<Begin Segment 14>

SS: Tell me a little about what your, your living quarters were like, and what life was like.

EW: Well, I don't know the dimensions, but not very large, you know, the barracks. And just, the walls were just one board so you could hear everything, you know. And we did the best we could, we hung sheets up for partitions and tried to make it as homey as possible.

SS: What was a typical day like for you at camp?

EW: Well, I was fortunate, my sister and I to be able to work in the administration building because we had gone to business college. And so we would get up and go to the mess hall -- we had the latrines where the shower rooms were -- and went to the mess hall for breakfast. And mess hall for lunch and dinner. I don't have any, I don't have happy memories of the camp, because at that time I was engaged and so I didn't have much social life there.

SS: At the time did you think it would just be a matter of weeks or a month perhaps?

EW: No, no. We had no idea. We thought years. We were thinking in terms of years.

SS: What did it do to your parents, this experience of going to camp?

EW: Well, for the first time they were able to just, not have to work. [Laughs] That would be the only good thing about it for them, that they were able to... but I think, for people who were used to working hard every day, it must have been difficult for them, not to have anything to do constructively.

SS: What are some of the images that stick in your mind from that time at camp?

EW: Well, I became ill, they gave us shots, of typhoid and all of that. And I became ill and I went to the hospital that they had rigged up. And the people there were, probably, well, I think there were some doctors there and nurses, but the equipment and the supplies they had were very minimal. And so then I was diagnosed, well, maybe it was psychological. And so, that's when my fiance tried to get me out of camp.

SS: How did your siblings manage under those conditions?

EW: Well, my older sister, the English major, taught school there. My younger brother, I guess he had fun playing.

SS: It seems to me that camp was sort of a real equalizer, lawyers, doctors, laborers, everyone was sort of in the same boat. Is that what it was like?

EW: I think so. In fact, this other family that lived in Burlington, he, I can't remember ever seeing him do any cooking at home, you know, his wife did it all. But when he went to camp he took on the job as cook. Oh wow. [Laughs] But the food was terrible. You can't...

SS: How did you manage to keep your spirits up? Who in the family was the real optimist?

EW: I don't think anybody was. We didn't have anything like that. Maybe my younger brother. But all I wanted to do was to get out. I didn't know how this was happening to us, why it was. We hadn't done anything, we were born here. How they could do that to us, you know.

<End Segment 14> - Copyright © 1996 Densho. All Rights Reserved.