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SF: So you were really active in construction at Tule Lake, but what about Heart Mountain? Did you do construction?

JY: Heart Mountain?

SF: Yeah.

JY: Yeah, I had... soon as I got there to Heart Mountain, I went to get a job as a junior engineer. I wanted to go to school, and then they look at my resume and they said, "Hey, you belong on the outside. You don't belong in the office." I said, "I want to work in the office." But anyway, they saw my resume, then they were looking for somebody to work on the canal. Well, what happened to the canal, back in the Depression years, they were making the Shoshone canal system to irrigate the whole Heart Mountain basin. And they drilled a hole through the walls of Shoshone canyon, came out, a big siphon pipe and then brought it out, and they finished it, I think, mid-'30s. '36, something like that, he said. And then turn the water on full blast and see how far they can go with this canal. Then there was one part that was lined with concrete, and then water disappeared. Great big gopher hole, the water just sank down and popped out five miles downstream there. So meantime, they didn't have no money, the WPA, so they just left it there. And then that's why the built the camp, so they hired a bunch of us, about twenty of us to go and fill the big hole, compact it, and line it with concrete. So in '42, yeah, '42, fall, we were there, we got it ready, and spring of '43 we went back and we lined the concrete in the canal. And it was in '43 that we could start irrigating the Heart Mountain basin. That's one of the jobs that very few people knew about. Even the local people didn't know about it. And I showed the photos I took, and showed them, and I told 'em exactly where it was. I never been back there, but I'm going back there in August to have that new interpretive center. So I'm signed up, I'll see if I can get a car and drive up to the canal and show them where the canal is.

Then I think a real freakish accident, too. We were building a garage at Heart Mountain, and I was on the roof there. It looks nice and dry, but it's so cold, the wood freezes. It looks dry, but I went on top of that, I slipped, I started slipping. And a guy named Yosh Shimizu, he was big, football player, I think JC Football. I come sliding down the roof, he reached out and just grabbed me, and grabbed me from my shoulder, the strap of the coveralls. Otherwise I would have went right down and been dead. So the other thing, too, when we start putting the roof on, and we have this hot tar, tar used to come in cans before, and it has to be pretty hot to pour it out of the cans, so we'd just throw it in the fire. And it's about ready now, so we get the can there, we get a claw hammer, hit the top and open it. Man, it was so hot inside, it blew in my face there. Whole face was covered in tar. But to show you how cold the air was, soon as it hit the air, it solidified. So it got on my face, but it didn't really burn my face. I had my glasses on, so I had tar all around my face. The Benzene was the cleaner they used to take the tar off, well, that was worse than the tar itself. but it's little things like that.

<End Segment 7> - Copyright © 2011 Densho. All Rights Reserved.