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MN: And just so we can clarify it, you went to Poston, which camp were you in, Camp I, II or III?

RW: We were in Camp I.

MN: But your entire family didn't end up in Camp I.

RW: No. My sister was farming in San Diego and they all, one of my brothers and one of my sisters was living down there with her, so when they got evacuated they all went to Santa Anita first. In fact, my sister didn't go right away because she was expecting, so the doctor who was a friend of theirs told the government she shouldn't be traveling so she can't go. He kept her in San Diego, Chula Vista area, but then she finally went to Santa Anita and then I guess they were given a choice to go where their families were. I had another sister who was married and while in Santa Anita being from Los Angeles, they all said my family's in Poston, so they all came to Camp III. That was the closest we got to them was Camp III. And then I used to go there almost every weekend or, during the summer, no school, I would just go out hitchhiking and go down to Camp III and spend my days with my sister's family. I was telling somebody about that just the other day and they said, "What do you mean you went out of camp and hitchhiked? You could do that?" And I said yeah, we didn't have to get permits, just go walkin' out the front gate area and go on the main road, and there's trucks goin' back and forth taking food and stuff to different camps, and you were out there they'd pick you up and take you to wherever they were going. Or if you went to Camp II you could just catch another truck going to Camp III. It was pretty loose in Poston.

MN: And I guess for, just to clarify for people who don't know the layout, the different camps were not very close to each other.

RW: They were about three miles apart.

MN: So when you got to Poston, how did your family make your room livable?

RW: Well, my dad was, I guess, kind of ingenious in ways and made little pieces of furniture out of boxes or whatever wood he had, and then my mother hung sheets which kind of divided the beds with a sheet hanging, and the beds were pretty much right next to each other. Let's see, before my father passed away there was my mother, my father, and my brother Hank, my sister Helen, and myself, so there were five of us, and my brother Jack, but he became a fireman across the street, so he just stayed over there all the time, even if he wasn't on duty 'cause they had living quarters in the fire station. But there was five of us there with just sheets divided by the beds, when I think about it I don't know how we did that. I know some bigger families got two rooms, but we had five of us in that one room, it was livable. My dad made an air conditioner. It was a, just a box with wire and this thing, I don't know if you know what excelsior is, it's like a shredded material and that was between the wires, and they had water running down through that excelsior. Then they had a fan sucking air, so it was kind of moist, damp air, but it was cool. It was not a true air conditioner, but it was just a homemade fan drawing through dripping in water going down the sides, and it made a big difference.

MN: I've heard of people also sleeping outside because it's so hot inside.

RW: Oh yeah.

MN: Did your family do that?

RW: Well, our family didn't do that, but we did as kids we'd go and stay up all night or with a couple of my friends, we'd go where they had a big oil tank on a platform for the kitchen, the big fuel tank. We used to go up on that platform and sit up there and stay there all night when it was warm and hot. And about five o'clock in the morning we'd see people leaving the camp so we'd say, hey, let's go see who's going out, go over there and say, goodbye, bye. We didn't even know who they were, but there were people leaving the camp all the time, going back east. They could go east; they just couldn't go west.

MN: So I take it your mother wasn't worried about where you were?

RW: No. She never worried and it was the same in Redlands and the same in Poston. We stayed out all night, or we went camping with the Boy Scouts and stuff. It just, we'd just go in and she never seemed to be concerned. I guess she just had faith in us, in the fact that I was not doing anything bad or that nothing was gonna happen to me and she never worried about it.

<End Segment 14> - Copyright © 2011 Densho. All Rights Reserved.