<Begin Segment 63>

AI: So, in the meantime, so you had this regular job at the hospital, and May, what about you and Mike and your mom --

MY: I was, I volunteered -- I think they, I don't know whether there was a call out for volunteers to do certain things, for us, but I worked teaching in the nursery school. For little, the children were about three or four years old. I was kind of babysitting for a friend of mine, anyway, so, and I heard that they had this nursery school in the recreation hall, I think somewhere. So I remember going there to -- and I didn't know anything about children, much less interested in them at one time, except babysitting for a little baby in Seattle. But that was quite interesting for me. I, but I remember, and you were talking about the hospital, I remember we had, everybody had diarrhea.

TY: Oh.

MY: You remember that?

TY: That was when we were still in Area C, I think. Not too -- shortly after we got there, in fact.

MY: Oh, I know.

TY: Oh, that was --

MY: And everybody thought, oh, we all have typhoid fever.

TY: And there was nothing but outhouses.

MY: And, and nobody could, half the people couldn't get there on time because it was --

TY: It was, yeah, it was...

MY: -- it was, that was pretty messy.

TY: I haven't thought of that for a while, but boy --

MY: Do you remember that, yeah.

TY: -- as I recall, it was a mess.

MY: I was just thinking of that, when you were talking about the hospital, I was wondering, did anybody come to the hospital for that, or...? Because some people got really sick.

TY: Yeah. Well --

MY: And do they know why?

TY: Dysentery. I mean, it just, probably salmonella or something, I don't know.

MY: And then it was, it was very contagious?

TY: Well, salmonella is, but --

MY: So it just spread like anything. So everybody, everybody was sick.

TY: Well, because we're all eating in common mess hall.

MY: Uh-huh.

TY: So, if there's food poisoning, well, we probably all ate the same stuff.

MY: And somebody told us that we all had typhoid fever. [Laughs]

TY: No, no, I don't think so. [Laughs]

MY: And I go, "Oh, my gosh." [Laughs] But you know how those rumors spread, that the government planted stuff in our food, and so forth. But anyway...

TY: And I do remember, I think, starting from Puyallup we got, the foods that we had was something else again. I think, yeah.

MY: It was army food, wasn't it?

TY: Yeah, we had a lot of Vienna sausages.

MY: Beans?

TY: Vienna sausage. To this day, I don't like Vienna sausage. And what else --

JY: Maybe that's why I don't like it, too. I didn't know why I didn't like it. [Laughs]

MY: And pork and beans.

TY: Yeah.

MY: And can-, they were all, Vienna sausages were in cans, right?

TY: Well, as I recall, the food when we were in Puyallup was pretty bad. I think it improved a little bit when we were in Minidoka.

MY: Well, you know why that was? Because they used Nisei cooks that didn't know --

TY: What they were cooking? [Laughs]

MY: -- zip about cooking.

<End Segment 63> - Copyright © 2002 Densho. All Rights Reserved.