<Begin Segment 14>

TI: So you said you weren't at Puyallup very long and then you went to Minidoka, so let's talk about Minidoka, and how did life change when you got to Minidoka?

HL: Well, it was much more settled. I mean, we were there for, we knew we were gonna, there for indefinitely, and so the first thing we did was try to get yourself a job. And so I applied to be assistant teacher 'cause I thought, well, if I want to go into teacher it would be good to, so Stella Yorozu was the one that had this fourth grade class and I was to be her assistant. The first week of school she got sick and so they said, "Okay, you take over." And so here I am with thirty-four fourth graders sitting on picnic benches. We didn't have desks or anything like that. We didn't have blackboards or anything, we didn't have books. Here's these kids and there's me, and I'm looking at them, they're looking at me, and we...

TI: Well, before you even go to that first day, so before the first day of school, what kind of training, expectations, curriculum, program, what kind of discussion was there about --

HL: There was just a little bit of in-service, but not much. It was most, it was basically getting the thing started. You had to get the kids in school and, or else they were running wild kind of thing, and so they decided you got to start school right away. [Laughs] And so there, we didn't have, maybe there would be probably six or seven teachers that had certificates. All the rest were just college graduates.

TI: So Stella Yorozu, she was a teacher or a --

HL: No, she was just a college graduate. She had a college degree, and so if you had a college degree you got to be a teacher. If you didn't then you were assistant teacher. That was fine with me.

TI: Okay, but in your case you got pushed up because Stella got sick.

HL: Sick and then there's nobody else to take it.

TI: Okay, so tell me about that, what happened with thirty-four...

HL: It was real interesting. I think I learned more about how to teach there than in anything else, because when you're sitting, you got thirty-four kids sitting in front of you, wiggling on the picnic benches and you don't have any books, there is no blackboard and just like, I started to teach them how to do borrowing and subtraction, and in that, my elementary school in the first three grades were kind of iffy, 'cause I skipped grades, and so I pretty much taught myself how to do a lot of things, and so I had figured out this way of doing subtraction and it worked for me, so I didn't think anything of it. So I'm up there teaching this, one of the kids raises their hand, says, "That's not the way we learned it in Seattle," and I said, "Oh, okay, come on up and show me how you learned it in Seattle." And then they show me how, they borrowed and I thought, oh, that makes good sense. [Laughs] But we used, like, I used my gardening for teaching math because we'd dig up a little plot in the front of the school and plant a few things. And then reading we just kind of gathered up books we could in the neighborhood, and it wasn't until we were, had been in school for about, I'd say a good three months before we started getting books, and we started getting books from California, the books that they had discontinued. And so we got something like five hundred fourth grade readers, but we didn't have need for five hundred fourth grade readers. We needed a lot of different readers. And then about that time we started getting certified teachers, so there was a teacher that came in, so she took my fourth grade and then I was asked to take the fourth grade down -- see, we had two elementary schools, Stafford and Huntsville -- and so they said, would I go down to Huntsville because the teacher down there was having a lot of trouble with this group of kids. I tell you, I walked in there and you wouldn't have believed it. They were throwing spitballs and everything, and I thought that's not gonna go with me. [Laughs] But the trouble was that was a very, very bright group of kids and she wasn't keeping them busy enough. And by that time we had enough books and so on, so that, but we were still on picnic benches, which was really hard on kids 'cause you can't put your feet down and you're, somebody's sitting right next to you, you poke 'em, and...

TI: So these were, like, in the mess halls or kind of modified mess hall type of places?

HL: No, they were, what they did is, they had barracks and the barracks were divided into...

TI: Apartments?

HL: Apartments. Like the middle ones were the biggest and the ones on the ends were small, but then you could divide it into three and get a pretty much, a even kind of a, and so that's where we were, in one of the modified barracks. And it wasn't until, oh, the following, let's see, fourth grade, then I taught sixth grade, and then I taught second grade. When I taught second grade we had tables and chairs, and it looked like school then.

TI: So it sounded like you got, you were almost like a substitute teacher, I mean, you had to fill in where needed, 'cause you got from fourth to sixth to second. Or was that kind of common for all teachers, they were kind of moved around?

HL: No, it was just, they kind of put me where they felt that I could do the best. And I just, like when I taught second grade I taught with George Tanabe's sister, Kim. Kim and I taught in the second grade together. We were co-teachers. We didn't, neither one of us knew too much about second grade. Like I said, only thing I knew about fourth grade was I was in fourth grade once. Only thing I knew about sixth grade, I was in sixth grade once.

TI: Did you ever get help from, you said certified teachers started, were also there.

HL: After, after things got settled we started having in-service training. Every week we'd have teachers' meetings and so you started getting more help.

TI: So it really is learning how to teach by fire. I mean, you're really just thrown in there and doing that.

HL: Oh yeah.

TI: What did you think about, when they brought in these outside teachers, Caucasians, that they were paid a lot more than you and the other teachers who were coming from the camp? Was that ever an issue?

HL: No. I mean, it, the thing is we accepted the fact that that was the way it was gonna be.

TI: And was there, like a division between, say, the white teachers and the Japanese teachers, or was it pretty much viewed as peers and professionalism, or peer professionals, or how did that go?

HL: Most of the teachers that came to camp were very dedicated people that were, they were willing to... they had to be willing to put up with a lot or else they wouldn't have come to a camp way, way out in the middle of nowhere. But we didn't really have any friction that I could, that I felt that we had. And it was, pretty much worked together the best we could.

TI: How would you say the education was for kids who went to school in camp?

HL: I think they got shortchanged. I really do.

TI: And why was that? Just because the, the lack of books and...

HL: The lack of books, lack of experiences and things. After all, they lived in a very circumscribed kind of environment.

TI: Did, and because of that, did you ever see any emotional issues or problems with kids?

HL: No. But some of the, one, one of the interesting things is some of the kids I had in fourth grade later on, when I was at the University of Illinois, they came up from Navy Pier and they were doing quite well, so I figure we must've done all right. [Laughs]

TI: I'm curious, when you had a classroom, there were some families who came from, from outside the Japanese American community and places like Seattle. They might have been from Alaska or something.

HL: Actually, Minidoka was made up primarily of people from Portland and Seattle, so we were a pretty homogenous group, so we didn't have the kind of stress that some of the other camps had.

TI: So because it was so dominant Seattle, Portland, then...

HL: It was just, you know. And then we knew people in Portland, Portland knew people in Seattle, so it was not, it was a Northwest group.

TI: So it wasn't, you didn't see the insider/outsider type of friction as much?

HL: No.

TI: Okay.

<End Segment 14> - Copyright © 2011 Densho. All Rights Reserved.