<Begin Segment 12>

TI: So when, when, at Hunt, Idaho, or Minidoka, when, when the camp was established, was there more news about the...

RM: There was news because Morrison Knudsen, the big construction firm in Boise, built the camp, and there were jobs galore, I remember that. And Morrison Knudsen had their main headquarters in Boise, but they didn't have their equipment and that kind of thing there. They may have, but I don't recall it. But the big thing was that it was jobs for, for people in southeastern Idaho, that's how they looked at it. And, and there was pretty much a news blanket on Minidoka until the coming of the, the people who refused to answer the questionnaire and were, they were imprisoned across the street in the...

TI: Well, so when you say "news blanket," so although the, you had, oh, over ten thousand people in your state, it pretty much wasn't covered, who these people were, it was just...

RM: Yeah, they...

TI: It was just sort of the common knowledge, though, amongst the people, that these camps were there?

RM: Yeah. Well, see, the isolated area, they were next to the Craters of the Moon national monument. They were out in the center of the desert there. The only thing I remember was indirectly that, was it too close to Sun Valley? Were the, was the camp too close, would it bother the tourist business up at Ketchum and Sun Valley? I remember that part of being in the newspapers. But I, I don't recall, I think that far more attention was paid to, to Tule and the revolts in the Tule camp, than it was to Minidoka.

TI: Do you recall the, the Japanese coming through Boise as they went to, to Hunt?

RM: No. The railroad was deliberately kept out of the town. You had to walk up to the train depot, which was one end of Capitol Boulevard, and you'd have had to know that they were coming through. And I can't remember what time they did come through, although I, I noted it one time. But the only time I went to the train depot was to see my brother off. And when he jumped the school and enlisted in the navy, when he was seventeen.

TI: So he was underage?

RM: Yes. He, he forged his dad's signature. Wasn't hard to do, we did it on our report cards.

TI: I'm curious; going back to school, was there any discussions about the camps from the teachers or your classmates?

RM: No, and I, I took history all the way through. They never mentioned it. I was always surprised at... taking high school history, not that I had a pompous feeling that I knew more, but we never got through -- I remember one American history teacher skipping the Woodrow Wilson era and World War I. [Laughs] And this was a, I couldn't believe this. We just jumped over, because he was a Democrat, and she wasn't going to talk about Democrats. But there was no discussion of the, the Japanese in the camps, and yet they were fairly close nearby. And, and I sort of thought of, I didn't put full effort in high school, I worked all the way through. I was much more interested in jobs, I was much more interested in reading what I wanted to read, and so I just put minimum effort into high school. Took the courses to go to college or university, I guess because they were there. I could have gone into shop, metal shop or wood shop or something, but instead I took college preparatory.

TI: Did you think, when you were going to high school, that you would, you would be going to college?

RM: No, I didn't.

TI: It was just an interest? You're just more interested...

RM: Yeah. My driving interest from -- and it parallels when I started working at the newspaper -- was history. I read everything in history, and I loved it. I knew that in the fourth grade, that I could, and so I would check books out of the library and go my own way. And I would pass English and history and math and whatever, just not worrying about it. Geometry or algebra, I'd take it, wasn't that big an interest.

<End Segment 12> - Copyright © 2004 Densho. All Rights Reserved.