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TI: Yeah, you spent a chunk of time in Idaho, Twin Falls, growing up. And I wanted to ask you, you know, have you ever returned back to Twin Falls?

EBA: You know, ever returning to Minidoka was out of my mind for many, many years until about 1989, or some, somewhere in that area. I just had the desire to go back to Minidoka and see it, and Twin Falls. I wanted to go back and find the houses that we lived in and the school I went to and also hopefully to find the camp site. And so I did. And I knew the addresses of the houses that we lived in and so I was able to find them. The first house we lived in that we were forced to move out of has now been broken up into apartments or living units, small units. The house across the street is, still remains a family, single family residence. And the third house we lived in around the corner on Main Street has now been also broken up into living units. But that part of Twin Falls is now in a pretty shabby area of Twin Falls. Most of the newer parts are out from the original downtown core there. And, but, so anyway, I wanted to see Lincoln Grade School again. So I knew where it was, 'cause I walked back and forth from school every day when I was there. And I told my wife, I said, you know, "I want, I'm gonna park the car here and I want to walk to school one more time." And so that's what I did. And it was, you know, to me it was, I didn't realize the emotional impact of that whole, that first visit, 'cause I'd made a subsequent visit. That whole visit until I came back and I was talking to, actually, a adult education class at church where I was on staff. I, when I recounted that whole story, I mean, the whole story of internment to these people, it just, I can, I can recall the feeling when I stand there, that this emotional jolt hit me about this whole experience. And part of it, too, was that a lot of the people in the class, "Well, I didn't know that happened. It did? We never heard this in school." And, but that visit, I think, started this opening of the, of, of whatever was inside me. I mean, not only of the experiences but family dynamics and all kinds of things. And it was, it was a very emotional experience. Still is when I talk about it.

TI: And it was really key, that walk from the house to school.

EBA: Right.

TI: And the school is still there?

EBA: Still there. School is still there, absolutely. Looks the same, has a cyclone fence around it now but otherwise it's still the same, yeah.

TI: Did you take the walk with your wife?

EBA: Yes, yeah, she walked with me.

TI: And, in addition to that walk, were you able to find the camp site?

EBA: Yes, after that we drove out to an area where the bridge goes across the Snake River. And there was a visitor's center there. And so I went in there and talked to an elderly gentleman there and told him I was... talking about the camp at Minidoka and where that was and wanted to know if he could help me find it. And he asked somebody else there and he really said, "Well, it's across the river there somewhere and you, one of those roads you go down, you'll probably find it out there somewhere." And I'm not, and I categorized him maybe unfairly, but I thought, here's a World War II veteran and he's not gonna be real helpful to me. 'Cause I would think that he would know where the camp site was. Anyway, he gave me some general area where it would be, so drove across the bridge and went, took two or three roads to go down for a while before we found it. But we found it. And at that time it was before the National Park Service made it a historical site, so there wasn't much there. There's a large, there was a large wooden sign on the road giving a brief history of the camp site and so I turned off the road and went up the road that led into the camp. And it was like everything came back to me. Just, even though it was flat, there was nothing there except the stone foundation for the guardhouse and the waiting room. And the irrigation canal is still the same, same little bridge you go, drive across it to get across the canal into the gate there. And also, there beside the existing foundation there is a, there is a, three memorial plaques in bronze. One tells a brief history of the camp, one is a map of the camp, and the third one is a list of some of the people that died in the camp there, not 442, but residents in the camp. And I could see, what I know now is, I think, is the root cellar that was at the camp there. There's a broken down wooden building there in the ground. But now it's farmland. And I could close my eyes and see everything at the camp there because I've been there. And it was, it was an exhilarating experience for me to do that.

TI: What were some of those memories that came back to you?

EBA: Well, looking at the irrigation canal and thinking of the swimming hole and the picnics and, and standing at the guard gate there waiting for the guard to check us through and then they'd swing the gate open, the barbed wire gate and it was just like, once you got inside there, you, I felt this release to just go and have fun and engage in having fun and seeing my friends and so forth.

TI: It must've been so much different in terms of the way it looked from a camp that held over ten thousand people to now, just kind of flat farmland.

EBA: Yeah, but you know, I think it's T.S. Eliot has a poem that talks about life coming full circle and we go back to where we started and see it again for the first time. And there's that sense that I went back and saw it for the first time, 'cause I have all this history and knowledge of really the events of that era and seeing what that really was like. So I think T.S. Eliot is right in that we go back to where we started and we see it for the first time. And that, that could apply to a lot of things in our lives. But for me that was where I saw it for the first time.

TI: Now, how did you describe what used to be there to your wife as you stood there and you started seeing, in some ways the bones of the camp. How did you describe?

EBA: Well, I had to, we had to stand in front of the map because I couldn't remember everything. But as we looked at the map I told her, you know, "The water tower was over there and this dining hall was here," and the... and I just kind of described the, the row on row of tarpaper shacks, six rooms to each barrack, twelve barracks to a block and they had a central dining hall and that type of thing. She engaged in it. She was very appreciative, I guess, is the way I would put it, of what I was telling her and of those units. That wasn't the first time I'd, I mean, she'd ever heard that, because I told her when, before we married what that was like and my history and so forth. So it was, it's an experience I can't describe really adequately.

<End Segment 31> - Copyright © 2004 Densho. All Rights Reserved.