<Begin Segment 26>

MN: Now your family went into Poston Camp I around March 1942, when did your family leave camp?

RN: One year later. My family, when I say my family, my unmarried brother, me, and my mother, we left camp about a year, about ten months later. We left camp about, maybe March somewhere. That, we stayed in camp not quite a year. My younger sister, she and a friend of hers -- she met her friend there -- at our camp in the office they had a bulletin board, job listings. There was a job listing working for the Bureau of Indian Affairs in Chicago, for office workers, so my younger sister and, she met her friend, another, somebody she met, they were reading the same thing and they went together. They got together and said, "Let's go and apply for this office work." So I don't know how they got it, whether they were, I don't know, but they just took off and went, the two of them, to work at this office. They must've had some kind of an employment agency at the camp, otherwise they wouldn't have gone. But they got settled in a place in Chicago and then after they got settled my mother, my brother, and me went, joined them in Chicago. My two married sisters, they stayed behind, and they went their own way, different places.

MN: When you got to Chicago, was it hard to find a job?

RN: You could get a job anywhere. There were signs all over. Labor was scarce. My brother went lookin' for a job, I went, we stayed at the YMCA. That was the cheapest and that's where all the guys from the camps came to stay. And over there you'd meet people from other camps and you'd talk to them and they'd tell, I work over there, or, I work over there. But jobs were so easy to find. Anybody would hire you. You could quit one job, knock on a door in another place and they'd hire you. A lot of them, first thing they did was they went to work for the Drake Hotel, which was down the street, and they would hire you doing something. But working was no problem.

MN: Did you encounter any discrimination in Chicago?

RN: Not a bit.

<End Segment 26> - Copyright © 2011 Densho. All Rights Reserved.