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AI: Well, also, at the time that we, uh, finished the group family interview this morning, in the sequence of events and chronology, it was in the 1940s when your father -- you had gone and gotten permission for your father to be released from the Lordsburg internment camp in New Mexico, and he was reunited with your mother and Joe, younger brother Joe, um, the two of them had been transferred from Minidoka camp and the three of them all went to Crystal City camp in Texas.

MY: Right.

AI: And in the meantime you were doing this work long-distance, ah, because you and Mike had gone to Cincinnati, and you were just telling a little bit about how you and Mike had arrived in Cincinnati and at first had stayed at the American Friends' hostel. So maybe that's where we should pick up your chronology now.

MY: Yeah, I stayed at the, the hostel and I was working as a, as a, not a cook but a server, I guess food server behind the counter. And they had a cafeteria or a coffee shop, you know, like they do downstairs where they -- a soda fountain or whatever it's called. And at the end of the day I had worked, it was one of those regular 9:00 to 5:00 jobs, I guess. At the end of the day as we were ready to, to finish, the manager came to me and said, "You know, I'm short of help down at the" -- we had a name for it, you know, as they do -- "at the snack shop downstairs," and so she asked me to go down to help, and so I went down there to help and so that was from 5:00 to 10:00 or however long that, that -- it was a student, one of the student center cafes downstairs. So I went down there to, to help and then I didn't get out until 10:00. I didn't get back to the hostel until about, I think 10:00 or 11:00, until quite late, around midnight. And then, of course, I had to get up the following morning and go to work again at eight o'clock in the morning, and so that went on for some time. And then every day she was saying, "I have to have somebody downstairs." So it became kind of a regular, regular job from eight o'clock in the morning until about midnight or until about ten or eleven o'clock. And I didn't get to know anybody in, at the hostel because I didn't have any, I didn't eat there and I didn't have a chance to talk to anybody.

And one night when I came in, or maybe one weekend when I wasn't working, Kate -- I think her name was Kate Brinsfield, this wonderful Quaker couple who were managing the hostel -- came to me and asked me, "Where do you go after work?" And so I said, "I work. I mean, I come right back after work." And she said, "No, I mean, after your job, you know, after you're finished, quit your job, where do you go?" And I didn't understand what her question was, so I said, "I work in the cafeteria and I come right back." And then finally she figured it out, that, you know, she said, "Well, are you getting paid, you know, for..." And I said, "I don't know." I mean, I was very naive, you know, I just didn't know what, I had never had another, I hadn't had a job like that except for babysitting in Seattle. So I told her I didn't know, and she said, "Well, when you, next time you get your paycheck, let me look at it." And so I said okay. I showed her the paycheck, and apparently -- and then she said, "Don't you know that there is a law against working more than eight hours a day or forty hours a week, whatever, forty hours a week?" And so of course I didn't know, and so she reported this to the WRA, or to -- I guess it was the WRA authorities. And so then they apparently contacted Mrs. Thom-, you know, the manager of the caf-, of the school lunchroom. And so then the first thing I knew, Mike and several -- there were about four or five of us who had come up from camp to -- she called us all into her office and she wrote, just read us the riot act and she said that, "Now, if you're going to snitch on me --" I mean, her language was so awful that I remember thinking -- I never heard a woman speak this kind of language. She started screaming, she was this very large woman, so she was screaming and screaming that, "You know what I can do to you? I could blacklist you forever in the whole city so you would never get a job," and so on and so forth. And so when this was going on, this blond woman came -- she kind of came in because she heard all this yelling and then she started to yell at the boss, and then, and she said, "Well, look, I'm going to take this woman with me and she's going to work for me." And she turned out to be the cashier at that, at the cafeteria, her name was Ada Gory who now lives in Los Angeles. She's quite elderly now and she, but she -- and I just didn't, I kind of looked at her because she was very, very -- she was a small woman but she was very brash, you know. And she said, she apparently didn't take any guff at all from -- she was the only one who kind of stood up to the, to the manager, and the management didn't dare fire her because she would make too much noise.

<End Segment 2> - Copyright © 2002 Densho. All Rights Reserved.