<Begin Segment 28>

JM: Well, nights were cool up there, it was sometimes cold, at Tule Lake. (...) I had never stayed there very long, but that was more of a climate that we could stand up there. And, seemed like things were little bit more organized too, up there. But there were so many people there, there was people from all over the West Coast. California, Hood River, and up around the Northwest there's, all stuck together there.

AI: Well, now, that must have been quite a change for you fellows, because Bellevue was such a small town, and even Seattle wasn't that big. And here you've got, wasn't Tule Lake somewhere over ten thousand people, something like that?

TI: Yes. Well one thing, the Bellevue community, and I believe Hood River also, they sort of divided it into two groups. I know we lived in the section called the Alaska area, which was on the one side of the fire break, and the rest of the camp was on the other, other end. And then half of the Bellevue people were on the opposite end pretty much. And Hood River was basically divided in the same manner, and I often wonder what reason there was not to keep the one community intact, rather than splitting it more or less in half. Maybe it was to disperse and get them separated for some reason.

JM: I don't think that that was the least of their worries(...). Wherever they said to go, you go. And we, we were up with the Hood River group. And then the people from down on Auburn were down there where Toshi was, I think, huh?

TI: Which block were you in? You were in the 70s? In Tule?

JM: ...69, or something. It was, it was right adjacent to Hood River people.

TI: Yeah, we had Hood River people also. Hood River, Tacoma...

JM: Hood River was 70s, so we were...

TI: We were in 59.

JM: Yeah. But Bellevue people were down there, too. But of course, there were lot of other people that we didn't know that were in there, and I didn't know where they were from. But I don't think that they put the families or the communities together, they just put 'em wherever they felt they needed to put 'em, I guess.

TI: Well, I know one thing, the buildings and structures were built more on a permanent basis than Pinedale was.

JM: But even then they were big long barracks-style buildings, divided into rooms. The long ones had maybe four apartments in, and the smaller ones had maybe two, and depend, they put the ones with big families in the... but the rooms weren't separated. The only way that they were separated is by, you have do it yourself. String a wire and a sheet across the walls, so that you can have a little privacy within the family.

TI: But even they, between the units all they had was those plasterboard. And I think, and up on top it wasn't finished, it was just flat across, I mean it was open where it started, where the pitched roof started why, it was wide open.

JM: Oh, you could hear everything.

TI: There was no privacy.

JM: Yeah.

<End Segment 28> - Copyright © 1998 Densho. All Rights Reserved.