<Begin Segment 12>

MN: And then after that what kind of jobs did you get?

LW: Another job was the person heading up the recreation department. One of our camp residents asked if I would be a scoutmaster for the Scouts that they were organizing, and since I had that brief experience in Reedley I said, "Okay, I'll work for the, yeah, I'll take care of the Scouts," so I had that job for, oh, maybe two or three months.

MN: And then what job did you take on?

LW: The job was working in the, what they called at that time the social service department. These were, they were monitoring, providing services for families that have specific needs other than just being mobile and being able to take care of themselves. There were some families that had special needs, so the social service department had, was taking care of that department. So I said, when the head of the social service department asked if I'd be interested in working there, I said, "Sure, I'll do that, I'll be glad to work there."

MN: Now, you were also very active in athletics and you played on the Poston all-star baseball team.

LW: Yeah, that came a little later, after, when we got into softball and baseball. The Poston III decided to put together an all-star team because there was a team coming from another camp, so we organized, they asked me to play on that team, and the game we had was with a baseball team from Amache, Colorado. I was surprised to, well, I was, I enjoyed being on the all-star team, but I was also surprised that another baseball team from another camp was able to travel all the way from Colorado to Arizona, so it was a nice event for us. At the same time, I wondered why Poston couldn't get a, have the privilege of traveling, the Poston baseball team wasn't able to travel like the Amache team was.

MN: So were you folks able to go outside of camp and visit another camp?

LW: No. We stayed put and made the best of living in the camp.

MN: So you folks called yourselves the all-star team, so did you play with the other, like against Camp I and Camp II?

LW: That was one baseball game I remember that we played. All of our other games were softball and we, the softball teams in Camp III were organized pretty much around blocks. You had blocks of barracks, and we had about, maybe six or seven different blocks of barracks, so the softball team, we had, like an intramural softball league made up of teams from various camps, I mean, various blocks. I don't think we ever played another team from the other camp. It was pretty much confined to Camp III.

MN: Now what position did you play on the softball and the baseball team?

LW: I played shortstop. That's always been my, my position. We also, way back, just before we evacuated from Reedley, we also had, I think the JACL formed a baseball team, so we had a baseball, Reedley JACL baseball team that had a baseball league among other Japanese American communities in Central Valley, so that was my experience before camp and then during camp of both baseball and softball.

MN: And so, since most of those people ended up in the same camp, did you folks, basically was it the same league from before the war that you were playing with, the same people?

LW: No, we were quite mixed. There were different people. Reedley was pretty much Reedley people, but by the time we got to the camp, since it was organized around the block system, we were all mixed, mixed from various communities. We didn't, we didn't pay too much attention to, "What community did you live in?" or community. We were all Camp III residents.

<End Segment 12> - Copyright © 2011 Densho. All Rights Reserved.