“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.