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TI: But let's go to Minidoka. And so any stories from Minidoka that sort of stand out?

ST: Well, let's see. My sister had graduated high school, and so she was a secretary in the ad building, and my father got a job as the night watchman in the mess hall. This was a very cushy job because he could sit around and visit with all his friends who came by in the evening. And he could do a little cooking sometimes. One time he managed to save all the old rice, the leftover rice, and he dried it carefully 'til he had enough. And they saved the sugar and syrup and things, and he made candy for the whole block. And so that was a treat, and so one day they presented it at dinnertime, and he came out and took a bow, you know. [Laughs] So that I remember. At that time, because we were going on the Seattle, or the Washington idea of what school systems were by, they went by the year for school year. So you started, to therefore, that meant that since I was a midtermer, I had to go back to the beginning of the seventh grade. I was very upset about this, but we repeated the seventh grade. And then they decided that it would be a good idea to let all those that were capable of probably being in high school skip to high school because this would help us later when we went out, we would be ahead in school, so I skipped the eighth grade. So that was nice. So I was with more people closer to my age, maybe a little older.

And then at this time, but 1940... that was '42, so '43, people were starting to leave camp. They were able to go out to the east to go to school and things of that sort. And there was not enough older, shall I say adult age people to do a lot of the jobs. So they decided that if you were thirteen years old, you could sign up and become a nurse's aide at the hospital. So my sister told me about this, so I went down and interviewed, 'cause I had just turned thirteen by February. So by June, I was already three months older. And so I went down and interviewed with the head nurse, and she asked me why I wanted to become a nurse, and so, you know, you say, "Of course," because you want to learn about this and that and so forth and so on. And so they had a regular class, we went to classes and the nurses taught the class, we had a little anatomy, we had medical terms. We learned how to make the proper hospital bed, and we learned to make it so tight that you could bounce a quarter -- it's like the army cot bed. We learned how to make those beds and learned how to do all that. And then in the afternoon, we'd go to the ward and help out. So then I did that for, until we left in '45, I worked there part-time when I was going to school, and then full-time in the summertime.

TI: In terms of, what kind of cases, what kind of patients would be in the ward that you would work in?

ST: Okay. I worked -- oh, we were assigned wards according to how we did in school. So the choice position to get was, of course, the outpatient where you met the people coming in. Well, you had to know them more. So all the older ones, 'cause they were high school age, there were some seniors in high school who were in this class, and they kind of pooh-poohed us younger ones because there were only two of us who were thirteen. And we just sort of were, they just sort of tolerated us. But we did the best we could. And so they, they got the outpatient department, and there were also some assigned to surgery. And I received... let's see now. I think I was on the medical ward because I had the dosages and all the Latin terms memorized well. I could read the prescriptions. And then, later, I was transferred over to the OB department, so I helped with deliveries. I actually, they had a delivery room there, and that was my first experience with deliveries.

TI: For someone that young, that must have been quite an experience.

ST: Yes, yes. It was very interesting. And the thing was, they said, "Now, you can't pass out. If you pass out, we're just gonna step over you." And I said I was not going to pass out, and I didn't. It was, to me, it was fascinating.

TI: And the people who trained you, the nurses, the doctors, who were they?

ST: They were, we had all Caucasian nurses. They lived, one of them had a child, and she actually lived in the hospital. We had an empty ward, because there weren't as many patients. And so she had a little apartment set up there. I'm not too sure where the other ones came from. They might have come in from Twin Falls, because that wasn't too far. And I really don't know where they lived. The people who were in the ad department, of course, they had housing up there, and I visited that because one of the director's daughters was a friend of mine, so we would go visit them and we'd say, "Wow, you get a real bedroom," you know. [Laughs] But I learned a lot. It was a good, it was a good introduction to life. And I learned about death, too, because I remember I used to help on the, sometimes I would help on the geriatric ward. They had a TB ward where my father did not want me to work. If anything, he did not want me to work there, so I never told him that I went and helped out once in a while. But, and so, actually, I did get infected by it. I never got TB, but enough so it shows in my blood. So when you run a test, it will show.

<End Segment 18> - Copyright © 2009 Densho. All Rights Reserved.