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TI: Okay, so let's go to Santa Anita. So your pregnant mother and you and your brothers and your father finally make it to Santa Anita in a truck because the measles you had to wait, you're quarantined and finally you get there. So tell me your impressions of Santa Anita.

RO: Oh, fences, searchlights, when we arrived by the time because we were delayed for two weeks, by the time we arrived there the barrack which is originally set up for I think four quarters, I mean, you know, by the time we arrived, the fourth, one of the apartments as they were called was split again, yet again so we just had enough room for the bed, for four beds like this and enough of an aisle for me to walk all the way to the end. Because I was the girl and I had to go way to the end right by a window with no curtains and the searchlight was right over there and every night the searchlight would come all night long, hit my face and of course 'cause we had no curtains it was like, it was hard to go to sleep. And later on I wrote a poem about "searchlights robbed blackness from my night." I wrote a poem about that years later. Anyway we were there from May 1st to August 28th. And my brother was born in August two weeks before they put us on a train. So let's see, May, June, July, so my mother was five months pregnant then when we left San Diego and she gave birth to Dan at the Santa Anita... I call it he was born in a horse stable. And he says, "All great men are born in horse stables." In stables, he didn't use the word horse.

TI: That's funny.

RO: So two weeks after he was born, they put us on a train to Poston. It was very hard on my mother, I mean, she was forty-two years old, she had just given birth and it was a hard delivery. And the one thing I remember when word came back that I had another brother, I was waiting for a sister not a brother so I was so upset I ran away from home. Of course running away from home is running along the fence and just circling around Santa Anita and I was crying 'cause I didn't have a sister. Anyway, of course my dear brother I love him dearly. He was supposed to be Danielle, not Daniel.

TI: That's funny.

<End Segment 9> - Copyright © 2011 Densho. All Rights Reserved.