A life remembered
On the Park family farm in Idaho, every child worked, and each sibling remembered a different part of the household that held them together. Arthur Park, Marie Park Fujii, Gilbert Park, and Harry Park recall a father who had worked on railroads, in Mountain Home as a bartender and bouncer, and later as a farmer who hauled produce to market, repaired shoes, cut hair, wired the house, and expected every child to work.
The siblings recalled unusually concrete details: their mother's death in 1925 after Charles was born, Arthur's years in the Waverly Baby Home, eight acres of strawberries, three carloads of Spanish onions, a two-block town where Korean children were called Japanese, Saint Luke's nursing training in Boise, Queen's Hospital in Honolulu, Pearl Harbor and Hickam Field, World War II service from Chicago to Scotland and Germany, IBM and FAA work, scouting, and church.
Based on interviews held by the USC Digital Library.
Early years
Farm Rows and Family Stories
The siblings' early family history began with loss as well as work. Marie remembered her mother as quiet, hardworking, and always busy; the one intimate memory she kept was being praised after helping with dishes. Her mother went to the hospital after Charles was born and never returned. Marie was six, Arthur was about twenty months old, and Charles died about two months later of whooping cough, at a time when the family believed no immunization was available.
After their mother's death, their father moved the family from Oregon to Idaho. Arthur, too young to be cared for while the others were in school and the fields, was placed in the Waverly Baby Home and later put on a train back to Eagle by a stranger. He remembered being the only Asian child there and being attacked by other children; Marie remembered him returning to the family kitchen and calling each of his older sisters 'Mama' before they gathered around to comfort him.
The household they described was large and layered: Wanda and John from their father's earlier marriage, then Rose, Louie, Gilbert, Jackson, Harry, Marie, Arthur, and Charles. Their father became the practical center of the home. He added rooms to the house, made a girls' bedroom, repaired shoes, cut the children's hair, managed an outhouse that had to be moved, built cellars for strawberries, canned food, winter kimchi, and fruit, and kept an icebox in the shed before the family had modern refrigeration.
Food memory anchors the account. Breakfast might be mush or dry cereal with fresh strawberries from the field; lunch could be pork chops or hamburger with mashed potatoes and gravy; dinner was usually rice, kimchi, meat, and namul. Rose, Louie, Marie, and later Arthur took on cooking and housekeeping as older sisters left. Their father's biscuits, the ice pan that had to be emptied, the kimchi crocks, and the rice kept in a can all survive in the story as evidence of daily competence.
1930s
Growing Up Visible in Idaho
Eagle, Idaho, was small enough that Marie remembered the main town as only about two blocks long: a grocery store, garage, drug store, and bank corner. The Parks lived there from the mid-1920s until the late 1930s, among only a few Korean families: their household, Rose's family, and a cousin's family. Even when they told neighbors they were Korean, many people marked them with anti-Japanese slurs, a habit that became sharper as news from Asia entered American public life.
The hostility was not abstract. Boys threw rocks at the house, switched off the family's outside electrical switch at night, rode away laughing, and sometimes harassed the children on the road. In one remembered episode, the brothers hid by the fence with rocks while another fired a .22 into the air just as the boys' own rocks landed. The attackers thought they were being shot at and stopped. More than fifty years later, a classmate apologized during a high-school reunion trip, suggesting that the episode had stayed with him too.
School could be both bruising and liberating. Marie remembered walking three miles to Fairview School in Oregon along railroad tracks, hiding when trains came after a rule forbade children to use the tracks. In Eagle, Arthur entered as the only kindergartener in a two-story red-brick school where first through eighth grades fit into four rooms. He was repeatedly challenged to wrestle on the way home until Harry and Jackson taught him enough judo to stop one older boy from bothering him.
Still, sports gave Marie moments of belonging. She played basketball and softball from eighth grade through high school and loved the winter trips when parents drove teams to other schools and the players stopped afterward for hot chocolate. That feeling of being accepted by the team mattered precisely because church dinners, town errands, and social visits reminded her how rarely the family was invited fully into local white households.
Depression era
Berries, Onions, and Seasonal Enterprise
The Park siblings described farm work precisely because it was the household economy. In Oregon, near Portland, their father took produce to the wholesale market by horse and wagon, leaving very early, selling at two or three in the morning, and sleeping on the wagon while the horse found its way home. In Idaho the routine changed to truck trips into Boise and nearby towns, with strawberries, cantaloupes, potatoes, peaches, and other produce.
The siblings remembered the numbers. In the Depression they had eight acres of strawberries and once picked one hundred crates in a day, with fifteen pint boxes to a crate. They sold at painfully low prices and paid pickers by the crate. Another year they raised three carloads of Spanish onions, sorted by size, stored some in a neighbor's packing-house basement, and sold part of the crop later. They also remembered high-school pickers, sometimes as many as thirty, usually at least fourteen years old, who came because there were few other cash jobs in the farming community.
The children did not simply help; they ran pieces of the work. They hoed, irrigated, trimmed boysenberry vines in winter, raised berries on wires, and delivered strawberries to Nampa, Caldwell, Meridian, and other nearby towns. Arthur recalled driving alone at sixteen or seventeen after picking finished around nine or ten in the morning, making a short sales trip, and coming home to more work. The family also earned winter money pruning prune and plum trees for neighbors.
They also remembered the cost of ordinary life: bread at five or ten cents a loaf, hamburger around ten cents a pound, milk from a nearby dairyman, ducks bought from a neighbor hunter for twenty-five cents each, coal-oil lamps before electricity, a hand-powered washing machine with a crank and wringer, and an electric bill of only a few dollars a month. These details turn the Depression from a label into a set of household calculations.
