<Begin Segment 25>

TI: You know, I'm thinking about your, we've been talking about your life for the last hour and a half, and you've had lots of various hardships. Were these war years pretty hard for you?

BH: Well, it was pretty hard.

TI: Like harder than anything you'd lived through before?

BH: Oh, yes. And I remember my, Paul and his brother used to, you know, jobs were hard to get, but they managed to find... because my brother-in-law lived there for a long time, so people knew him. So through him, Paul was able to work together. So both of them worked together all the time, no matter where they went. They even went to, they got hired by the railroad. Not railroad, coal mine. So they wanted to go to the coal mine to earn some money. So they had another family of Japanese that he said he had to, he was the first one to be called. So he answered the thing and he went, went in the mine. And that's when all the miners got real, you know how they were, they were mad at him anyway, at all the Japanese. So they started to swing their axe towards this man. And so he, I think he said they were about a mile or so inside the mine, so he ran out of the place. And Paul's shift was the next one, so he came over and he says, "Oh, I almost got killed," he says. "I don't want go to back in that place again." Before that, the miners, when they were told to come to work, why, they all went to the mining store and they bought all the equipment, the lamp on their head and all their gear. And so Paul was so happy, he was just like a kid, he tried that on, you know. He had to return everything. So he said, "Don't go down there, you're going to get killed," so that was the end of our, their coal mining experience.

TI: Oh, so never got a chance to do it? Where was the coal mine located?

BH: Right in Rock Springs where we lived.

TI: So it was Rock Springs.

BH: Uh-huh.

<End Segment 25> - Copyright © 2009 Densho. All Rights Reserved.