<Begin Segment 13>

DM: And what were your school experiences like at Minidoka?

AM: Well, we had nothing in the camp, in the assembly center we had no school, but we did not really have school until almost the end of October, so that meant that we arrived there, first, end of August, first part of September, and we had no school of any kind until then. I don't, I haven't found any records to know exactly when school started, but I remember when school started, we were told which building we should report to. And there were no desks, no chairs, we just sat on the edge of the barracks building, inside, we sat on the floor. And most of the teachers were recruited from Indian reservations or other places. Only a few of them came for altruistic reasons, most of them came because it was a job. I remember taking an American government class from a woman named Ms. Gilbertson, and I kept thinking, "I wonder what she thought about teaching American government at that point?" You know, you look at the civics books and you think, "This is, this doesn't make sense." And you have to remember, I went from a Catholic girls school, which was highly disciplined, to this place that we were sitting on the floor, with most of the time no books, no paper, no pencil. Eventually we got them, of course, but for a long time we didn't have any semblance of a school or classroom. Somebody told me several years later that we had a gymnasium, and I said, "You're kidding. I don't remember a gymnasium." Well, they built the gymnasium in 1944, towards the end of '44. So there was indeed a gymnasium, which still exists today, parts of it that still exist there in Minidoka. But when I grew up, when I was there in school, there was no building to spare.

DM: And when did you graduate?

AM: 1943.

DM: So you're Minidoka High School class of '43.

AM: Well, it's Hunt High School.

DM: Oh, Hunt High School.

AM: They didn't name, they named the school Hunt. In fact, they named the postal office Hunt, Idaho, and since then, I've been part of a Minidoka Internment Memorial (Committee). Anyway, it's a National Park Service (committee), and when we were talking about what should be preserved from that period, I said I thought the U.S. Postal Service, the post office should be the most important building in that place. They said, "Why?" and I said, "Because our life revolved around going to the post office to mail things," or getting, eventually when we started getting Sears-Roebuck and Montgomery Ward stuff, that was our connection to the rest of the world. And I said that most of us don't think of it that way, but I always think of it as the most important building in that place was where we communicated with the rest of the world, in whatever form. But I don't think that they found the building.

DM: That's really telling; that's an interesting way to think about it, that you were so isolated that the postal service was your only real link to the rest of the world.

AM: That's right. And Montgomery Ward and Sears-Roebuck were very important in our lives.

DM: What kind of things did you get from those catalogs?

AM: Well, I remember my mother saving enough money that she could get me a pair of ice skates, and I remembering treasuring -- I still have them. I haven't worn them in many years, but I still have them. It's something that I connect, just as I still have my suitcase that I bought at Bon Marche. I never use it, but it's still an important remembrance of that time. And I think about it and I think, "Why would I keep something like that?" And I realize it's because it's the only pieces of what I call sanity that still existed for us, for me, anyway. Different people look at different things differently, but I sure remember that.

DM: And what kind of other social activities were there for kids?

AM: You know, for kids, it was, if you played baseball they had baseball. For boys there were a lot of activities. They had very few things for girls, that's what I remember. And the ice skates was because I learned to skate before I left to go to camp, and I remember always thinking -- Sonja Henie was the Norwegian, I think, ice skating star, and girls my age thought that she was super, right. And I remember getting a pair of ice skates and then had to leave them behind, of course. So when we were in camp, my mother got them for, pair of ice skates for me. I used to think I was a pretty good skater. But in the recollection of the camp itself, I said, I remember wearing my ice skates and walking from my barracks building to the pond. There was a canal that runs through the camp, alongside the camp. Can't remember... anyway, they trapped enough water into an excavation so that in the summertime kids could swim, and in the wintertime it would freeze over and we could skate on it. But then I realized, when I looked at the map of the place, I realized why I could walk to, Block 32 where we lived was close to that place where they made a pond.

<End Segment 13> - Copyright ©2008 Densho. All Rights Reserved.