<Begin Segment 23>

TI: So let me make sure I understand this. So after Lincoln's birthday, they fired all the Japanese railroad workers.

BH: Yeah, they said, "Leave the premises, Union Pacific premises within," I think it was forty-eight hours. So we had to evacuate. And so all our stuff, Paul's paintings and all, everything he couldn't carry, that we could just put in our car, we just put it in there. We used to have a small car at the time. So we put everything in it, what we could, everything. Paul built a bonfire and we took everything, old paintings, everything in there. All our, whatever we couldn't, didn't need to have, we just took it out there and made a big bonfire. His old paintings that he loved, but we couldn't do anything with it, we couldn't carry it anyplace. So we just burned everything. Clothes, and anything that's written in Japanese, we just burned it.

TI: Do you recall Paul saying anything when he had to burn all that?

BH: Well, there was nothing he could say. Like the Japanese expression was shikata ga nai.

TI: So what do you do? So you're kicked out of your house, forty-eight hours' notice, you're out of a job.

BH: Out of a job.

TI: So where did you go?

BH: So we went to, there was a little cabin for tourists, two little, two houses down there, between where we lived and Green River. So we rented one room, twelve-by-twelve, four of us lived in there for a month or so. And then we couldn't stay there forever, so his older brother was in Rock Springs already, so he started looking around. And he found someplace, and it was an old shack on the road going to another coal mining town. And so a black family lived there, they had about eight children, and they had an old house that... it wasn't even a house, it was a chicken coop at one time. And so couldn't help it, we had to rent that place. I think, I don't even remember how much we paid, eight dollars or something. And it was really a shack. So we lived there for, must be ten months, maybe fifteen, sixteen months, I don't know exactly.

TI: So what would you live off of? Because Paul wasn't working?

BH: Yeah, we got that compensation check, so thirty dollars.

TI: And that was thirty dollars --

BH: That's all.

TI: -- a month?

BH: That was...

TI: Or a one-time payment?

BH: I think it was a month.

TI: And so you were living on, essentially, thirty dollars a month.

BH: Uh-huh. Of course, we had a little savings, too, by that time. But we didn't want to use that if we can help it.

TI: And so what would the two of you do during the day? When Paul's not working, what would you do?

BH: He would paint or do something. But we had to leave the house, so we had to find this place. And we had no place to put anything. But somehow, Paul always loved to paint, so he'd save his brush and paint.

TI: What would Paul paint during this time? What kind of...

BH: He did a couple of portraits of me and some of the kids. When our second son that died, when he was just born, he was only about nine days old, he painted him while I was holding him. But he still painted.

<End Segment 23> - Copyright © 2009 Densho. All Rights Reserved.