<Begin Segment 24>

MN: So when you first arrived at Poston there was a meeting at the mess hall. Is this where you picked your cooks?

RN: What?

MN: When you first arrived at Poston there was a big meeting in the mess hall.

RN: Yeah.

MN: Is this when you picked your cooks?

RN: I don't know exactly. We had a meeting, and they told us, says, well, we have to do our own cooking and everything so we need volunteers that can do something. They said, "If you don't pick somebody among your own group here, if you don't pick 'em, what they're gonna do is bring in people from the army, soldiers, and they're gonna do the cooking and everything." So it's better that we pick somebody here, all Japanese, instead of bringing in an outsider and let them do the cooking 'cause you don't know what to expect, naturally. So common sense says you better pick your own thing. Well, it turned out that among our group, the last group to, that was on the bus, there was, we had cooks there. They had small restaurants and they were, they came on the bus with us, so they volunteered to cook. They volunteered to cook for us and the other volunteers volunteered to help, naturally. So we were lucky. We got along real good. But there was, the food was so simple they had, you didn't need a cook. Anybody could cook it.

MN: What do you remember of the food?

RN: Well, I don't know. I don't remember what the hell we ate but all I remember is every morning we had boiled eggs. Each, we each had a boiled egg, I remember, bread, no toast. We had coffee. Then later on, say a couple months later, they began to ask what we wanted. We got rice, the kids got milk, I remember. But then for meat the only thing they fed us consistently was neck bones. Everybody said, "What is this?" They didn't ever hear of neck bones. They says these are spare ribs. No, they're not spare ribs. These are, they come from a, they're neck bones. 'Cause nobody every bought neck bones, so when they're living... and so anyway, we had bread, apple butter, no butter, just apple butter, no jam. Apple butter, period. Put that on everything. [Laughs]

MN: Did you work at Poston?

RN: I did some little work. I didn't do much. I didn't do much. Most of the younger ones, Poston I was made up of all farmers. Orange County, Imperial Valley, all, they're all farmers, and they did all the work. To them that was play. They operated the trucks, the tractors, everything they operated themselves. They'd just get on there and they start doin' things, you know? But us city people, Poston I, Block 45 was made up of all city people and we don't know a thing about things like that so we don't do nothin'. Work in the kitchen maybe.

<End Segment 24> - Copyright © 2011 Densho. All Rights Reserved.