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TI: And I just wanted to kind of finish up with Keith, too, because you just told me that -- I'm in Spokane, now -- that Keith just recently passed away.

ET: Right.

TI: And any other memories of Keith that you wanted to share at this point?

ET: Well, I think... so many things happened with Keith. One of the things I'm going to be talking about at the funeral is we had a very stormy summer, the August, the year, the 1943, 1942, we came to Minidoka from Puyallup camp and we found that place was so dusty from almost every day for two or three days. And sandstorms and lot of debris in the air. So Keith always had kind of an ingenious ideas about how to solve problems, so he made up a bunch of, kind of a mask, and he passed it on to everybody, and we wore. And, "Boy, what a nice thing. Where did you get these?" and he never said anything. But the minute we got on the truck, and there were about twenty young ladies in that truck, and they were screaming and laughing and everything else, and we didn't know what it was. And we were known as kind of like "Keith Oka's Kotex Brigade." [Laughs] That's the name of the group. So he was kind of a funny guy at the same time.

TI: Because he made the masks...

ET: Yeah, he made 'em all, and they needed an extra kind of string to tie the ends behind your neck, but it just worked perfect, I mean, couldn't ask for anything much better than that.

TI: Oh, so the guys didn't know what they were, but when the girls saw that they knew right away.

ET: Oh, they knew exactly what it was. I didn't know what it was. But we didn't care how we looked or anything, it worked. So it was kind of a...

TI: And these were masks to protect you from the dust and things like that?

ET: Yeah, dust, and it really saved us. We got, we had to go to area, Block 17 and 15, that Keith was living in 15, I was in 17. And we'd catch a truck, and that's our transportation to, to the workplace, which is in, oh, easily a mile, mile and a half down. So he did things like that, very, very clever guy.

TI: That's, that's a good story.

<End Segment 3> - Copyright © 2006 Densho. All Rights Reserved.