<Begin Segment 36>
AI: Well, after you decided not to continue with the hospital work, what did you do after that?
PB: Well, I continued to work... most of the time I was in Tule I worked, I did work in the hospital, and evenings, since my daughter was a majorette, she was head majorette, so she was teaching a bunch of girls, twirling the baton. And she played the saxophone -- or not the saxophone, clarinet in the band, and I, I met this fellow, these two fellows that I saw as we entered Tule Lake, they happened to be from the same town that my sister-in-law's sister married a man from Loomis, California, and these two fellows also lived in Loomis. So I met that whole group from that area, so I made a lot of friends from California. And since Les played the saxophone in the band, and my daughter played the clarinet, well, every time they had band practice, I went out with them. So that was a lot of fun to go out and watch them. And Fourth of July they had this big parade, and my daughter was leading the parade and giving the flag salute. That's the one that was, the picture that was shown nationwide in the movie Manzanar. And that was a picture that was actually taken in Tule Lake, so I have that picture.
And I had a lot of fun going to dances. I didn't dance very much since Les played in the orchestra, so, but he wouldn't let me dance with anybody. [Laughs] He was so jealous; it just seemed like he was terribly jealous of anything that I went out of the way with anybody or anything, he'd be so jealous. And I know my mother said, "You should never get mixed up with a jealous person, because if you do, you're at fault, and if you don't, you're at fault." [Laughs] But I found out that's true. He used to check on me. I'd go and visit my folks, and if I was a little late in getting back, he was out looking for me. And he'd always check on me, and even in the wintertime, his, he lived in a different block a ways away from me, but in a way I was lucky because his mother worked in the kitchen, and I don't know whether they cooked differently in that kitchen, or whether he was available to... he had ways of getting things from outside of camp. Some black woman that used to come in, I don't know what the connection was, whether they were just friends or what, but this black woman used to bring things into camp. And even in the wintertime, sometimes he'd come just to check on me, and other times he'd bring me biscuit for breakfast. Hot biscuit with honey, and I don't know where he would get that, because we didn't have that in our mess hall. But he would get on skis, because there'd be snow on the ground. He'd get on the skis and bring me back the biscuits for breakfast. [Laughs]
AI: Oh, that sounds romantic.
PB: He was a very sweet person, always leaving little notes, and if he missed me, why, he'd say, "Well, I got to go to work," and... but he was a lot younger than me, and his mother was very concerned. And she was trying to break us up all the time. Finally, she did break us up, because she said... well, he wanted to go to school in New York after camp, or even while he was in camp, when they got so that they can go out from camp. She sent him out of camp, so I lost track of him. But just recently, I found that he had left a note giving me his address, and I never knew that. Isn't that strange? That all these years, I never knew that he had left me an address in New York to get in touch with him, and I didn't know that, and I was going through my photographs and different things from the different camps, and here I found this note, and had his address in Syracuse, New York.
AI: Oh, my.
PB: And if I had known that, I would have written to him and kept track, kept in touch with him, but I don't know what happened to him.
AI: Well, it's, it's interesting to hear about, about your romance in camp, because as you were saying, it was just like a town, with so many people and families and activities and lives going on. And I have heard, of course, of people getting together in camp, and some of them eventually got married, and some of them didn't; some of them were split up like you were.
PB: Oh, yes, there were a lot of marriages in camp. It was just like a town, they had elders and people that headed certain, each block had somebody heading that certain block, and they had canteens where you could buy things, and periodically had dances in certain sections, they had church, church meetings. In fact, my boyfriend and I, we wanted to teach square dancing. Well, I didn't know anything about square dancing, but he did. But then, of course, you have to have a caller, and we didn't have no caller, so we couldn't really do any square dancing unless we could find a caller. But he was very versatile, and he would go from one block to another block, and maybe give a talk on religious matters. He would, he would maybe give the sermon. He was a very interesting person, and very nice-looking. He was so handsome that all the girls couldn't figure out why he was going with me, because I was older than he. In fact, I was the oldest of the girls that were the nurse's aides. There were a lot of nurse's aides in Tule because there were girls from all over the state, Washington, Oregon, California, even from Hawaii. We had doctors from Hawaii. So unfortunately, I never got a single picture of him, and I, for the life of me, I don't know why I didn't get it, because the schoolteachers were taking pictures of my daughter when she had her fifteenth birthday, they made, these schoolteachers made a cake, and we had pictures taken then. I don't know why I never got any pictures of Les. I regret it to this day -- [laughs] -- but I never got a picture of him. Only one, when we went to a Christian gathering, and oh, there must be three or four hundred people in that picture, very, very tiny, you can't hardly see who it is. That's the only picture I have of him. But there were a lot of marriages; my sister-in-law's sister got married in Tule Lake. And, of course, lot of children were born there, my two nephews were born in Tule. They're pretty old, now. [Laughs]
<End Segment 36> - Copyright © 2004 Densho. All Rights Reserved.