“With their experience as grocers, including a familiarity with butchering and dressing meat, they found work outside of camp at the Quality Market in Delta…”
In 1956, when I was twelve years old and my brother seven, my father, Willie Hoshiyama, brought us on a road trip from San Francisco to Chicago, camping along the way.
My family went on fishing and camping trips up and down California every year, but this trip was special. Not only did we visit my mother’s brother and family in Chicago, we visited a place in the Utah desert called Topaz. In the nearby town of Delta, we visited a family named the Jefferys. I remember how emotional my dad was to see Mr. and Mrs. Jeffery again and to introduce his family to them. I’m not sure I understood his emotion until I was older, and learned what Topaz was and who the Jefferys were.
Before the War, my dad and his brother, my uncle John, had a grocery store called Weldon’s on the corner of Laguna and Sutter in San Francisco. After Pearl Harbor, they were incarcerated in Topaz Relocation Center in Utah.
With their experience as grocers, including a familiarity with butchering and dressing meat, they found work outside of camp at the Quality Market in Delta—the closest town, 16 miles away.
The Quality Market was owned by a Mormon couple, Orvil and Donna Jeffery. At a time when Japanese Americans were treated as enemy aliens—forced from their homes, locked up, spit at, barred from the military—the Jefferys not only hired the brothers, but gave them a place to stay in the basement of their own home.
The brothers played with the Jefferys’ children. Orvil and Donna’s son, Art, remembers eating breakfast with them every morning. At the market, in addition to preparing the usual meat products, they also remember dressing upwards of 1,500 deer in a season.
Their time with the Jefferys was not long. My dad got permission to leave camp and followed my mother to Chicago, where they were married in June 1943. I was born the following year. My dad never again worked as a butcher or in a market. However, he always remembered Orvil and Donna Jeffery, and never forgot the respect and kindness shown to him.
My dad passed away in 1998. In 2005, with my husband and daughter, I attended a Topaz Pilgrimage for the first time and visited the old Quality Market building, which had become a furniture store. I spoke to the owner and found out that he was Glen Jeffery, Orvil and Donna’s son! The market was still in the family but had moved to the other end of town. Glen and his son, who worked in the store with him, were very warm and welcoming. Glen remembered Dad and Uncle Johnny; he was just a little guy during the War, probably about three years old, but he remembered the fun he had playing with the “boys,” and how on one occasion, his tricycle was broken due to such “fun!”
Glen said that, at his mother’s behest, he had gone to almost every Topaz Pilgrimage to ask about the Hoshiyama brothers, but no one seemed to know about Dad; and Dad never went to a Pilgrimage. Glen ran upstairs to get something for me. It was a letter his mother had written to Dad before she passed in which she asked after the welfare of the “nice Japanese boys.”
Note: The Topaz Museum has on display a picture of the Quality Market and a panel which tells the story of the men from Topaz who worked for the Jefferys.
About the contributor: Gail Hoshiyama Nanbu was born in Chicago, IL in 1944, where her parents, Willie and Fumiko Hoshiyama, were married after an early exit from Topaz. The family returned to San Francisco in 1949, but Gail has lived in Walnut Creek, CA for many years. She and her husband, Gerry Nanbu, love to travel, especially to Japan. Gail enjoys Ikebana and making Kimekomi dolls while still helping clients with their tax issues as an enrolled agent.
Copyright 2019 Gail Hoshiyama Nanbu. All rights reserved.