1940s
Hawaii, Nursing, and Wartime Service
Hawaii entered the family story through Louie and Marie's nursing ambitions and Arthur's move west. Louie became an R.N. and went to Honolulu, where she was a nurse during Pearl Harbor. Marie trained at Saint Luke's Hospital and Training School in Boise, where student nurses worked twelve-hour shifts from six to six, took classes in subjects such as anatomy, physiology, materia medica, and communicable diseases, and practiced injections on oranges before working with patients.
Marie expected to graduate in July 1942, but the December 1941 attack disrupted civilian travel. Because Hawaii had become a strategic military and hospital center, Queen's Hospital needed nurses, and she was able to apply and go. She remembered being the only Asian student in her Boise class and hearing a visiting parent ask loudly whether the Japanese girl was still in training. Still, she kept lifelong ties with classmates and helped organize a 1992 reunion of her small class.
Arthur reached Honolulu in July 1941 after Louie sent for him. He attended Roosevelt High School until the war broke out, then earned his high-school certificate while working and entered the Hickam Field apprentice program. There he learned electronics, worked on radio equipment for P-40s, B-17s, B-24s, and B-25s, and later became an instructor in radio-electronic theory. The Army placed many of the workers in the reserve so the technical workforce would stay stable.
The brothers' wartime memories reach across the mainland and Europe. Gilbert remembered taking Harry's draft place because Harry had a nursery job and helped keep the farm running. He entered the Army shortly before Pearl Harbor, was in uniform in Chicago when men chased him as if any Asian soldier were Japanese, worked in medical and dental settings in Arkansas, trained through Wisconsin, Georgia, and Fort Benning, landed in Glasgow on July 4, 1944, passed through Llandudno and a general hospital that received Battle of the Bulge wounded, and later crossed Germany through Nuremberg and Landshut. The family also remembered Jackson, killed on his twenty-third bombing mission over Italy in August 1943.
Adult lives
Marriage, Education, and New Households
Adult life did not separate the siblings from the farm habits of work and invention. Arthur used the GI Bill at the University of Hawaii, tried arts and sciences and teachers' college, sold insurance briefly, and met Bessie through a sales call that did not produce a policy but eventually led to marriage. He worked at Hawaii radio stations KULA and KPOA, repaired IBM card punches, sorters, and collators after training in Endicott, New York, and then built a long FAA career in electronic maintenance, radar, communications, and data systems.
Arthur's technical path remained rooted in the curiosity he developed in Boise. As a high-school student he rode a bicycle three miles to school, read bound volumes of Popular Mechanics at the Carnegie Library while waiting for Jackson, bought tubes and a semi-automatic telegraph key with his six-dollar National Youth Administration pay, built crystal and regenerative radio receivers, and later worked on aircraft surveillance radar, scan converters, and microsecond timing. After the FAA, he repaired research equipment and ultra-cold refrigeration at a cancer research center.
Marriage also revealed the persistence of language and family authority. Arthur remembered a Hangul letter from his father that he could not read and took to a Korean language instructor at the University of Hawaii; the instructor softened it into advice to work hard and be a good boy. Marie received a similar Korean letter when she planned to marry a Chinese man. She later had Bessie's mother read it and learned that her father was warning against the marriage, showing how written Korean could still carry parental pressure even when the children no longer read it easily.
The siblings' next generation appears in practical, specific terms. Arthur had a son who finished Stanford in two years, went to Hewlett-Packard at nineteen, later earned a master's through Stanford-linked classes, and moved with his family to Japan; a daughter who studied psychology, became a certified interpreter for the deaf, and taught fourth grade on Molokai, where she taught a whole class sign language for one deaf student; and a daughter who graduated from USC in physical therapy and later worked in cardiac and rehabilitation settings. Arthur also served six or eight years as a Boy Scout leader through the Korean Christian Church in Honolulu, once leading twenty-three scouts, thirteen of whom had no fathers at home.
Later Years
A Family Story Told Together
The Park siblings turned ordinary recollection into an archive. They remembered the boys' Korean middle name Whan, used to mark generation within the Park family; the father's ability to understand English even after the children stopped speaking Korean at home; and a visit, remembered through family stories, from Syngman Rhee around 1919 while he was touring Korean communities in the United States.
Their memories also connect childhood prejudice to adult discrimination. Arthur recalled being refused entry to a YMCA pool in Oklahoma City around 1973 after staff made a rule against Asian swimmers, despite his having entered the previous week. He also remembered, from selling insurance in Hawaii around 1948, that some companies had charged an 'Oriental rate' until Occidental dropped it. The family's later generations met ignorance too: Arthur's son, a Honolulu newspaper carrier, won a 1973 newsboy trip to Europe and was confronted in New York by another child who assumed all Asians were wartime enemies.
As the siblings spoke, they kept correcting and adding to one another's memories. One sibling supplies the school name, another the crop, another the year, another the feeling. Marie remembers hurt and exclusion; Arthur remembers machines, libraries, and electronics; Gilbert and Harry remember the farm, fighting, wartime service, flying lessons, and practical survival. Their exchanges show the family negotiating its own past in real time.
Oregon markets, Eagle streets, Boise schools, Methodist church dinners, Korean meals, Idaho cellars, Hawaiian hospitals, Army camps, IBM classrooms, FAA radar rooms, and Korean Christian Church scouting all belong to the Park family's history. Together, the siblings show how their family made belonging through labor, skill, stubborn humor, and memory.