<Begin Segment 18>

TI: Tell me about school at Manzanar. What was school like?

HU: It's great. Compared to... here again, it's relative, if I were, if -- I was in seventh grade, just got out of seventh grade, going into eighth grade -- if I had stayed back home, in eighth grade I would have been in this one room, one room with two classes, two grades and one teacher, and with one teacher you, basically it's reading, the three Rs, but camp, I remember the first, first semester we had woodshop, which we would have never had back home, and of course we had different classes for English and gym and that kind of thing. And science class, they had science class and that I remember because they started plastering the wall and putting the linoleum after the camp was, was finished. It was finished in June, so from about June they started fixing that interior. And in this science classroom they haven't gotten around to putting the linoleum and plastering the wall, so I remember sitting without chairs, we were sitting against the wall and it was afternoon class where the wind starts blowing. And when they built the camp they removed those sage brushes, all the vegetation and they had just nothing but fine sand and silt on top, so when the wind blew, I mean, it just came up. We could, you could see the dust just coming up like volcano from the floor and we're just scraping the tablets like that, so it was quite an experience. But after a week or two they plastered the... but that's one of the things I remember about the school. But it was definitely better than what was back home.

TI: Well, tell me about some of the teachers at, at your school.

HU: Oh, there was a couple of teachers... I think everybody in the class remembers Mrs. Oatman, well actually Miss Oatman, and oh, she was an English teacher, she was strict. She would, you would look like that [looks to the side] away from her and bang, she would slam the ruler on the desk. I mean, she was, everybody thought she was some, somebody from hell, somebody... I mean, she was, she must've been in her late fifties or sixties. To us initially, we thought she was mean, mean old witch. And then they had this detention and a couple of San Pedro guys, Terminal Islanders, they're, they're... well anyway, they didn't behave, so Mrs., Miss Oatman had these two guys help her, got sent to detention and they, she had them help her move the furniture in her cottage there, in her room, and these San Pedro guys, Terminal Islanders, they spoke a lot of Japanese. I mean, they were very good in Japanese, so, so these two guys, were, they're talking about baasan, all the bad things about this, the teacher and then Miss Oatman was just minding her own business and when they left she gave 'em a couple of Coca Colas. They say arigatou and she started speaking Japanese and she was, she used to teach in Japan, so she knew the Japanese language. And the, when that word got around, I mean, we had nothing but respect for her, so she was one of the greatest teachers.

And there was Mr. Rogers, he was my French teacher and he was real, he was in the Navy. I guess he got injured, he was, injured his shoulder or something. Oh, he was brilliant. I think he was a genius. He spoke French, Spanish, I mean, half a dozen other languages very fluently, and I remember, and he also learned Japanese, so he would speak in Japanese, and one day we asked him, "Hey, what are you gonna do after you get, we leave? Where you gonna go?" He says, "Probably Japan." And then, so when I was in Japan, when I was stationed in Japan, I was in Tokyo and I thought maybe Mr. Rogers is in Japan so I start investigating and sure enough he was there. And I called him and he took me out to lunch that day and he brought me to his room and showed me all these pictures of Manzanar and we had a sort of great reunion.

TI: Good. Any other teachers that --

HU: Yeah, Mr. Greenly, Greenly was English teacher and he was very oriented in Japanese, Nisei problems. He said, "You guys have staccato..." you know Niseis, we have this accent. When I'm talkin' over the phone I can spot a Nisei. No matter how much they try to hide they have the accent just like I have an accent, so he was aware of this Nisei accent so he drilled and drilled us on, in talking more fluently and we had to memorize poems like Theophilus Thistle, "so many thousand thistles." I remember at one point we had to memorize "Kubla Khan in Xanadu, did Kubla Khan the stately dome decree where Alph, the sacred river," and so on and so, I don't remember all of it, but I still remember a few words of it and things like that. And he was, I think, very, very helpful. He was blind. He was cleaning his rifle, I understand, and it went off accidentally, he got blind, so he had this blind dog, but he has this very, very great voice. You probably heard of Mr. Greenly from others.

TI: Yeah, I've heard about some of the teachers. This one I'm not sure. This is the first time I've heard about this teacher.

HU: Yeah, he was a great teacher. He was...

TI: So it sounds like you, you had some really good teachers.

HU: Yeah, I think so. I liked, there were quite a few teachers that I liked.

TI: In the same way, it's, so you went from, probably an improvement in education, I mean, from where, where you would have gotten to Manzanar.

HU: I think so. Absolutely. Oh yeah.

TI: Good.

<End Segment 18> - Copyright © 2010 Densho. All Rights Reserved.