<Begin Segment 31>

TI: But going back to Hastings Park, so, so what was kind of the typical day for you as a thirteen-year-old boy?

HS: Well, most of the day we did, they eventually started a little school, so we're down there in the middle, the end of March. By the, by the beginning of, by beginning of May, they put up an improvised school for all the kids, so that they would, we would have to go to some kind of teaching setup. It was, and they were held in the bleachers, in each, each grade or part of grade, I was in grade seven, so there'd be 7-A, 7-B, 7-, so you had them in a, in one of the big buildings, and we would just sit in the bleachers and they would try to, the teacher would try to conduct the classes in front, in front of you. And then they would section off, then they would have another section for... it was, it wasn't totally, there was no, there was no building for one class, so you had ten different classes going on all at the same time in, say, one big, big arena, which was just sectioned off for classes. So we did get a type of schooling; it wasn't, it wasn't the best situation, but we were trying, they tried to give us some type of schooling.

TI: And who were the teachers at the school?

HS: The teachers? Well, they brought in some teachers who were willing to come out from the general community, so they must have had people that we would call substitute teachers. The principal was a, that took over, was a full-time teacher from the Vancouver area, and he was a, he might have been a vice-principal at some high school or school, and he took over as he was an English, English background. And so he had to try and organize this setup so that we have some kind of teaching going on for a while.

TI: And books and supplies, you had all those things?

HS: Books and supplies, they did have, they brought in some books and supplies that we could use, and we did have it for about two to three months, to try and finish off the year, because here we were all leaving in, say, midstream. If I'm grade seven, they had to somehow finish off that year for everybody that was there. And they tried the best they could. Now, a lot of these ideas came maybe from, they were just brought up by a commission called the B.C. Security Commission, which was then organized in B.C., made up mainly of people who were from the area of Vancouver and surrounding. It was headed by, it was headed by a fellow by the name of, of Taylor, Austin Taylor, actually, who was a, he actually was... today you would say he was a billionaire, but in those days, he was a millionaire businessman from Vancouver. Very successful businessman. They made him chairman of this B.C. Security Commission, and he, of course had, they had various sections, but they had a whole group of people that set up the, it was made a committee, and this committee, they were responsible for the federal government, and they were sort of given the, the mandate of trying to do something with the 22,000 displaced people. And so, and so it was his job to do, to settle them.

TI: When you say "set up," so, and organize, he was more worried or concerned about, about the welfare of the people?

HS: Welfare.

TI: Because he didn't have to worry so much about the security? I'm trying to understand...

HS: Oh, yeah, he's working, he's working about what to do with us in terms of housing, food, everything. And then, of course, then the thing, obviously in that commission, the idea, what came up was what are you going to do with the schooling of these kids who had been, who had been abruptly removed from their schools? Because like in the lower mainland, there was areas of, areas where maybe there might have been up to fifty percent of the kids were of Japanese descent, like Steveston area. There was a large population of Japanese people in Steveston, so they, they occupied large numbers. Whereas we were in Prince Rupert, maybe, like I said, ten to fifteen percent of the school population, nevertheless, you would leave. And when you left, nobody knew where you went. In fact, there was very little, there was very little media attention put to this whole thing. Whether it was deliberate, and probably had something, it probably was deliberate, they didn't want people to know what was happening to, when you really come right down to it, to fellow Canadians.

TI: But you really didn't know that. You were in the camps --

HS: No, we didn't know that, I didn't know that, because we didn't read the newspapers.

TI: Right.

<End Segment 31> - Copyright © 2006 Densho. All Rights Reserved.