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AI: Well, and then, from what you have said earlier, about your father being able to leave camp on his own without the rest of you... and that was, I think you said, about ten months or so after you all arrived at Minidoka?

RS: Uh-huh.

AI: That he, he was able to go out.

RS: Right, as long as he didn't go to the western sector. And he told me that he went up to... what is it in Rochester, New York? Mayo Clinic. But they offered him money that was far below the minimum wage. And he went to various other pharmacies in the upper Midwestern area, but landed in Chicago working for Sergeant Drugs, which, up until just a few years ago continued to operate on Wabash Avenue, because I used to go to Chicago a lot for one reason or the other and I would always walk by Sergeant Drugs and had a sort of personalized fond memory of that because of my father. And it was owned by a German American family and they actually took him in and provided him with a place to live while he worked at the drugstore. And, so, for quite a period of time my father looked for a place that was big enough for my mother and my sister and I to come and join him. But for one reason or the other it took him a year until he finally found that place in south Chicago, fairly close to Lake Michigan as I recall, because I remember walking there from the apartment on Sundays and sort of playing next to the water.

But we lived in this, in this very, very modest apartment and I recall it was, my mother in particular, was very nervous about me growing up in that apartment because it was a very rough neighborhood, and the kids were very rough. And I was still, I was just kindergarten age, but I always remember one of the favorite games that we had was "Bomb the Jap." And we had this, one of the kids has this dummy bomb that was all metal and we would go up our apartments and throw it out of the window when all the kids would be playing in this open area, sort of a courtyard, on the ground level. And all of our apartments, of course, looked into that courtyard. And it was a very small area. And we would throw the bomb out, whoever had it and try to hit the kid that was down there, which could have been devastating if it ever happened. And we would scream, "Bomb the Jap," and so you had enough warning to get out of the way before the bomb actually hit. But it was there that I probably learned my first dirty words, and flipped off my mother. [Laughs] One day, went up, she asked me to do something and I gave her the middle finger and boy, I remember she whacked me over the head. I had no idea what it meant, except that that's what you did when someone said something to you. But I think that also spoke to the sort of quality of the neighborhood and the type of neighborhood that it was.

AI: Well, I've heard from other folks that quite a few Japanese American families moved to Chicago around that time, the ones that were allowed to relocate out, and, let's see, your father had left camp in 1943, and you joined him in 1944, were there other Japanese American families living in your complex or neighborhood?

RS: Well, I don't specifically remember any. But looking at our family photo albums, there were. And not only that; a lot of the military personnel, like my Uncle Mich, because he was bilingual, was sent as an interpreter to the Pacific area. And he came back several times for a visit, to visit, to visit us in Chicago, because there're a lot of photographs. And it was at the time that he and my Aunt Hideko were, I think, just initially dating. Hideko was a Tsuboi. But there were a lot of photographs of couples, Japanese American couples visiting us in Chicago. And my guess is that they were probably being released at that point.

AI: What about your playmates in that housing complex? Racially, ethnically, what, what kind of make-up --

RS: It was all white. As I recall they were all white. And my babysitter, her name was Betty Boren, and, Caucasian family that lived on the same floor, just across the hallway. I always remember when my sister Carolyn contracted influenza, meningitis, and I remember my parents taking her to the hospital in the middle of the night, waking me up, and Betty Boren came over to watch me and they took my sister away and that was the last time I saw her, because she died, I believe it was that evening. And the next day they took me, they asked me if I wanted to see her, and they took me to the funeral home and I saw her for the last time in her, it was like a bassinet, 'cause she was under two years old. And my father lifted me up and I remember thinking that she didn't look real. She looked like she had powder all over her or something. But that was my first real encounter with human death. So those -- and I remember Christmas in Chicago, and of course, because my father took a lot of photographs, sometimes I get what I actually recall and what I think I recall confused.

<End Segment 8> - Copyright © 2003 Densho. All Rights Reserved.