<Begin Segment 15>

TI: Again, you came a little later, how about job situation? Were you and your brothers able to get jobs at this time?

JT: Well, I can speak for myself. We got paid, if you had a job. If you was in a supervisory classification or a professional classification like a doctor or a dentist or something like that, you got nineteen dollars a month. This was top wages. And if you was just a common laborer, you got sixteen dollars a month. And I think we also got some money for clothing allowance, and I think that was two or three dollars a month. My job, when I got there, I worked in, they called it construction engineer. And what we did was, there was a pond out there, and we, we filled this pond with sand. And the thing was, we had a tractor out there, and we had dump trucks that backed in there. The whole thing was to see how far you can drive your truck over this sand and dump the load of sand into this pond. Well, nobody tipped their truck over, but everybody got their truck stuck and we had to pull 'em up with the tractor. But eventually we got the pond filled. And they built a, I think it was called the tent factory. And I think today, that building is still there. It was a permanent building, it wasn't a temporary building. And then I got a job, I had several jobs. These were all sixteen dollars a month jobs. And I worked in the freight crew for a while, and we unloaded produce that came in on the railroad. And sometimes we went out on the farm to pick up vegetable out on the farm. And then I got another... I think it was three or four jobs I did in there. I became a plumber. And anytime they had a problem, well, we'd go out and fix the problem. There was three of us in our block. So eventually, we found out that there was lot of showers, shower stall that weren't used. We dismantled all the pipes in those shower stalls. It wasn't a (used) stall. The men's shower was just all open, it was just pipes, and there was no privacy. But the showers that weren't used, we dismantled them and we took all the pipes and we brought 'em back to our block. My apartment was on the north side, 4204-A was on the north side, and the shower stalls, the toilet, bathroom was in between. So we got enough pipe, and we dug a hole in the ground, trench in the ground. And the first apartment we went up to the attic, and we had running water in our apartment.

TI: This is the first time I've heard of anyone having running water in their barracks. [Laughs]

JT: Yeah, we had running water. And this is because we took all this, the shower that weren't being used, we took 'em all apart and we saved... and since we had worked in the plumbers, as plumbers, we got all the couplings. And, you know, we're only talking about three or four feet. So it takes a lot of plumbing to go out there 120 feet in the barrack, and 50-60 feet on the ground between that. But we did have running water.

TI: And with running water in the barracks, what did that allow you to do?

JT: It didn't do nothing. It's just that we had running water. [Laughs]

TI: So just the satisfaction of being able to turn water on.

JT: Yeah, we could turn it on, turn it off. And, of course, we asked the people that, we're on top of their apartment, and we're putting this pipe together, and we asked them if they wanted water. I don't remember anybody saying that they wanted water, but we had, we had water.

TI: Now was there ever a sense that you might get in trouble if you did things like this?

JT: No, I don't think anybody even knew that we had water. And even if they knew, didn't mean anything.

BT: Well, I just wonder about the areas where you were taking the pipes from. Why weren't people using the showers?

JT: I think it was too close to the door or something.

BT: Oh.

JT: You know, we had the whole row of showers, and maybe there was ten, fifteen shower heads out there, maybe two or three of 'em were too close to the door or whatever the reason was, maybe they weren't working. I don't know, maybe it was plugged up. But if they weren't working, we took it apart and we brought it home.

TI: That's a good story.

<End Segment 15> - Copyright © 2009 Densho. All Rights Reserved.