<Begin Segment 25>

AI: Tell me about the actual day when you had to leave your home and leave Sacramento. What happened that day?

EH: Well, fortu-, again, my mother was, my mother had had an accident early in the year. Let's see... and anyway, she, she had a Ford... I forgot. One of those small Fords, and she just labeled that a "no-good car." [Laughs] She came home with an Oldsmobile, and I said, "Mom, you know that's a fairly expensive car." She says, "I know. I paid for it." And so... but it was a good car, and she just bought it in the spring before Pearl Harbor. And that's what she used to travel all over the place. She never had an accident. It was just amazing, because she was riding on rural roads. Sometimes Sacramento has a lot of river... Sacramento River area has... and even Yuba, Yuba River, Feather River, they're, they're all, they just all have levies, dirt levies, and, and it seems to me the road is maybe this wide. At flood time I'm sure it's a little dangerous, but no lights, no street lights, no lamp lights, and so there, she's just chugging along all the time up and down mountains. It's... north of Sacramento or northeast of Sacramento, it's a little bit mountainous because the Sierra Nevadas start, but she, she made it. We --

AI: So she had gotten this new car.

EH: (Yes).

AI: And then when you were getting ready then to leave?

EH: (Yes), the missionary that was living in the first floor drove us to the Sacramento auditorium where we were supposed to all gather. In fact, before that, one of the things... I said that some of us were recruited to interview homes to find more space for what they thought there was going to be an influx of Bay Area people, so we did that.

The other thing that took some doing and concentration was immunization. And immunization, we had to take all our shots at one time. We all got deathly sick with fever and aches, and they did it at the Buddhist church. The Buddhist church had a huge gym, and somehow -- and there were plenty of Japanese doctors that could do this, but we had to stand in line for... and families with little kids screaming and yelling, but that was... that took two or three days, three or four days. I forgot whether it was typhoid. There was one specific immunization that really gets you. Your arm is sore, you're feverish and that kind of thing.

The other thing that I... talking about the Buddhist church, one of the high school activities growing up was spending every Sunday afternoon in that Buddhist church gym, because the Japanese basketball leagues were such a strong attraction. And every rural community had a basketball league. I think they even came up from Seattle to Sacramento to play. And we had two teams in, in Sacramento. So that's where our Sundays went. And, of course, that was just basketball season. They must have had baseball games, but none of us were inspired to go anywhere to see baseball games. But...

AI: But as you were saying, there were quite a lot of activities that you had to take care of in these busy days of getting prepared, including getting the shots.

EH: Uh-huh.

AI: And then, and then so the missionaries --

EH: (Yes). We loaded everything in, in the Oldsmobile and he dropped us off at the auditorium. And the auditorium, it was such a dismal, sad, solemn day. Nobody said anything. Of course, nobody came to see us off, though sometimes I've read... in fact, I think my mother... my sister talk-, in some writing talks about somebody coming with doughnuts and coffee or something. And I, I never got around to saying, "Hey, where did that come from?" But we, we had to stand in long lines with all our luggage around us, and you could only take what you could carry, though I think we... somehow we got the notion to bundle bedding up in sheets of canvas and roll it up and tie it as a bundle. We had to do that. It was... we all, each of us were given an army cot, a canvas cot, and most of the camps really got cold in the winter. Tule Lake certainly did. It was on the Oregon border, Oregon/California border, and you had just a potbelly stove in there, so you had to have... our barrack, each barrack (room) is twenty by twenty-five, I guess.

<End Segment 25> - Copyright © 2004 Densho. All Rights Reserved.