<Begin Segment 19>

MN: Okay, I wanted to ask you a little bit about your father now. What kind of job did he do?

RW: In camp?

MN: Uh-huh.

RW: Most of the time I guess he was working in the mess hall. I'm not sure whether he was cooking or dishwashing or whatever, but he was working in the mess hall. Until one day he fainted, and then that was the beginning of his problems.

MN: So how long was he in the camp hospital?

RW: I think it was after we were there about a year, that he got sick. And then he died in '44, so I think he must've been in the hospital at least a year. They brought him back to Los Angeles. I guess they found out he had leukemia, so they brought him to Los Angeles and they supposedly gave him a transfusion of blood, enough to replace all the blood in his body, and then he came back. They asked for donations of blood from all the people in the block who donated blood to replace that blood. He was doing fine. He came home, went back to work, but it wasn't very long and he got sick again, and then he went to the hospital and then he went into the ward, then he went to a two-person room, then he finally was in his room by himself, and that's when you knew he was seriously ill.

MN: When he came back from Los Angeles and he had the blood, blood transfusion, he was doing okay for a while, and he had asked you to go down to the river and bring some carp. What did he do with that?

RW: I was surprised because I didn't know why, but he did ask me to go to the river and catch some live carp and bring it back alive. So I went down there to catch these carp, 'cause there're big carp there and easy to catch. I bring it back in a bucket of water, kept it alive and brought it home and gave it to him. He took an ice pick or a knife or something, and he cut a hole in the top of the head and then he drank the blood. I would assume he thought that that would help, but that's what he did. He was drinking the blood out a live carp.

MN: But your father eventually had to go back into the hospital. Were you there when he, when your father passed away?

RW: I went to see him every day with my mother, every single day, and the last night he was on oxygen, but we had gone home. And then apparently he died during the night when we were back at our barrack.

MN: After your father passed away, what happened to his remains?

RW: He was cremated. They put the ashes in a marble box and then they gave it to us and we kept it in the barrack and then we brought it back to Redlands with us, and we had it in Redlands in our house for a long time. And then we finally, I think just before I went to Korea, I guess right after high school, we had him interred in the Evergreen Cemetery. We bought a plot for my mother. I know my, one of my sisters, the second oldest in the family and her husband are buried next to my mother and my father, even though my mother was still alive at the time. They're both there now with my sister and her husband.

MN: Now, when people got cremated in Poston, were they cremated at Parker?

RW: Well, I would have to assume so because I'm sure they didn't have a crematorium there in Poston. I, 'cause I knew pretty much what was in the camp, where everything was, 'cause we were always roaming around. I may be wrong, it might be somewhere we didn't go or we missed, but it's something that you don't just expect to find.

<End Segment 19> - Copyright © 2011 Densho. All Rights Reserved.