<Begin Segment 16>

MN: Now, you, the Amache camp had a farm. Did you work on that farm?

TS: (Yes).

MN: What did you do on that farm?

TS: Tractor. I drove the tractor, Fordson tractor, had a big wheel on the back and a small wheel in front. (...)

MN: Now, you learned a few things from your racing car brother.

TS: (Yes).

MN: What did you do to the tractor?

TS: I put a little device on the carburetor that made my tractor go faster than everybody else. I used to race all these other guys on the farm and I was always beating 'em because they had a governor on the engine that would back off it goes beyond a certain rpm, but mine kept revving because I had the thing neutralized, the governor. So I was beating everybody on the races. I never told 'em what I was doing. I had a little wire on there. "Hey, you got a fast tractor." "(Yes), it's the driver," I said. I told 'em it was the driver. It wasn't the driver. [Laughs]

MN: Let me ask you about the camp climate. What were the winters like in Amache?

TS: Cold. Twenty degrees below zero. Real cold and windy, icicles hanging down from the roof two or three feet long. Real cold.

MN: How did you keep warm?

TS: They gave us pea coats, black pea coats that come down to about the knee. That's the only thing we had. Nobody had jackets or anything.

MN: What about the summers?

TS: Hot. Really hot. Ninety, a hundred degrees.

MN: So how did you keep cool?

TS: You couldn't. I think we were able to buy a fan or something like that, found it somewhere. I don't know where we got it, but we had a fan. Didn't help too much.

<End Segment 16> - Copyright © 2010 Densho. All Rights Reserved.