<Begin Segment 22>

SS: When did you finally get word that the war had ended? Did he come home first or did the war end?

EW: No, the war ended.

SS: The war ended. Do you remember where you were when you got that word?

EW: Gee, I don't remember. I really don't remember. But I know that we were so thankful and did a lot of crying and everything on each other.

SS: Was it the kind of thing that -- was it like a weight being lifted, or...?

EW: Oh yes. We, well now, well, now we can really look forward to their coming home, that maybe this is the end of it.

SS: In the meantime, your parents and some siblings were still at camp?

EW: No, they were allowed -- maybe the next year after I had left -- to leave camp. And they went to Emmett, Idaho. And my parents worked in the hospital laundry there and so my younger brother graduated from high school there.

SS: Were they able to rebuild after the war?

EW: Rebuild?

SS: Their lives, their businesses, their homes?

EW: No, no. By that time they were much older, and they came back to Seattle, and my brother in the meantime, who had been in the service, was discharged, and he came back and established a home for them. And he went to his law practice. And they lived with him. And then we came back to Seattle and found a place.

SS: Have any of you ever gone back to the old family property in Burlington?

EW: Oh yes, uh-huh, we've gone back. Of course, it's, the house is gone and everything, but we still have friends there that I went to school with. And we like to go back and look. They say you can't go back home again, but then it's still old Main Street, it's the same, and the schools where we went. We like to go back.

SS: Do you ever wonder what life might have been like had you not been uprooted and gone to camp?

EW: Oh yes.

SS: Where do you think you would have been?

EW: I don't know. I've gone back to several class reunions, and a lot of them stayed there and farmed or whatever. And I thought, "Gee, I don't know what we would have done."

SS: It seems to me that you led a very adventurous life.

EW: More than I wanted. Or more than what I wanted, you know, the kind of life I would have wanted.

<End Segment 22> - Copyright © 1996 Densho. All Rights Reserved.