<Begin Segment 37>

AI: Excuse me, I'm (going to) take you back and just to finish up this occasion at Pocatello, did you say that on the way back after the conference in Pocatello, on your way back to Tule Lake, did you say that you stopped at Minidoka camp?

EH: (Yes).

AI: And visited there?

EH: (Yes). And so, I'm wondering if we had a private bus. But the Minidoka group would have had to go home. You know, go to Minidoka. So we must have traveled in the same accommodation. It wasn't a long visit. I think we probably had to leave the same day. We certainly didn't stay overnight.

AI: Was that a little strange for you to be going to Minidoka as a visitor...

EH: (Yes), and I recognized a little bit of a difference in climate, I don't know why. And that's, there was a little bit of that issue in, in Tule Lake. Immediately, we could recognize how much darker Californians were, compared to Seattleites. And I knew that we would be comparing the lack of (everything) else, we were comparing food all the time. And we knew that somehow, the Northwesterners were getting better food than we were. And it wasn't that they were getting different food, it was that the cooks knew how to cook it better; how to prepare it better. And that just, we kind of exploded about that.

The YW -- I had two YWCA visitors, and they wanted to see the camp just as it was. So I said, "Okay, you wanna go home and have lunch with me?" And I had to walk fifteen or twenty minutes before I could get to my mess hall. So I was always a little bit late, and the cooks would glower at me. But here I brought this guest in, and, so I said, "Please fix me a second plate for her." And they said to me, "Why didn't you tell me you were going to have guests? We don't like to serve beans to guests." And I said, "Well, she wants to see camp just as it is, so it's all right to have beans." And she was Esther Bermeister, I, I should have contacted her. 'Cause I knew that she was on a conference or something here at one time. But she was with (...) businesswomen's section of the YWCA.

We had college kids visiting at one time. Chico... I lived in Chico, and (I) suppose Chico State was maybe the biggest college south of Klamath Falls. We weren't even in Klamath Falls, we were (in) Tule Lake. Tule Lake was almost an unknown spot. People had to look hard to find that. And it was very sparse... it was considered an agricultural, but there wasn't much agriculture going on. When the Tule Lake farm started to operate, it really perked up the area. Because here in Tule Lake, were probably a good percentage of the Cal-Davis, University of Cal at Davis, was the agricultural college, which is just fourteen miles out of Sacramento. And here were the best agricultural college graduates right there in Tule Lake, because, again, that's an agricultural area.

AI: And you're speaking of the Nisei graduates of --

EH: (Yes), (yes).

AI: -- of the agricultural college.

EH: (Yes), that's one of the things I did with couple of Girl Reserve groups. I managed to talk somebody into giving the Y-, this couple of groups, an excursion to the farms. And so I had to talk to some truck drivers fast, to, "Don't make a ruckus about it, but we'll be glad to ride on the trucks. Just take us to the farm." And it was about five miles away. And it was an eye-opener for all of us. There were pigs, there were hogs that were this long, I swear. [Laughs] And they were always breastfeeding piglets. And what a great experience that was for, especially for the kids. And it was very impressive, to see all these hogs laying on their belly, and having suckling piglets. And, and I never got around to asking, "Wow, what are we doing with them? Are we getting benefit of it?" I don't remember having a lot of good meat.

But the other thing that happened was, by October or November, here the place just opened, by October, the potato crop was so huge, they had to release the high school kids to help harvest the potatoes. And my sister Jean was just a freshman, but she came home scared stiff because she had thrown a potato at a duck, and it was that (she hit) a duck. There was a bird sanctuary just a few miles away. And the ducks would -- there (was) lettuce or something planted fairly -- and the ducks would swoop down, and when the ducks left, the ground was brown again. All the green lettuce was gone. And so the kids would be aware of that, and Jean threw a potato at a duck and hit him, and brought it down. [Laughs] And the kids were all, you know, they were teasing her to some extent, but (they) said, "Oh, you killed a protected breed on federal grounds. They're (going to) come after you." And she halfway believed that and she came home worried that somebody really was (going to) come (to) get her. So she had to tell us quickly what had happened. She didn't mean to really kill that bird. So I said, "Well, what did you do with the bird?" "Well, I don't know what happened to the bird. I was getting out of there." [Laughs] She said, "I didn't wanna be associated with that thing." But that was fun. But that's how, farming was protected. They were also -- (you) see, this was one of the first ones, (farms) I think, that got established.

AI: In, in the camps.

EH: In the camps, among the camps. And we started shipping out rutabagas by the truckload. But I tell you, we sure got tired of eating rutabagas. And they also (made) tsukemono, Japanese pickles, they pickled those damn rutabagas, and jeepers, that's all we had for a long time. But, but that kind of food was ample, I think. Carrots, potatoes, I think, potatoes particularly, we really, the government apparently didn't recognize the fact that we almost had to have rice. We certainly got a lot of potatoes. And...

<End Segment 37> - Copyright © 2004 Densho. All Rights Reserved.