<Begin Segment 26>

AH: Well, you were starting to have what was latent starting to become sort of up front now, your indignation and the feeling that something had to be done and you were seeing the same kind of behavior by the authorities at Minidoka that you had seen actually at Puyallup. And you were talking about, you could have done things as a civil engineer that were quite easy and yet they seem to have regulations and procedures and contracts and everything take precedence over people. And this was getting you upset. And I'd asked you whether this feeling of being upset was deepened by what you were seeing in terms of the changes in your mother and the fact that your father's absence from the family was being prolonged because of him going through these different camps. And what you had said was that you weren't seeing your mom very much because you were doing sort of your own thing and stuff. And while you said that I was thinking to myself, "Well, what was your own thing at Minidoka?" Because you were doing something with the kitchen when you were at Puyallup, but what was your job at Minidoka?

JA: One of my first jobs I got at Minidoka was the border post crew. That was to go out into the border of our camp and put up posts -- "WRA Camp," "No Trespassing," so forth, all the way around. That was my first. And then from there they wanted some engineer, so I just told them I'm a civil engineer, so I got into with the Bureau of Reclamation to do engineering work.

AH: Now that first job that you were describing, that must have gotten you a little bit mad, too, didn't it?

JA: Not really. We were in crews of four and I'm listening to, you know, what they're thinking. To me, I want to get the posts in and let's keep going. And a big, another thing was that there was a lot of rattlesnakes, scorpions. So we had to be careful how we walked, so that was more my concern -- the safety of the crews. So I ended up becoming the snake person...

AH: So just dealing with the snakes or the scorpions, etcetera, kind of blinded you to the fact that what you were doing was putting up these restrictions on where people could go.

JA: Yes, there you go. Yes, I realized that, but it didn't hit me that deep. All I knew this was the border of the Minidoka camp, and my job was to put the border posts in.

AH: I would guess that in a few more months you wouldn't have been able to do a job like that. Am I right?

JA: Why?

AH: Just because it would have stuck in your craw more, it would have...

JA: Not necessarily, no.

AH: So you could have done that at any time through the camps?

JA: That's right.

AH: Really? How do you explain that?

JA: Well, it's a job.

AH: Because somebody even wrote a poem when the put up the fence at Manzanar, about that -- I mean, at Minidoka about that 'damn fence,' and stuff like that, but you didn't feel the same way about that?

JA: No, I didn't feel. It was just, to me, it was... although it was pointed toward camp, it meant for people from camp that that was the border, you can't go beyond that, but I never... it was such a distant away. I mean, we'd take a truck and we'd drive maybe half-hour, forty-five minutes way out into the desert, so at that time, it was just a job and that was it, just another job.

AH: Okay, and then what about this next job you got, that was in your field, more or less.

JA: Yes, it was in my field. And the big thing was, we had to bring in the water into camp, that means irrigation water, because so dusty. So I had to go out there and do the engineering, well, actually, it was the surveying, to make topog. map for the area from the canal to camp, how to bring the water into camp, how best to bring it in. And I was very busy at that.

AH: It was kind of an intellectual challenge for you, too, wasn't it?

JA: Right, and it was good, because it was just up my line and at school I went through but no practical experience, and here I was, I was getting all of that. And I was very happy.

AH: It was kind of a good job for you in two ways I would guess, not only that it was an intellectual challenge for you but it also provided a social service for the people in the camp. I mean, they got water.

JA: Well, in some way, but that's what I'm thinking. Once we get water in... it was so dusty, you'd be walking in dust maybe knee-deep, and once we get the water in and whatever they said, grew, rye grass, that settled the dust and everything got much better. Instead of being dusty, it become not dusty.

<End Segment 26> - Copyright © 1997 Densho. All Rights Reserved.