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TI: So let's switch gears a little bit again, so just other activities. I've, you're a good writer and on your website you have different stories and one of the stories that really caught my attention was the Alabama Hills story.

HU: Oh, yeah.

TI: So talk, talk about that. So you're in camp and, and I've been to Manzanar and it's, the geography is actually quite striking, and then nearby something called Alabama Hills. So why don't you explain that?

HU: Yeah, Alabama Hills, the, they used to make, they made famous movie, like Gunga Din... lot of, probably hundreds of Western movies with that background, so Alabama Hills, it's, also it's a mining, before it was mining, gold mining. In fact, they got the name Alabama Hills because couple of prospectors from Alabama started digging in the area and that's how they got the name Alabama Hills there. So anyway, it was summertime, summer vacation, and my friend, we were just tossing baseball and it was getting hot and then we start thinking, well, maybe we should go hiking, maybe up, up that Mount Williamson, but that's too, too high. Finally we said, "Let's climb Alabama Hill. It doesn't look that tall and it doesn't look that far." And it's a funny thing, like mountain, hills, it looks so close, but once you start going it's quite a ways. So anyway (my friend's family friend) was a chef at this mess hall, so he had prepared a lunch and, and then... I can't remember what, what we had for lunch. Well anyway, we start -- oh, and he says, "Maybe we should, we could shoot jackrabbits," because it was, there were a lot of jackrabbits there. And so he made a couple of slingshots and we started early in the morning and we were kinda, not scared, but it was sort of exciting because you're sneaking out of this barbed wire area and you're looking around and see if nobody's watching you. Actually, it was, we were overreacting, but we were overreacting, by that time nobody cared anyway.

TI: So you just kind of walked right through the, just underneath the barbed wire and just walked out?

HU: Yeah, walked out, and then we came to George Creek and we had to cross the creek, the water came up to, to here, and I was amazed at the trout. There were a bunch of trout, good size native trout swimming all over. You could just almost grab that thing, and unfortunately we had slingshot; we should have brought fishing pole then. But anyway, we start going and this guy, my friend was much more physically adept to that kind of thing, so he sort of helped me out. And also this, you could see Highway 395 and we figured, well, we didn't want to get caught, so instead of going over the crest we went through the, sort of a gorge like thing, which is, you got a lot of loose rocks and things, but anyway, finally we got up there. We're, all the time we're looking around to see if we're not being watched, and we went over the hill and we looked over and we, they still had these gold mines out there, gold mining place, and then, then we figure there could be some movie being shot there, which there wasn't. Then we looked over, we saw the gold mines and we didn't go any further because we were scared that if somebody saw us they could easily take a pot shot at us, so anyway, we came back. But that, that was quite an experience. But there were other things to do, like the first day that we got there the barracks are covered with tarpaper and it used to come in a roll, just like the roll that we buy today except that in those days they had this round tarpaper scattered all over the block, and we start tossing that thing across the firebreak. The firebreak is about 525 feet long and most of the time when you, when we tossed it it would go up and then boom, take a nose dive, but when you went way out, it would go up there and sort of hover up there and, it would crash into the barracks across the barracks and we got a rush out of that.

TI: So, I mean, you would catch a wind or something or a nice, nice current and it would actually go all the way across the --

HU: Yeah, all the way across, over 425 and bang into...

TI: And then people would come out of the barrack and see what was --

HU: Good thing they were just completing --

TI: Oh, so they were empty?

HU: Yeah. Block 35 and 36, they were just beginning to fill in. And thirty years later, a couple of guys took the same idea and called it Frisbee. So my mother used to tell me that this is the land of opportunity and that's one of the reasons why they came here. Only opportunity I got was bunch of missed opportunities. [Laughs]

TI: You could've been the inventor of Frisbee.

HU: Right.

TI: Good.

HU: And there were other... basketball, softball. I think first thing was softball. We had a softball team that we used to play against. Even the Terminal Islanders, they had Skippers, the older, older team's name was Skippers and our age group, they had a team called Skippers Junior, and we used to play against them and Boyle Heights guys. What did they used to call themselves, Boyle Heights? Anyway, there were quite a few teams. And then by the time the basketball season came along it was, they, the camp was well organized enough that they had a league. They had a adult league, they had a high school league and we were in the junior high school league, and one day we're -- anyway, we signed up for the junior high school, they called it the Midget League, and we signed up for that league and we're shooting basketball, trying to figure out what to name ourselves. And we're coming up with all kind of names like Panthers, Lions, real big, macho names, and there was a guy name Ralph Lazo and he was a Mexican American. He was attending Belmont High School in Los Angeles and when his buddy came to, went to Manzanar he tagged along. He was visiting us and he was watching us, and he says, "Hey, you guys look like a bunch of midgets. Why don't you call yourself the Mikado Midgets?" And I think he was just joking. He was a character. He was a real nice guy, character. And, and we were kinda stupid, we're kinda naive and we thought, hey, that's a cool name, so we called ourselves the Mikado Midgets, and of course Mikado means emperor, so Emperor's Midgets. That's a lame name, but I guess it didn't matter because we had a lame team anyway. We never won a game. We lost every game we played. So there was that kind of thing. There was judo.

TI: Going back to Ralph Lazo, did you ever get a chance to talk to him very much or get to know him?

HU: No, he was about two years older than me. Only thing we did was just, "Hi," you know, when we come across, came across each other. We'd say "hi" or "what do you say." I think we used to use that term a lot, "What do you say." You'd see somebody, say, "Hey, what do you say?" And that's about the extent of it.

TI: Were you ever confused, like why is this Mexican American in camp? Did that ever cross your mind?

HU: No, it never even crossed my mind. [Laughs] He was kinda popular and no, I never wondered about that. Yeah.

TI: Okay, so I'm gonna switch gears here again. So you, you were in Manzanar at a time where you're kind of coming of age, thirteen, fourteen, fifteen. Tell me about the social scene. I mean, did you get interested in girls? Were there, like, dances? I mean, what, how did that all work?

HU: We had dances. We used to get together. Every block had this recreation room; we had one in our block and I used to hang around with a guy in Block 28, like Wacky, that's a brother, older brother of Farewell to Manzanar Jeanne Wakatsuki. Yeah.

TI: And his nickname was Wacky?

HU: Wacky, yeah, we used to call him Wacky. And I don't know how he got the name, maybe short for Wakatsuki or maybe he was sort of wacky. He was a character. So anyways, there was Wacky and there was Mas, there were a few other guys and there were a few girls there that we used to get together and we sort of had a small dance type of thing, get together. But, well actually, but when it came to girls I didn't get around much. I'm not a, I'm not a Romeo type.

<End Segment 21> - Copyright © 2010 Densho. All Rights Reserved.