<Begin Segment 13>

BK: So then, you were all sent to Puyallup, and you were describing, a little bit, about how six of you were in that one apartment or one room. Was it an actual apartment, or...

MH: No, it was just a room. Where the grass came up the through the floor, well, it always used to make me laugh. Of course, I guess we all went through it. My sister was in a horse stall, and she had two little kids at the time, and so... but it was quite close to the mess hall, so that wasn't so bad. But like my brother-in-law said, he said, "My kids would never eat, because they were too interested in watching everybody else." They'd never seen so many black heads either, because they were in National, and although there were Japanese, there were a lot of hakujins, too.

BK: So this was, this was their first exposure to so many Asians, then.

MH: Yes, especially Asian children. I think in the sawmill, there was only one or two. So it was quite an adjustment for them, that they would... so, they wouldn't eat.

BK: I'm trying to visualize this... there's six of you in this one room. How did you sleep? I mean, you must have used the entire floor.

MH: We did. Mother and Father, of course, we put the beds together, and my brother Ted and Ken -- I don't know how they figured it out -- but they put two beds on top of each other, to make a bunk bed. And then, Ak was on their side and then, I was on Mom's side. Then we had the little potbellied stove in the middle.

BK: So you had bunk beds that were three?

MH: No, two.

BK: Two tiers, okay.

MH: Two tiers, and then, one was by itself. And that's all, the room was only wide, long enough to hold two beds together, foot by, to make the length. So the boys were on one side, and Mom and Dad and I were on the other side.

BK: So... I'm just trying to visualize this again. The walls of the Puyallup only went so high.

MH: I think they only went about eight feet, didn't they?

BK: Right.

MH: And so, all the way down, from one end to the other. I don't even remember how many were there, in this one barrack, but you could hear everything. You couldn't yell at anybody, you couldn't scream at anybody. If you did, everybody down the road heard it. And I think that was the hardest part. Even where my sister was, in a horse stall, their partitions only went up so many feet, and they had a curfew there, so the... it happened to be that all the young people were in these horse stalls. So her and their neighbor, they figured out a way to have a ladder that would go over the top, so they'd go over to play cards, and they could get to the kids in a hurry if they heard one of the kids.

BK: Because they had a ladder from one...

MH: To the other.

BK: To the other.

MH: Can you imagine?

BK: No. [Laughs] Talk about the privacy, right? For a young couple? [Laughs]

<End Segment 13> - Copyright © 1998 Densho. All Rights Reserved.