<Begin Segment 17>

TI: Well, let's go to Rohwer for you, and what were some of your first impressions when you got to Arkansas, Rohwer?

FC: Rainy and muddy, and it just rained and rained and rained. We got there around Halloween, and the weather had just changed. Arkansas you have distinct seasons, so it had turned cool and rainy, and the school had just opened. We were the last train out of Santa Anita. My folks stayed to the very end, just, just psychologically wanting to be close to my sister. So we stayed, and this trainload of people were dropped off at various camps. They were all people who for some reason stayed to the very end, and we were the last ones off of this train and then arrived in Rohwer in end of October. And I think the first of November school opened for the first time, so I didn't miss out a lot of school because it started late, but as a result we were in school through almost, I think, through the month of July. And all that humidity, we're sitting in desks and you could feel the sweat rolling down. You'd get up and you stick to the desk because you're all wet with sweat.

TI: So not so much the heat but the humidity was really high.

FC: Yeah, there's no fan, no air conditioning 'cause one of, they took one of the regular blocks and converted it. And I had that one year in junior high school and then I went to the senior high, which is on another location.

TI: So you're about thirteen when you first...

FC: When the war, when we evacuated I was thirteen, yeah.

TI: Okay, and then when you're at Rohwer starting school it's probably around almost fourteen.

FC: Fourteen, fifteen, and sixteen.

TI: And tell me about school. How was the quality of the schooling?

FC: Well, we had some, we had some strange teachers. [Laughs] We had one woman in the ninth grade who was a product of Arkansas. She was a slow moving, large woman and she taught world history, and she would give us an assignment, we'd sit there and read out of the textbook, no discussion, just read. And she'd be there picking her teeth, filing her nails, and all the students had no respect for her, but she was our teacher. And then we had some Nisei teachers.

TI: But going back, so that was very different than what you got at Maryknoll?

FC: Oh yeah. Very much so. I tried to take Latin 'cause that's what I would have taken if I stayed in L.A. and the teacher, it was not this Arkansas teacher, I don't know where she came from, but she was, but she was teaching Latin from a historical point of view. She was talking about how the Romans celebrated Saturnalia and this pagan kind of stuff, which I, because I come from a more Catholic background, I found very offensive and couldn't relate to the way she was teaching, so I dropped Latin unfortunately. Took Spanish instead, which if I took it more seriously it would be helping me today. But anyway, at that point, my folks not knowing what was gonna happen to us, they were not saying you got to study hard and make As, you know? They couldn't push us not knowing what was gonna happen to us. They just wanted us to go to school and do the best we could, so not much was demanded of us by the teachers as well as my parents. And once I got into high school there were some pretty good teachers. We had some people who were like Christian ministers, and so they were a little bit more conscientious. There was an English teacher that was exceptional, but we also had teachers who transferred from the Bureau of Indian Affairs and they just never realized the Japanese students would be so studious, and they expected us to be like Native Americans and never quite understood that we were ready to be challenged. And so they didn't. They taught the classes way below our abilities. So we had a mixture, but there were, the people who were the American Service people, American Friends people, they were the best people all around. They were in administration, they were in schools, and they were, the men were doing it in lieu of army service.

TI: And so they were college educated and...

FC: Conscientious objectors and liberal and people with some kind of conviction about how life in the U.S. ought to be, so they were very, they were sympathetic and good teachers.

TI: Earlier we were chatting and you thought that after three years of high school, that the school in Rohwer was, like, the best high school in the whole state?

FC: [Laughs] That's what they told us, that in the three years that we existed, that academically we had the best academic record in the state of Arkansas.

TI: Do you recall taking standardized tests or anything like that?

FC: I don't, I think we did do some of it, yeah.

TI: Yeah, so there would be a way of testing that.

FC: Testing it.

TI: It'd be interesting to actually go back --

FC: And I know that we used to sing the Arkansas state song too.

TI: [Laughs] The razorbacks? I'm trying to think what, what...

FC: [Laughs] No, no, it wasn't that.

TI: No, that's, I guess that's the...

FC: It was some stupid state song that we used to sing every morning.

<End Segment 17> - Copyright © 2011 Densho. All Rights Reserved.