<Begin Segment 25>

MN: So you arrived in Poston just as it was getting really hot. How did you keep cool in the summer?

RN: Well, you can't keep cool. All you do, when it's cool in the morning, in the morning all you do is sit outside or stand outside this side of the building, and the sun goes, twelve o'clock, this way, we go on this side of the building to stay in the shade. And somehow, once in a while somebody would bring a, two buckets of ice water from somewhere and we had ice water there, but as a rule it was always warm water, to drink. So you just, you just can't stay cool, go from one end of the, one side of the building to the other.

MN: You said one of the, your friends from Seattle got pretty ambitious and he dug a hole?

RN: I had one guy from Seattle and he was, he was the laziest guy. Well, he wouldn't do no kind of work, except he built a hole in the ground to cool off. Yeah, he, I said, "What the hell you doin' there?" And the guy, he dug a hole down there to stand in to keep cool, so we all took turns. [Laughs] Some people, they improvised. They had windows there, they improvised, they got gunnysacks somewhere and they wet it all the time. They had a bucket of water, they would dip it in that bucket of water and hang it up in the window, and the breeze comin' through was kind of cool. That was temporary. But that guy that made the hole in the ground, lazy as he was, he kept cool.

MN: What about at night? Did you sleep inside or did you sleep outside?

RN: We slept inside because somebody, other people, they built a platform outside their door to sleep outside. They built a platform. I don't know, they got the wood somehow and they slept outside. Us guys, we always slept inside on our hot, hot steel cots. There weren't, they weren't beds, they were those steel cots, and it's hot and by that time we still had those straw mattresses and you'd sleep on them 'cause they were, they weren't hot. They were just, just room temperature.

MN: Now, once it got into the wintertime the desert gets really cold.

RN: Well, it was cold, and they put, they had a stove in our place, but we never, they never passed out the chimneys, so we all had stove, but you can't burn nothin', there's nothin' to burn and there's no chimney so what the hell's the use of having a stove? The stove was just sittin' there all the time. So we didn't care because it was cold but it was dry, no rain or anything. So we just put on our, whatever you're wearing, and it wasn't that, real that cold.

MN: What did --

RN: 'Course the, if you had kids or something it's entirely different, but all the Japanese, they all, they all improvised. Because practically, practically all the families living at Poston, outside of our block, they're all farmers, they were all farmers from everywhere, so they know how to live in those, it was just like living on a farm maybe. [Laughs] They know what to do. The city guys are the ones that are always crabbing and complaining, you know.

MN: What did you do for recreation?

RN: Nothing. All we did was play poker. In our bunkhouse -- it was too hot to go outside -- we'd play poker. We had loose change in our pockets, we'd play, well, nickels and dimes, quarters. That's all we used to do, play poker. [Laughs]

<End Segment 25> - Copyright © 2011 Densho. All Rights Reserved.