<Begin Segment 15>

TI: We, we sort of got off on a tangent, which is really interesting. I love this discussion, but I want to go back more to your life. Heart Mountain, you talked about arriving, going into a barrack twenty by twenty-four for a family of seven, so let's, why don't we start by just, so how did a family of seven organize itself in this, in this room?

BS: We spread out the seven beds. I think to save space we put two beds together and to use common blankets over the two beds, and so we had to kind of put them in the corner. And we had this coal burning stove and we had this homemade little table and I guess we had a couple of benches, so it was a really a crowded situation. But we ate in the mess hall and we went to the laundry room for our showers.

TI: And how was life different than Pomona?

BS: Well, I, we started to have school at Heart Mountain. I guess Heart Mountain was better organized. We kids had more things to do. At first we used to just roam around in gangs. I'd say a dozen of us boys would get together and just roam around the camp because we had nothing to do, and so then we would get into trouble, then... it really was a bad situation.

TI: So when you say get into trouble, what would be an example of a group of boys getting into trouble?

BS: We roughed up the youngest member of our group and so he told his parents and so we got called into the police department and we were bawled out by the police chief, but luckily he didn't tell our parents, and so, and so nothing bad happened to us. But just a situation where we had no facilities --

TI: So I want to go back to that story. So here you get pulled into the, the police station and the police chief bawls you out, so that sounds like a reprimand, but you would be more afraid of your parents than the police chief on something like this? You said at least you didn't get in trouble, that your parents didn't know? I mean, what would your parents have done?

BS: I guess they would just bawl us out and that'll be the end of it and maybe we would behave better. But we weren't that bad of kids.

TI: Okay. I was just curious if, if your parents were worse than the police chief in terms of discipline. I was just curious how that, how that played out. So what were, like, besides school, what were some other organized activities that you did?

BS: Well, because we didn't have anything to do, then the authority came to us. They would see a group of kids playing around and they said, "Okay, we're gonna form a football team," and they would supply us with a coach and we had a football team. And there would be other teams around the camp and so we had football games. And that was pretty good. Then later on we had basketball teams. We had softball teams. The authority came to us; we didn't go to the authority and say, "Hey, how about doing something for us?"

TI: So do, they were just worried about you guys. They were concerned that they don't do something then you'll get into trouble, so they tried to do something proactively, I guess.

BS: Right.

<End Segment 15> - Copyright © 2010 Densho. All Rights Reserved.