they were recruited to the sugar beet fields of Eastern Oregon—where Alice was the only woman doing the “backbreaking work” of harvesting. When the war ended, they took up farming a barren piece of land that, after much hard work and sacrifice, they eventually transformed into the country’s largest gladiola bulb farm. Following Mark’s passing in 1981, Alice revived her earlier love of dance, and, in her 90s, she continued to compete in ballroom dance events around the world. She passed away on August 16, 2018 at age 104. (October 2018)