<Begin Segment 13>

TI: So let's, let's go back to Puyallup. Memories of Puyallup, what did you do when you got there? You talked about going in there and seeing machine guns.

HL: We weren't there too long. It was, well, there wasn't too much to do. I know we, most of the, like I did a lot of knitting and stuff like that 'cause there was not much else to do, but we were there for a couple of months, then we were, we were one of the first groups that left to go to Minidoka.

TI: Okay, but so I'm curious, you're, you're older than you brother by, you said three, four years?

HL: Four years.

TI: Four years. What was the influence of camp on teenage boys?

HL: I think it was quite different than what it was for us because one thing I know that happened is that the family no longer had as great an influence on him as friends, because you no longer ate at home, you all ate at the mess hall, all you did was go back home to sleep kind of thing. And so, like my brother, his experience in camp was quite different than what my sister and mine would be, and I think my sister probably was the one that was the most bitter of the whole, of the three of us because she had the most to lose.

TI: She had her business so it's up and running.

HL: And it was all interrupted and this kind of thing. I hadn't started on anything much yet and I was hoping to go on to school, so it wasn't that great. My brother was still in high school, and so you know how high school kids are.

TI: Well, so that's why I'm curious, because you're probably in that position where you could see your younger brother now running around with his friends and then you had your parents, and was there tension because of that?

HL: No, there wasn't tension, but then you could see that there was not the influence that, that should've been. And what surprises me is that whole group of kids turned out as well as they did. [Laughs]

TI: So your observations, were you concerned about, about your brother?

HL: Yeah, I wondered what would happen. But then the thing is I knew most of the boys he was running around with, and he was running around with older kids than he was and there were kids that, well, they were people I went to high school with so I knew them pretty well and I knew which were the good ones and he ran with the good group, so that was okay as far as I was concerned.

TI: Now, if he were running around with, maybe the bad group, would you have done something?

HL: I would've tried to do something, because I would've felt that you're putting your whole life in jeopardy if you ran around with the wrong group. And of course, not that they didn't get into a lot of mischief. They did. But we all did. [Laughs]

TI: Okay.

<End Segment 13> - Copyright © 2011 Densho. All Rights Reserved.