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MN: Today is Tuesday, August 23, 2011. We are at the Centenary United Methodist Church. We will be interviewing Robert Wada, and Tani Ikeda is on the video camera, and I will be interviewing; I'm Martha Nakagawa. Bob, before we get into your Korean War experience I wanted to go back and ask you about Poston, and Poston had these double roofs. Why did they have these double roofs?

RW: Well, they were put on there to put a little buffer between the main roof to hold off the heat because in Poston, Arizona, in the summertime it's hundred degree plus weather, and that would kind of buffer the heat before it hit the main roof. If it hit that and they didn't have that double roof, the sun was hitting just a layer of pinewood and black tar paper, it would be an oven inside those rooms. So that really helped buffer some of the heat.

MN: So you're telling me Poston gets very hot; how did you folks keep cool?

RW: Hot and cold in the winter.

MN: How did you keep cool? How did you keep the barrack cool?

RW: Well, the ingenuity of the Isseis. Most of them built little water vaporizing air conditioners. It was a fan and it was a large box on the outside of the barrack, and they had wire going down the sides of the box instead of a closed box and in between the wire they had excelsior, and then they had little troughs of water above on top of the box and water would drip down through that excelsior and they had a fan blowing air through those dripping excelsior into the room. So it really helped cool the room, but it also made the room very damp because it was drawing in moist air from the outside.

MN: Now, Poston also had these severe dust storms. Were you ever caught in one?

RW: Yeah, you're always caught in a dust storm, but you're kind of forewarned because if you looked off to the east you would see these large, large, looked like big, giant cotton coming towards you. So then people would say, "Oh, here comes a dust storm," and sure enough, in a matter of an hour or so, depends on how far away it was, you'd have just a solid dust storm and it became almost like a fog, a dense fog. You wouldn't even hardly see the barrack next to you. It was a very dense fog and very dusty, and of course what we did was put some kind of material in the door cracks and windows just to try to keep the dust from coming in, but it still came in. And I did get caught in one dust storm on the way home with my mother and I and a neighbor lady. I was visiting my father at the hospital and as we were coming back, and of course we had our little dog with us too, as we were coming back a dust storm hit real hard, very strong. The wind was really, really horrible, so it got so bad that we kind of hid behind, or got behind this little canteen building that was a small building. As we just got there, lumber came flying over, bouncing on the little building, and I thought, wow, where's that coming from? And then I looked at our block, at our barrack, and all of a sudden I saw what I thought it was the entire barrack being lifted up and thrown up with the wind, but it turned out to be that upper of the double roof. The wind was so strong it was ripping that upper roof right off and it's blowing it up in the air, and it looked like the whole barrack was going, but it was just that double roof.

MN: So these are very severe, almost like Dorothy in the Wizard of Oz kind of a storm.

RW: Yeah, they were very strong winds, and it'd have to be to lift those double roofs off like that. Yeah.

MN: Anything else about Poston you want to, you want to share with us, or experience there?

RW: Well, goes off with a little humor, I guess. One of the things about going to school is we weren't really that keen on going to school or learning, most of the boys. The girls were different. They were more intuned to studying and being good students. But we would ditch classes and we used to ditch class sometimes where we had classes off near the edge of the camp, we'd go off into the sand dunes and hide behind the sand dunes, wait 'til a couple came by, throw rocks at 'em and then run. I don't know, if somebody reads this they might be one of the people that got rocks thrown at 'em. [Laughs]

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