Densho Digital Archive - Tokio Hirotaka - Toshio Ito - Joe Matsuzawa Interview (denshovh-htokio

<Begin Segment 36>

AI: Now, in the meantime, you had gone back to Tule Lake. Did you stay there very long, or did you go out again to --

TI: That was fall of 1942. I came back with the other four guys, and we all came back Tule Lake. And I stayed in camp until the spring of '43. My brother went out to Montana to look over conditions out there, thinking maybe the family could go out there and locate someplace, on a farm. So he reported back that he found a place so, told us to come on up. So, 'bout a month later, the rest of us went up to Montana. Place called Chinook, near Havre, very close to the Canadian border, within twenty miles, I would guess. And found a farm near the town of Chinook. Chinook had the only sugar beet factory in the area, so there were quite a few sugar beet farmers around there. Well, we located in one of the farms, but this farmer was not a farmer in the sense that he farmed the land. His father-in-law was a big time sheep rancher, and they were just raising the beets and things as a kind of a sideline thing. He didn't know a lot about farming so -- the weather conditions were not favorable either -- so, we had to suffer along with this guy trying to raise sugar beets and a few other things that he didn't know much about.

But when our contract expired in six months, I think it was close to November, or earlier, no I believe it was earlier. I think it started snowing that year around September, as I recall. Well, we really decided that, this is not for us, we want to get back and try something else. Well, by that time, my brother and I decided that we needed some kind of transportation. We had to go into town to buy groceries and do a few odds and ends, besides sit there on the farm and work. So we scraped up some money and bought an old '37 Chev coupe with a little makeshift box on the back, with the trunk lid off. So that, well, we're a family of five so, it really didn't make sense to buy a coupe like that. [Laughs] But that was the only thing around, and available, and the price was within our reach, so we decided to go ahead and buy it anyway. Well, we used that for transportation. And when it was time, when it came time to leave, why, my brother asked me, he says, "Well, you want to drive the car down, or you want to go by train?" And I said, "Well no, I don't want to drive." And so, he and my father drove down on this '37 Chevy, and the rest of the family and I came down by train, down through Butte, and down to... well, by that time, instead of going to Tule Lake, our family had moved up to Minidoka. So that's, no, no, I take it back. No, we went the way back to Tule, but then after that we came up to Minidoka. So, when we came back down, we moved over to Minidoka. And, while I was there, well, I got my draft notice from my local draft board. So, I was drafted out of camp. So I went from one camp to another, so to speak.