<Begin Segment 32>

AI: So we're continuing our interview with Elaine Ishikawa Hayes, and Elaine, just before our break, you were talking about how you had gone to sign up for work placement at Tule Lake, and you had asked to be put in the recreation department. And so what did you end up doing as, within the recreation department?

EH: I think it took a bit of organizing, but there was a rare personal-, person by the name of Harry Mayeda, and he was just a born leader. Knew how to be firm, but very good-natured, and willing to listen and all. And he had a, in recreation as with probably all departments, there was a personnel department that we went to, who, the head of personnel was, I think, a John Fukuyama, I think, who's a Seattlelite that ran, I mean, he had, he was a UW graduate in Japanese history or international affairs or something, but he owned a florist on U Way and 42nd or something. But, and there were several people interviewing all of us because... 10,000? Seemed to me at Tule Lake should have been a little bit bigger than that, maybe 12,000. But anyway, we all had to go somewhere. My mother with a lot of other women went to kitchen, I mean, what do they call... mess hall assistants of one kind. There were, there was a truck farming, there was a very successful truck farm in Tule Lake because it was virgin soil, and they had drained a lake. And the guys in recreation -- I don't know how, whether they were going from one job to the other or they had been out there in the, coming back and say, "Hey, you could see the rutabagas expanding." [Laughs] But that's how amazing it was.

But, so we were organized in the recreation department, almost in the middle of the camp. And I suppose that's to facilitate people coming from all corners. There were, there's what you call firebreaks in, in the camps, huge, probably as wide as a football field, and that, and that's to prevent fire spreading, potentials. But anyway, you know, there was an Issei section and a Nisei section, naturally, because there were, all the Niseis were pretty, by, my mother was what, just forty-one when, when Pearl Harbor occurred. And so there were, a third of the population must have been Issei. But, and then the sports section was another big one, particularly baseball. And they had regular kind of talent show nights in the hot, in hot California, that was quite typical but convenient, that we could just line up chairs out on the firebreaks, and they built a great big stage, and I'll have to dig up -- I think I have some copies of the recreation staff that we took a picture, I think just before I left. But it, it's an impressive mass of people, there must have been a hundred or two hundred people, and it showed everybody; musicians and the Issei staff and the secretaries. Every department had their share of secretaries. A lot of my friends did secretarial work in different departments.

But I, I explained to Harry Mayeda, Harry Mayeda happened to be a fellow Sacramento Presbyterian family, and his sister, older sister was a piano teacher for many, many of us. And so I knew Harry to some extent. But he was a marvelous guy, and marvelous leader, and so I told him, "I, I think the kids ought to have some group activities, and I'd like to contact the Sacramento YWCA and see if they won't help us with getting, at least learning how to sew or embroidery." They could start off with that, by making their own -- we used to wear a... it's not a scarf, but kind of a, cut on the diagonal like a tie. And be able to embroidery, the Girl Reserve emblem was a circle with a triangle in the middle, and "GR," meaning the triangle standing for... what? "God, others and self." Or "God, country, and self." I forgot. And Susie Fukuyama, John Fukuyama's wife, was a -- and I didn't know it at that time, but she, I knew she was a professional designer and seamstress. And she was willing to get a half-a-dozen friends together and teach the girls how to embroidery. So I can't remember what we did about embroidery hoops that we should have had, but I, but everybody, and YW promptly sent us bolts of the dark blue medium cloth with embroidery threads and needles and, and so we started off that way. And in the process, then, you talk about... I forgot where it was "God, country, and others," but the meanings and what you do about them.

And one of the dilemmas that I always had in that job, was there were -- in Sacramento, for instance, I think there was a bigger Buddhist population than there was a Protestant population. And so that word, "YWCA," Young Women's Christian Association always bothered me. And we, I went to a YWCA mountain region conference with two other people, because we couldn't come back to the West Coast. And in the discussions in Pocatello, one of the major concerns that one of the people had was they didn't like the word "Christian" because their Jewish friends didn't feel comfortable joining them. And the town of Pocatello isn't as big as Seattle, so you know everybody, and you want that to -- so I, I told them about my dilemma, and they were glad to get that insight. That it wasn't just a Jewish issue, now it would, could even be an Islamic issue. And I, it would be interesting to see what the YW is doing, doing, if anything. They probably aren't (going to) doing anything about it. But it was, I went to, the schools didn't get started, I think, until October.

AI: Of 1942.

EH: (Yes). They had to get kids registered. To the Tule Lake crowd, as I remember, it was coming, we may be, we may have been one of the last group, but it was mid-August, I think, before we could get settled, before we even had job assignments. And you know that the professional college graduates, if they were in professional roles, were getting $20. You know, doctors, lawyers, I think teachers, also. And those of us that were in the middle rank: secretaries, recreation leaders, got $16.

AI: Sixteen dollars per month.

EH: Sixteen a month. And my mother, my mother's group and custodians and kitchen help got $12.

AI: For a month of work.

EH: Per month, (yes). And that really didn't last long. I mean, for one thing, the terrain was so rough that our shoes were wearing out very quickly. And when it got cold, we, we never saw snow in Sacramento. Maybe once in ten or fifteen years. But up there, and when it rained it was muddy, and when it was snow, when it was snow, it was cold, and we needed gloves and hats and heavier coats. And so when they established what they called the co-ops, meaning they established Sears & Roebuck, and Montgomery Wards, as cooperatives, buying with catalogs. (They were) very precious items, but that's where we could get, that was the only place we could get clothes of any kind. Though I did have friends who, from Portland and Seattle, I think somehow they were very attached to... something and Frank, Meir and Frank, I guess, in Portland. I don't know that the Bon Marche, Bon Marche must have gotten, might have -- you know, they would individually somehow know what was available and order them. I think, I think, and I must have done that, because I had a suit made before I left. Thinking that I was (going to) have to have some dressy clothes. It wasn't a fancy suit, but, and there were lots of seamstresses around. So I really got a full... in fact, I think I had a suit with a coat, so it was kind of a three-piece suit. And I think I must have gotten that, that, had ordered that from Meir Frank. But...

<End Segment 32> - Copyright © 2004 Densho. All Rights Reserved.