Carl Nomura:
Marriage & Kids
A renaissance man recalls, with a sharp eye and a wicked sense of humor, marriage on a shoestring and raising a Japanese American family in post-war Minnesota.
by Carl Nomura
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Excerpted by express written agreement from Sleeping on Potatoes (Erasmus Books, ISBN 0-970-1947-3-0,$18.95, 268 pp).
Available through bookstores or from publisher at 1-360-733-1483.
© 2003 by Carl Nomura.
All rights reserved.
Carl Nomura:
Marriage & Kids
hen I proposed marriage to Louise, she didn't immediately jump at this fantastic offer. Instead she went to the library and looked for books in the marriage section. There she found one that correlated men's success as husbands or fathers and their occupation. She found nothing under physicist, but she came upon one for chemical engineers. They were excellent prospects and she reached that "Chem-E" was close enough to physics. She then checked with her father. He had come to the U.S. in 1898, a time when Japan and China were mortal enemies. His answer was, "Marry whoever you want, but make sure he's not Chinese."
I was a penniless student, living at the sub-poverty level of $111.11 each month from the G.I. Bill. Louise dug into her savings from the twenty dollars a month stipend she received from the Cadet Nurse Corps. Lou thought we'd be rolling in dough because she would be a graduate nurse and could get a job at the hospital. As it turned out, she had to pay back one month's worth of make-up time, at twenty dollars per month, before she could qualify as a nurse. That was the time that had accrued while she was in California arranging for her mother's funeral and finding a place for her father. He had just come out of the Relocation Center to find his home burned to the ground along with all of his possessions.
Sleeping on Potatoes (Erasmus Books, 2003) traces Carl Nomura's life from birth in a railroad boxcar through his family's desperate struggle during the depression and the dark years of internment camp to his remarkable marriage and, finally, his career as a top Honeywell executive. Nomura paints characters and situations with a shrewd eye and a wicked wit to produce a compelling tapestry of the brightest and darkest sides of the Japanese American experience.
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But she had enough saved to buy the rings and pay all the wedding expenses. My only expenses were a suit and a pair of pajamas. When Louise asked my roommate what I was doing, he said, "He's ironing his pajamas."
The only relatives who attended our wedding were Louise's father and my younger sister, Ayako who was a nursing student in Quincy, Illinois. Louise's father refused to take off his rain boots because they were too hard to put back on. All the other guests were college classmates. We were astounded by the lavish gifts the poor students gave us: toasters, clocks, dishes, a pressure cooker and one pillow. We used that pillow for about ten years before we bought a second one. Maybe that one pillow was the cause of all those surprising pregnancies.
The author with oldest son John at a recent family reunion.
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After the ceremony, we went to the King Cole Hotel. We could afford only one night's stay and didn't go out to eat. Instead, we dined on a box of Ritz Crackers and Limburger cheese. And then we were too worried about running up more expenses, so we moved into our new home.
This was a house we had rented with another student couple. The house had only one bathroom, and it was off the master bedroom. We were on the second floor. Nighttime trips to the bathroom were incredibly inconvenient since we had to go down a flight of stairs and through the other couple's bedroom to reach it.
To solve the toilet problem, Lou asked me to buy a pan to use as a chamber pot. I bought a small one, thinking that Louise, at eighty-nine pounds, would have a small bladder. She filled the pot in one sitting.
We had applied for admission to University Village, where veterans were housed, and were on the waiting list. This village had barracks and Quonsets for families with children and trailers for those who were childless. After about four months, a vacancy opened up, and we were able to move into a trailer.
It was a wonderful moment. We had a kerosene heater, a hot plate and two sofas that opened up into beds. The shower and bathrooms were about 200 feet away. What luxury!
UNIVERSITY VILLAGE
The men in the village became instant friends because of the shared communal latrine. The same thing happened with the women. Eventually we met the neighbors as couples. Our social life developed as we played basketball and exchanged dinners at each other's trailers.
Our closest neighbors were Bob and Lorraine Lowry. Bob was a sailor, so things were "starboard", the latrine was a "head," cleaning the house was "swabbing the deck," and junk foods were "geedunks". Bob mopped his trailer daily because a strange stench had developed. The smell never went away until Bob noticed that he was flicking his cigarette ashes into the pan on the space heater. The pan was filled with water to increase the room's humidity, but the ashes were cooking and turning the water into a stinking brew of brown juice.
And then Louise told me she was pregnant with a due date thirteen months after our wedding day. She insisted on working right through her pregnancy as a special duty nurse -- a demanding assignment that paid almost twice as much as a floor nurse job. She weighed just eighty-nine pounds when we were married, and it was frightening to see her growing enormously. When she began having contractions, she timed the periods, and when she thought she was ready, she packed her bag, walked to the corner, and rode the inter-campus streetcar to the University Hospital.
Lou called me to say, "This may take some time since I'm a primipara, so wait at home and study. Somebody will call you."
That happened twelve hours later. She had given birth to Kathryn Ellen Nomura, who weighed in at six-and-a-half pounds and was nineteen inches long.
When my classmate, Bill Hanson, heard about Lou taking herself to the hospital, he chastised me. "What kind of an animal are you? When she's ready to come home, we'll get her with my car."
A couple of days later, Bill drove me to the hospital and we went to the infant viewing room. When he saw Kathi, he was most surprised. "Why, she's a Japanese baby," he said.
To this ridiculous observation, I retorted, "When you plant radishes, you get radishes and not carrots or cabbage. What the hell did you expect?"
When we brought her into our tiny quarters, she pooped. The stench was terrible and we both ran out of the trailer before coming to our senses to do what parents naturally do: change the baby's diaper! Lou instructed me to rinse out the diaper in the latrine. I did so dutifully, but created a mess by throwing up.
DO-IT-YOURSELF RULES
With the arrival of Kathi, we were able to move into one of the barracks in the University Village. We were pretty comfortable there except in the summer when the heat was ferocious. The only way we had to cool theplace was to open the doors and hope for a breeze. The problem with this was that Minnesota had mosquitoes. In fact, Minnesota is famous for its giant mosquitoes. Some refer to them as the state bird. To keep those insects out while letting fresh air in, I decided to build screen doors.
I measured the height and width of the double door entry and cut my lumber and screen to size. Betty Haggstrom, our neighbor across the sidewalk from us, came to check out my flurry of activity and decided that she too needed screen doors.
I assumed she'd follow my lead and measure her doorways. But no. She didn't measure anything. Instead she glued several sheets of newspapers together, cutting them into a pattern of the opening. My sense of male superiority soared to new heights as I sneered silently, "Dumb woman. She thinks she's building a dress."
But I was dismayed to find, when I had finished hanging my doors, that they didn't fit. After measuring again, with care, I discovered that the opposite sides were not equal and, further, that none of the angles were ninety degrees.
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“I bought a small one, thinking that Louise, at eighty-nine pounds, would have a small bladder. She filled the pot in one sitting.”
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