[...] HATTIE [Hattie Bryant, narrator and host of the show Small Business School]: (Voiceover) Bob Sakata was born in 1926, and grew up on a 10-acre farm in California. He helped his father in the field and started thinking about how to make work easier.

All right. So when you started farming, you didn't have any of this fancy equipment?

BOB: Oh, no. You probably took a picture of one of the pictures I've had. We just started with a team of horses and that John Deere tractor. And that leveler that you saw in the back of that picture, I built with railroad ties and timbers because we needed a piece of machinery that would be able to level the land. And in those days, there weren't hydraulics or that type of thing, so I had to innovate the hydraulic and adjust the blade manually to dig the dirt and cut the dirt and then unload it, and so forth.

HATTIE: So tell me about the first machine you thought of or the first piece of equipment.

BOB: I think I was about 10 years old at that time. Dad had us picking corn out in the field. I was the one that was carrying the baskets, and he would pick the corn. And when the basket got full, I had to walk and carry it all the way to the end, underneath the shade tree, and dump it. And he would come and pack it. I thought that was silly, so that night I just made a little narrow sled with sides on it, and we had a horse, and I had the horse pull it. And so we were able to pick the corn and throw it in the sled.

HATTIE: So when you were 10 years old, you were already figuring out ways to make farming easier for people.

BOB: Easier, right. It's just all common sense. But I did have a very curious mind. At the age of maybe eight or ten years old, I didn't go to bed reading a funny book. I would enjoy reading tractor magazines and equipment magazines. I'd look at it and I would say that would be a better way than the way they're making things. [...]

HATTIE: You listen to the people who are doing the work.

BOB: Yes, because I understand it because I started from there. All my employees here know that I'm the cheapest-paid man on the staff because I don't want to be owning yachts and airplanes and so forth. I have a greater pleasure of having a new John Deere tractor or having something that is more productive and more challenging.

HATTIE: So instead of buying a fancy car for yourself, you put the money into a tractor that's more comfortable, that's better for one of your employees to work with to make their life a little better?

BOB: That's right. I think the main thing is there are two things in this business that you have to be sensitive of. Number one, your employees, because they're the ones that make your company. And you have to try to make the workplace a pleasant workplace and try to make everything as easy as possible, and that is a ongoing challenge. [...]

Bob's life hasn't been easy. When the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor, Bob was 15 and was placed in a relocation camp in Colorado.

BOB: On December the 7th, 1941, when Franklin Delano Roosevelt had the great description, `The Day of Infamy,' when Japan bombed Pearl Harbor, that was an embarrassing time for all of us. Because of public pressure and, at that time, because of the safety of our welfare is what the government said, they put us all into what they called relocation camps. But it was not a relocation camp. It was a concentration camp, with four sentries standing on the corner. I was able to get a citizen's endorsement and I left early. But my family stayed in the camp till the camp closed in 1945. And I went to school here in Brighton and graduated from Brighton High School in 1943.

But looking at the history of what we went through, much could be said about it. But my father told us, that, `You behave and you do what the government tells you to do and you prove that you could be worthy of being an American citizen.' And I thought that was a great wisdom. So today I would describe that total experience as a blessing in disguise because from every hardship, you learn, from every challenge, you learn, you know?

HATTIE: You had a couple of other huge challenges, crises, that were defining moments.

BOB: Oh, yes.

HATTIE: What happened with your leg?

BOB: Right here in this big barn, that was my shop, and I worked in there till past midnight and I wanted to get the job done early. And I got in there about 5:30 in the morning and no sooner than I lit the acetylene torch, we had an explosion. There was an empty gas barrel close by that took all the explosive fumes when I was working the night before. And 66 percent of my body was burned third degree. They had covered me with a white sheet when I got to the hospital.

HATTIE: Because they thought you were dead?

BOB: Yes. Until my family doctor came there and he just chewed everybody out and said, `You don't know this guy and to take him to surgery quick.' I remember going to surgery and the doctors all said, `This guy can't feel a thing. We don't have to put him to sleep.' And they were tearing my coveralls off and pruning out all the burnt skin. And one of the nurses said, `He's feeling everything you're doing.' And the doctor asked her, `How do you know?' I was holding her hand and she said, `He's about ready to break my wrist.' But that's when I learned that there is an Almighty.

HATTIE: So you were in the hospital a year?

BOB: Yes. A little over a year. And they were sure that I would never walk again. And so I thanked them for that and I thanked them for their work, but I told the doctors, I said, `Why don't you let me and my God figure out whether I can walk again, but you do what you can.' And here I am. [...]