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MN: Now, the day before you left for camp in May was your birthday.

CO: Yeah, I know, I told you all that. Yeah, my twelfth birthday was May 4th, and my father and mother as a birthday present bought me a pretty little dress in the town of Oceanside, and we knew the shop owner and she was very nice. It was dress embroidered with cherries, and I remember that dress because I wore it on the train going to the camps. And here were these ordinary things happening in the middle of this great upheaval. It's little details like that that probably reassured us of a kind of continuity that this is not going to be really awful. I mean, at least in my kid's mind, I don't know. I didn't anticipate that it was going to be something directed against us as a group. Gee, I don't really think about those things. [Laughs] I need to go into analysis or something, but anyway, I don't know. I guess I really look back on it, I was an unusual child.

MN: Okay, so on the day you have to leave your house from Oceanside, where did you gather to go to whatever camp you were going to go to?

CO: I think... I'm kind of thinking about probability. What actually happened I'm not really sure of, but I think that friends, white friends drove us to the train station, and they gave us some food and stuff, too. We just said our goodbyes, like this very friendly grocer and all that, I think he helped us out. There were other people, too. So... man. Maybe we were just fortunate that we didn't feel that somehow this terrible thing was happening. As it turned out to be, it was a terrible thing, but at the time, it didn't feel like it.

MN: Now, can you share some of your memories of the train ride?

CO: Yeah, my second train ride in my life. Well, they were beat up old trains. But again, we were surrounded by family and friends within this group, this contingent that was going. So it was not... I guess it wasn't really burning hot yet at that time of year. So I don't remember it as being really unpleasant. And when people say that they forced us to turn down the shades and everything, I don't remember any of that. 'Cause I remember just watching the scenery the whole time getting there. And they would bring boxed food, like boxed lunch type things periodically, and the soldiers were very polite and nice to us. It's just... were we just extremely lucky? I don't know. But we all got there in fairly decent spirits without having felt suffering or deprivation or anything. Or maybe I was just thinking about the adventure of it all. I'm sure that my parents didn't think that anything really terrible would befall us, my particular parents. I understand that's not the case with other families whose parents thought that they were taking us off to kill us all. That would have been very different if that's the way everybody felt in our contingent, but that was not the case.

MN: Now, how many days was this train ride?

CO: I think just a couple of days. It wasn't too long.

MN: But during that time there was, were there any showers?

CO: The landscape... no, no. I think they would stop the train periodically and let us get off and stretch. Oh, I imagine we must have gone finding toilets, places and stuff. I just don't have any memory of that kind of thing. We slept on the train.

MN: Sitting up?

CO: Yeah, we sat up. I guess playing games and things, I think we had books to read, I don't know. Gee, that's amazing. Have I just repressed a lot of bad stuff? Well, that's possible, too. But anyway, the landscape kept changing, so that was very interesting, going from California into the desert and over the Colorado River, right there, right at the border. And getting there at nightfall and getting onto buses and then going into camp.

MN: So you went straight to...

CO: Straight to camp. We didn't have the assembly center experience. I think that made a difference to us because I think the assembly center experience was really bad in the sense that a lot of these temporary places were still within city limits or whatever, and people could see, look out and see ordinary life going on like cars on streets and everything and that they could still see average life going on just outside of these assembly centers. And the contrast must have been very stark, and things like the horse stalls, you know, pretty grim experiences. Now, I know that there was one big riot at Santa Anita because they kept coming around searching all the places and maybe stealing some of the stuff, looking for contraband, and everybody had to put everything out. We escaped all those experiences. So I don't know what my head would have been like if I'd undergone some of those things.

MN: But for you, as I was listening to you about this train ride, from a child's viewpoint, would you describe it as pretty exciting?

CO: Yeah, it was an adventure. I was new, I mean, it was different, and I guess it must have been like, "I wonder where we're going," kind of thing. Not with dread, but with curiosity. I just attribute all this to my parents as being calm and not excitable under the circumstances. [Laughs]

MN: Then you mentioned that you arrived at Parker, Arizona, in the evening. And this is out in the desert, was it still warm out?

CO: Yeah, it was warmish, and we got onto buses that took us into the site.

MN: I know this was nighttime, but what was your first impression of Poston?

CO: Dusty, dirty. Sort of like slightly controlled chaos, because there were a lot of people, and we were all having to be assigned where we were going to be living. So there was a lot of standing in line and people trying to make sure that they lived next door to each other and all that kind of thing, yeah. I have one memory of the next day, my parents moved from one barrack to another because they wanted to live close to our relatives and neighbors. And me and... who was with me? Some other friend. We were out wandering. We were kind of looking over the whole camp, when we came back, my god, my parents weren't where I thought they were going to be, so we had to find them. 'Course, every barrack looked like every other barrack, and we didn't know the lay of the place. But yeah, that little thing I remember because suddenly it was like lost. "Where are they? This is where we thought they were gonna be." But it was daytime so we found them without too much time or trouble. But anyway, again, it was like an adventure, like, "What was going on?" I didn't really think beyond what does it mean or anything. It's just, "What is all this? What is all this?"

<End Segment 4> - Copyright © 2011 Densho. All Rights Reserved.