<Begin Segment 6>

TI: So any other stories, Santa Anita, before we move on?

MT: Well, one thing is that I remember a parody one of our Boy Scout leaders did after this, and there was a song called White Cliffs of Dover before the War, and it's about a young boy having to, being able to come back to his home after the, when the war is over and so forth, and they'll be bluebirds over the white cliffs of Dover manana, tomorrow, just you wait and see. That's how it started. And its parody was: "They'll be blackbirds over Camp Santa Anita manana, just you wait and see. There'll be fights and riots and," [sings] "there'll be fights and riots..." I can't quite remember the words now. "Forever after, fights forever after, manana, just you wait and see." Oh, "there'll be love, there'll be love and fight and riots ever after, manana, just you wait and see." So it was a play on what we had, it was our assistant Boy Scout leader Jimmy Ikeda, who wrote the parody, which I basically remember from those days.

TI: And did he write that while he was in camp? This was something that people sang?

MT: Yeah. Santa Anita, we were in Santa Anita, after the riots. [Sings] "And Joe Zaki would go to sleep in his own little stable again. There'll be blackbirds over the Camp Santa Anita manana. Just you wait and see."

TI: Good. Anything else about Santa Anita, like family members, anything that you can remember?

MT: Pardon?

TI: Like family members, anything that happened to your, to your mother or...

MT: There were some incidents that, for instance, there were latrines around barracks and things where you had to go and had no partitions at all, and the women particularly, Nisei girls particularly, were very modest and they just dreaded going to the bathroom. And they would do all kinds of things to try to not go when other people are there, to the point where there was one enterprising girl who somehow found a large cardboard box, and when she had to go to the bathroom she would carry that, put it around her when she went to the bathroom. The baths were communal baths, what they did was they took the horse bath in, where they would wash the horses, the big round edifice that they had, and they put a partition in between the two and the boys would be on one side and girls'd be on the other side. But they were open, open showers, and the girls had a terrible time going to take a shower like that. And some would bathe in their underwear, some would bathe in their swimming suit, and others would go late, late at night when other people weren't there 'cause they were, they didn't want to be naked in front of other people. And the boys, of course, were used to this. They didn't care. They didn't, they showered their side.

TI: And tell me more about the bath. That, that's sort of unique. I mean, yeah, I've heard about the showers and things like that, but at Santa Anita they actually had a communal bath?

MT: No, no. It's a shower.

TI: Oh, the shower.

MT: Just, it was a big shower.

TI: Okay. Big shower.

MT: Huge shower.

TI: Okay, but it wasn't...

MT: It still exists, by the way. That building still exists today.

TI: And that's the place where they'd wash down the horses sort of?

MT: Yeah, before. And they do now. But for us we were the new horses. Put a partition in between for the boys and girls and that was our shower.

TI: Got it. Okay.

MT: The problem we had with the toilets we had, they were basically flush toilets, flush meaning flush down a trough and down, stuff like that, but the problem was they went to cesspools, didn't go into sewage, so it'd fill up, back up and it'd come out. And they'd drill another cesspool and they'd put pipes into there and so forth, so when it overflows, of course, it really smelled a lot. So it was, they were unprepared for us. They were unprepared for a lot of things. The barracks were minimal. We think the stable is bad; the barracks were bad too 'cause they were green lumber, green lumber that, with knots in it, which meant that as it dried, of course, the openings widened and there were no, and the knotholes, so people were doing different things to cover it up, putting paper and so forth. And some families had two families in there, like I told you before, two families in one room and they might have been, they were strangers, so they would up bedsheets or they would put different kinds of bedsheets or any kind of covering to create partitions so they would have some privacy.

TI: Now, so when you say privacy, I'm thinking also of couples, I mean, like the older teenagers, when they're a couple, if they want privacy at Santa Anita what would they do? Where would they go, how would they get privacy?

MT: You're talking about if they were not married?

TI: Yeah, not married.

MT: They would, they would try to find somewhere it's dark and see if they can hold hands and, hold hands wasn't too bad, but if they wanted to kiss they couldn't do it out in the open so they would try to hide where it's dark, where, like where the grandstand, they had some, they could find some privacy. Or they would go to, if they could find somewhere where no one was there, maybe get into a rec room that, recreation room that was empty. But that's, but you had a curfew, so you couldn't stay out late. They had searchlights every night, searchlight going on the thing, and it became kind of like a game a little bit for some of the younger, some like us who would see the searchlight, come and hide, see it's gone and come out, back and forth. And they, they could detect from some of the reflection that we were there and then we'd come back.

TI: So it was like a game for you guys to play.

MT: Game, yes, a game. If they shot someone then there would no more be a game, but I don't think they were ready to shoot anybody at that point. And at one time they put a bed check. You had to be to your room by nine o'clock and they, a civilian guard and an interpreter came and would count heads, see if there, if you were all there, all the people who were in that room. So you had to be in that room or else, I don't know, put you in the jail, I guess.

TI: Now was that, like, random, or did you guys know?

MT: No, no, went to every house.

TI: No, but random in terms the night they would do that. I mean, did you know, like --

MT: No, it was every night.

TI: Every night.

MT: For a while, then they stopped.

TI: Okay.

MT: That's how I remember it.

<End Segment 6> - Copyright © 2011 Densho. All Rights Reserved.