<Begin Segment 23>

AI: Well, as you were saying earlier, after being in Puyallup for a few months from May to about the, about August or September, then you went on the train to Minidoka. I was wondering, after you got off the train and then you got to the Minidoka camp, what was your impression of it?

MF: My impression was all that sagebrush. That's all we saw. Nothing. And my husband was a policeman there. They gave him a complete policeman uniform and he had the high boots because sometimes there was rattlesnakes and he got athlete's feet and he had to go to hospital and they peeled the whole sole.

AI: Off of his, the skin of his foot?

MF: [Nods] He was in the hospital about a week.

AI: That must've been painful.

MF: Gee, it must've been painful. I just went there maybe two times out of the week, 'cause it was so far from where I lived. I lived way up on Forty-first and the hospital was in the twenties block.

AI: What was your room like up there? Was that just you and Bill and David in one small room in a barrack?

MF: Yeah. We had a small room. Mr. Sasaki, that used to work for Fredrick & Nelson's, his son, I think it was Arthur, and his wife and a little boy lived in that unit, that unit, so we were with another family. So there was six of us in the one big room and we had a blanket to separate us. And that just lasted only about three weeks. And then that, Sasakis moved back East so we got that room on a corner barrack.

AI: So at first you had to share but then afterwards --

MF: Yeah. I was lucky that they moved. And they went back East so we got that room and...

AI: You know, that's so interesting to me that Bill got the job as a camp policeman.

MF: Uh-huh.

AI: And here he was, an Issei, considered an "enemy alien" and yet he was able to get this job of responsibility.

MF: You know, my aunt and I were laundress. Just to wash the caps and aprons for the kitchen. We washed it in the washroom where the toilet was. And then we hung it there and then we would iron it at home.

AI: In your barrack room. Well, tell me about the laundry there. What did it look like?

MF: Well, it was a great big concrete -- I don't know what you'd call it, tub. And then they had this washboard. And my aunt and I, we, my aunt, I didn't want her to work hard so I told her to just rinse it. I would scrub it and we would hang it in the laundry room and then we'd take it home and iron it. No, I think we did iron it over there. There was one or two iron boards there. And then we would iron it and give it to the cooks. And we got sixteen dollars a month.

AI: That sounds like hard work. Washing by hand.

MF: Doctors got nineteen dollars a month.

AI: So you and Bill both had jobs while you were in Minidoka.

MF: Yeah. We both, so sixteen and sixteen is thirty-two dollars.

<End Segment 23> - Copyright © 2002 Densho. All Rights Reserved.