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TI: When you got to Minidoka, tell me about what you saw there. Now were you, when you went to Minidoka was it to live or just to visit? That wasn't clear to me.

ES: No, we went there to live for a year, about a year. And then my husband decided it was just too much to just keep living in a place like that when there's a job offer to us in Indiana and different places that they could get a job. And so he decided to go to Indiana to work in a lead, steel factory, and that didn't work out too well because he eventually ended up with lead poisoning. And so I think he was there for about six months, and in the meantime I decided, well, I just didn't feel like staying in camp myself, but I had two children. So I said I think I can take a job with the farm labor camp as a nurse, and so, because there was an opening there and it was just for the season. I think there's sugar beets and potatoes. And so they took me and I got a babysitter, and part of the time my mother came out with me to be with my children while I worked, and I went to a different camp, like Rupert and I think there was Paul and Burley. I think there were three different camps that I had to take care of. Yeah, I had to give Rocky Mountain spotted fever and I think there were a couple of other shots that I had to give.

TI: Now how was it for you, so you were nurse inside camp and now a nurse in a farm labor camp outside, so you're not behind barbed wires now, what was the difference? I mean, was it...

ES: Well, they gave me a different salary. That was one of the reasons that I left. But I had to do my own washing on a scrub board and do my own cooking, had to buy groceries, so it wasn't that easy, but the farmers, the farm labor camp had a boss there and he would take me shopping for my groceries. It really wasn't that easy when you had to feed the three, two children and your babysitter, but it was better than being in camp. And then, but fortunately my husband was in Indiana and he had made a little bit of extra money, so he would send me the money and then I would save my check. That was in, let's see, '43? '44, yeah, that was in the summer of '44 and what was, VJ Day was '44, wasn't it?

TI: '45, August '45.

ES: August of '45. Okay, we were there on the farm in '44, then we were told that we could go back to our home in Portland.

TI: So before the war was over.

ES: Yes.

TI: Okay. Right.

ES: So we got back to Portland in 1945, October.

TI: Okay. So this is right after the war had ended.

ES: Yes, yes. But my folks had gone back earlier, a month or two earlier.

TI: Now why, why didn't they go back to Brooks in the Salem area? They went to Portland, why?

ES: The house had burned down, so there was no house to go back to.

TI: How did their house burn down?

ES: Well, I guess it was accidental. From, we didn't --

TI: But you looked a little skeptical when you said that.

ES: Because the people lived there, I heard later that, and so they lost everything too.

TI: Your parents, you mean? Or who did? I mean the people who were living --

ES: Living in the house.

TI: They were renting the house.

ES: Yes, they lived in my folks's house.

TI: And then the house burned down.

ES: And they had stored everything in the attic that was of value, and of course my mother had all these Japanese things that I really would've loved to have. And a lot of pictures, so there's no baby pictures of my brother or a lot of the family pictures, so they're all gone.

TI: But was the house, you said it was accidental, or was it under suspicious sort of circumstances?

ES: Well, we think it's accidental. Let's just think it's accidental, because they lived there too, the people who were running the farm. So the farm was completely gone, really, because they couldn't do too much farming.

TI: How about the forty acres that he bought under your brother's name before the war?

ES: Well, evidently they were still growing onion there. They didn't grow anymore celery or lettuce or anything like that because that took too much handwork and they just didn't have enough people to do that and they just didn't have the knowledge to do it.

<End Segment 22> - Copyright &copy; 2011 Densho. All Rights Reserved.