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AI: So, what was your reaction when you saw this, sort of primitive barracks buildings and...

HM: I think that I was not surprised. Now, I read a professor's paper about the Minidoka education program just this spring, and he talked about the organization of the schools and so on. Said that they had sent out letters explaining the primitive conditions and trying to prepare people. I don't remember that, but somehow or other I knew to bring bedding and what to bring, and you know, it was all so new. I... other people, you know, the servicemen were going off to camp and their situation was different. And I just figured, well, this is different for me. And I sort of took it in stride. And I had a room with a canvas army cot and a straw-filled mattress, and a light down from the ceiling and that was it. And we learned to furnish our rooms with orange crates. We went into town and bought gingham, and thumbtacks. You could take two orange crates and set them upright so that the divider made a shelf, and then thumbtack the gingham around each side, and that made a little dressing table. Get a piece of glass cut to fit, so you had a nice surface, then you bought a, got another orange crate and set that facedown, put a little padding on top, more gingham, a little dressing table bench, hung a mirror on the wall, and you were set.

And then, later in the fall, the WRA bought the Whitcomb Hotel in San Francisco for an office building, and they took the hotel furniture and distributed that among the projects. So late in the fall, I got a nice single bed and a Beautyrest mattress. And I had a regular bed and an upholstered chair.

AI: But when you first got there, that was...

HM: It was primitive.

AI: Right. And that would have been September 1942?

HM: Yes. I got there... I think it was about the third week in September. And I guess I arrived about the same time that the last people came from the assembly center. And I was told that in the morning, the carpenters would start building the block that was to be occupied by the evacuees who were met at the railroad and bussed in, given orientation and lunch, and by afternoon, the barracks would be finished, and they would be shown their apartments. Now, the story was that the original planning was based on a rural population. And we had quite a, an urban population from Portland and Seattle. And so there were fewer large families and more small families. And the apartments didn't shape up in the same proportions, and so at the beginning, somebody from the WRA project would have to go down and, "Now, Mr. Soto and Mr. Fujii, for the time being, your two families are going to have to share this apartment." And I guess they would string up blankets or something and provide a little privacy.

Now, at the Las Vegas reunion... oh, I can't remember the lady who told that when she arrived, there was a barracks with no partitions at all, and they had to divide that up among families that they didn't have suitable apartments for. So, I really don't know the details of that, but there was considerable adjustment required at the beginning.

AI: Right. And I understand that the education buildings weren't finished, when you arrived, there was no high school building yet.

HM: No. I learned from this professor's paper that originally, it was planned that they would have school buildings built specifically for the schools, but only three or four projects actually got them. At Minidoka, they said no, they would have to use barracks. And originally, the high school was assigned half a block, and the elementary schools. And that was what they had to start with. So then it developed that a half a block simply would not accommodate the junior/senior high school. So we had to wait until November 16th to start the junior/senior high school, while they remodeled a whole block. And the barracks were divided into just three 20 x 40 classrooms. However, by the time they opened school, they still had no blackboards, no textbooks, only picnic tables with attached benches, and no resource materials. And we were assigned to start teaching. Well, we used our imaginations, and the guidance of the curriculum guide, and concentrated on learning about the project and discussing evacuation and relocation and that sort of thing. Finally, we got prison-made, individual desks and chairs, which were much more flexible than the old-fashioned school desk and seat made together and bolted to the floor in rows, so that when our high school classes went in for a joint day with the Twin Falls high school, and the Twin Falls high school was an old building, and dark wood, and old seats bolted in rows. They came back and looked around, and they thought they liked the project school better. And I was very pleased with that.

<End Segment 6> - Copyright © 2003 Densho. All Rights Reserved.