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MN: About how long were you in Fruitland, Idaho, before you went to Utah?

MU: There again is when we went to Utah, school had begun already. And I'm thinking school usually began in September. Because I was new to the class I was... it was not the first day of school so that's the reason she would say, "We have a new student in our class," and that would be my sophomore year. So that's when we had moved, I don't know what month we moved but we started school after school began so I would surmise it would be September.

MN: Now why did your family move to Utah?

MU: My brother who was with us at that time was the oldest, my brother below him had gone out to Nebraska and I don't exactly remember if he had been in the service at that time. The reason for our going to Tooele Ordnance Depot was my mother's idea and I'm sure my brother's idea. We had property in the country. My mother needs someone to run the estate there, a ranch, she did not want my brother, Howard, to go into the service and to lose him. So we had heard the Tooele Ordnance Depot is where they had... we used to call it an ammunition dump where they stored, made, I'm not too sure, but that's where the ammunition was. If you lived there in the Ordnance Depot area and worked there, you were deferred from being in the army six months at a time. And so some of the Nisei families had done that, we were not the only one, because we made friends there. And so they had applied for that and so that's why we moved out to Utah. There is a town called Tooele but it's in that area Tooele Ordnance Depot and that's where we moved to. And we must have moved in September because my mother would not keep us out of school any longer than she had to because education is the foremost important thing for us, is how she felt, for us to have. And so we started after the initial opening of the school year, so it must have been in September, and I was then a sophomore equivalent to the tenth grade. So I spent time there until the war ended.

MN: Now did you live on the Tooele Ordnance Depot site?

MU: Yes.

MN: What was that like?

MU: They were not barracks, they're each unit... there were about three in one building, three units. Our unit had three bedrooms, a kitchen, a little area for a dining/living room area and then it had a shower, I don't remember a tub and a commode of course, the restroom. That was our unit. My brother and his wife were in one, my mother and I were in the other, and my brother was in the other. But you can understand all the bedrooms, especially my mother and my bedroom and my brother's bedroom especially as storage. We had no basement, no garage, and so that everything that we had in Idaho had to come, we had a truck, my brother had truck, so the truck was loaded with our worldly goods at that time from Fruitland, Idaho, to the Tooele Ordnance Depot.

<End Segment 15> - Copyright © 2011 Densho. All Rights Reserved.