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MA: And so tell me about your reunion with your father and when he came back.

JH: Well, like I say, most of 'em had to come back late. They had to get off about midnight or so. I remember my mother telling 'em that he was arriving, and I think it must have been in December of '43 or '44, one of those years, I can't remember which year. And she made sure we were in bed and asleep because it was gonna be late. But I'm always curious. I couldn't sleep, but I didn't let my mother know. So we were in a bigger room, we were in, I think 39-13-A, I'm not sure what our address was there. But it was a larger room, and my dad came in the door real late. That's the first time I saw my mother and father hug each other. [Laughs] And I was very happy, but I went to sleep, because I was supposed to listen to my mother, I'm not supposed to have been awake. It's private time for them.

MA: And then the next day...

JH: The next day it was really nice to have him there. Because soon after, I think we had snowfall. We always had hail, which I'd never seen either. And it was just fun. During that winter when there were icicles on the eaves, I'm sure you people have that. Well, the people from Hawaii, where they got it, I don't know, but they had syrup. So the teens would get on the barrack roof and pour the syrup down each icicle and we'd have popsicles. I was, I mean, I don't know why I remembered that, but I remember that. We made a snowman, and we wanted to -- see, people from Hilo say "shave ice," right? People from the other islands say "ice shave." We had to be different, you know. So I remember where that block was where we got the popsicles from. In the morning, I think the morning that it snowed, one of the residents of that particular barrack went out and got all the fresh snow and made shave ice. We had shave ice in winter, which is weird.

MA: That's great, though.

JH: But we, they managed to bring a little bit of what we did, our culture back. And the kotonks -- sorry -- learned a lot of our language. So by the time we were in Arizona, in Gila, my father used to be the, one of the cooks in there. He was not very good at cooking, though. But they would ring this triangular bell, you know, when it's time to eat. Now, I think it's only our block in Arizona. When he rang it, with his loud voice, he'll say, "Kau kau, kau kau." Everybody knew what it was, "time to eat dinner." That's Hawaiian. [Laughs] But it was hilarious, you know. But in Jerome, I was terribly homesick, yeah. I dreamt about that scene I told you almost every night.

MA: And tell me about your, so you ended up transferring to Gila.

JH: Uh-huh.

MA: And why did that happen? Was it that Jerome was closing at the time?

JH: Jerome was about to become a POW camp. So years later, when I actually became very friendly with Big John Ellington --

MA: I'm sorry, who was Big John?

JH: He's now the owner of the land that Jerome was situated on. And he was farming -- when we first met him -- we took this trip for the southern camps, we met him there. And then I remember I was looking down at his driveway and I said, "That's the, those are the stones from the camp. May I have some?" Because the ones that I had brought home, so nicely wrapped, my mother threw away. So I have them now. But Big John is a wonderful, six-foot-six-and-a-half-inch-tall man. And he would come to every single reunion we had for Jerome.

<End Segment 8> - Copyright © 2009 Densho. All Rights Reserved.