<Begin Segment 11>

BF: Unless Tracy wanted to ask some questions, I wanted to sort of skip ahead to kind of the time, going a big jump in time to your getting involved with JACL and then redress.

TL: Maybe we could ask one question about how the camps affected, for example, like your health and kind of, well, education, other parts of your life. Could you talk a little bit about that?

CK: What effect the camps had? When you mentioned health, actually that Idaho weather was very good. I had allergies and whatever, and health-wise -- except that I did have some hospital stays there -- the effect of camp in the long range afterwards, was the fact that it totally interrupted my going to any college for years. Then it was, after that, getting married and raising a family and trying to survive and having to work and so forth. So if it hadn't been for camp, I think I would have then gone on to the university and that would have changed my so-called career. I didn't have a career. It was just merely jobs to, to earn a salary. So, that's where I feel it affected me most, is that it determined my later way of life and how I earned a living.

BF: Now you said after you left camp, you went to, you went back East.

CK: Yeah, I went to Minneapolis, the Midwest.

BF: Midwest, right, East to me. [Laughs] How hard was it to sort of resume a normal life?

CK: Well, we all went out -- that was another frustration. I tried to go to a college or university and I had applied for help to the National Student Relocation and the letter I got back from them said that, "(With) your transcripts and your record, you should qualify for the top level of Smith or Vassar." That was it. In the first place, I didn't want to go to any school like that. I wanted to go to just a plain, ordinary university where I could get some help. And, because we had nothing, no funds or whatever, so it depended on a scholarship and a place to live and so forth. But that was it and there was no, you know, getting me in touch with anybody or anything like that. So I was a little disappointed in the help that I had. And I never did find the help that some people got. They were given a specific school that they could go to, like the Friends University and all. That was, I have a friend who went there. And so some people were able to continue their education, but what was the question now?

BF: Oh, resuming normal life after camp?

CK: Oh, yes. So the only way I could leave was to have some kind of a place to stay. And the reason I went to Minneapolis is my older brother, who was already in the service, was at Fort Snelling, because the MI, Military Intelligence. And then my brother next to me had gone out to Chicago to work and then from there was drafted and he was at Snelling. So with the two of them there, I thought, you know, at least you need some kind of contact or whatever, so I went to Minneapolis and started out working in a home as a place to stay. And I think I was there about a little over a year and I kept trying to go to school. And so I ended up with a job at the University of Minnesota in the A.S.T.P. program, that was the army training. And then I was able to take a class or two. I still didn't have enough money to go full-time. So in that way, it was fairly easy to adjust because there were the contacts you make through that. And then I called my parents out to Minneapolis because the camps were getting ready to close. So we were there about three years until eventually, as I said, when I came back and stayed in Corvallis until my husband graduated and then we went to Seattle and from there in Seattle, we called our folks out back to Seattle. So we ended up sort of full circle in terms of getting back to our home.

<End Segment 11> - Copyright © 1997 Densho. All Rights Reserved.