<Begin Segment 8>

TI: So Catherine, the question I wanted to ask was how did you meet your husband?

CH: Well, we were both there in the same place. He was a trained teacher. He had some experience on the job, which I didn't. So at that point in history I wasn't really paying close attention to detail or to personalities, anything. Just a matter, we were both there, other people were there. Need to apply my memory much more.

TI: Now, do you remember what it was about him that attracted you to him?

CH: He was a man. I was young. I don't know, he was, he was a friendly person and polite to people and fairly young and nice looking, so I guess I reacted as a female to a male. I don't think he was impressed at all, I don't think. I was just a figure in a room or whatever. But we were living in a small, don't know what the word would be, but a group of people boarded in a, what amounted to a... I would say a small group.

TI: Kind of like a dormitory sort of situation?

CH: Yes.

TI: Okay.

CH: And how many of us there were I have no idea, and whether the dormitory had males and females or just males in one and females in the other I don't remember. What I don't remember is too much.

TI: How about dating your husband, how did that work out? How did the two of you first start dating?

CH: I'd really have to put my mind to it, 'cause there were other men, other women and we sort of socialized in the dining room, so forth. It was a perfectly amiable group, but how it worked out I'd have to think about.

TI: And what was your husband's name?

CH: Arthur, L for Lee, Harris.

TI: And tell me again, what was his job at Poston? What did he do?

CH: You ask the most difficult questions. [Laughs] Well, he was a teacher and he was hired to be a teacher. And how he got there I don't know. I don't remember that well how many people were involved, but there were several men and women hired to teach and he was one of them.

TI: So tell me about the marriage. Where did you and Arthur get married?

CH: Well that was quite a long time from when we first met. However long it was I couldn't guess, and I don't think when we first met that either one of us was figuring in terms of getting together. He had a wife and I think she wasn't expecting him to wander off, but then we just came along sort of naturally and that was that.

TI: Okay, and in your book you mention how after the war you return to Poston to help close the camp down, so this is after all the Japanese had, had left, and you helped do a lot of the clerical work to shut the camp down, reports and things like that. It must've been interesting because before you had thousands and thousands of people and then it was just down to just a few staff people to, that was left. And do you remember that at all?

CH: Not really.

<End Segment 8> - Copyright © 2011 Densho. All Rights Reserved.