<Begin Segment 15>

MN: Now, your family, do you remember what day or month you left to go into camp?

BT: It was in May, middle of May.

MN: And which assembly center were you supposed to report to?

BT: Fresno Assembly Center. It was the Fresno County Fairgrounds.

MN: What was your reaction to seeing the soldiers there?

BT: The soldiers? I had no reaction to anything.

MN: Now, you're entering this, I mean, just a few months earlier it was the Fresno County Fairgrounds, you won first places in the model airplane contest, and now it 's a different circumstance.

BT: Yeah.

MN: How did you feel about going in there now?

BT: It's funny, but I didn't have too much negative feeling one way or the other, you know. But when you're in camp, then you see all your buddies there. It's, that, I think, made it easier. Yeah, 'cause...

MN: What was your new address?

BT: The what?

MN: Your new address.

BT: What was it? We, I know we were in Block I. I don't remember now. I think it's, I, Block I, Barrack 8. Barrack 8, yeah, and then unit one, I think.

MN: What were your living conditions like at Fresno?

BT: Assembly center?

MN: Uh-huh.

BT: It was, it was pretty bad, because the barrack, it was, they knew it was just a temporary barrack, so they didn't put much thought into it. We didn't have any flooring. The barracks was built right on top of the asphalt, and so that was our flooring. And then the wall that separated the units, they used cheap lumber, so there was cracks all over the place and there were knotholes, and the lumber didn't go all the way up to the roof. It stopped at the ceiling level, and there was no ceiling in there, so it was, it was just a big gap at the top. And then the, with all the cracks, cracks and knotholes, we used to take newspaper or toilet paper and plug up all these. But, well, you cut out the peeking, peeking holes, but you still, there was no privacy because you can hear everything. So it was kind of, that was a downer.

MN: Now, you mentioned that the flooring was just asphalt. What happened when it was really hot during the summer?

BT: Oh boy, that smell was terrible. Yeah. And especially if you dropped water on the hot asphalt, it smelled that much worse. And then our, the legs on our bed would sink into the asphalt, so it was... when we moved to Jerome it was like going to a five star place, compared to the assembly center.

MN: What did you use for a mattress?

BT: They would give us a big sack, like a, canvas like, and then we had to go out in the field and fill it up with hay, and that was our mattress. It was really uncomfortable. I think the straw, just poking. But eventually, as you rolled around in it, after a couple of months it squashed down, it wasn't too bad. But then we had to go back out in the field and dump the old straw out and put new straw in, and so we start all over again.

MN: You know, some people started to get allergies from the hay and the straw. Did you have that problem?

BT: Well, I don't know if that started it or not, but I developed hay fever moving into Jerome. But then, Fresno Assembly Center, it didn't affect me.

MN: How many people lived in your unit, your little unit?

BT: In the Fresno Assembly Center my whole family was in one unit. So there were, let's see, well, there was, my sister was married and she had a daughter, so that's three, and my other sister, that's four, and then three of us, seven, eight people.

MN: Sounds like it was pretty crowded.

BT: Well, it was crowded in a way. In a, but then, we didn't have any furniture in there, you know. It was just the beds.

MN: What was the food like at Fresno Assembly Center?

BT: The food was okay. A lot of people complained about the food, but it, if you're used to having ham and eggs every morning and steak in the evening, then you would complain. But that's, that's one time it was good to be poor. You didn't know this luxury stuff, so whatever they gave us, it was good.

MN: Now, down here in Santa Anita Assembly Center, they ate their foods off of these tin plates with partitions. What kind of plates did you get at Fresno?

BT: If I remember correctly, we got, we had regular dishes.

MN: You mean like one big dish?

BT: Everything would be piled onto one, I don't know, I guess it was about a ten or eleven inch dish, yeah.

MN: Now, can you share with us why you're confined at the Fresno Assembly Center, but then across the street there's Japanese Americans working out there?

BT: Yeah. Well, they were actually in the white zone. They were in this little farming town like Sanger. They were in the white zone, so they didn't have to go in at the beginning. But after the army had us settled down, they pulled everybody in, in California anyway.

MN: So these people, farmers, living in the white zone, could they come and visit the Fresno Assembly Center?

BT: They could not approach the camp site on the side, but they could come into the visitor center. Yeah, that's the only way they were able to.

<End Segment 15> - Copyright © 2012 Densho. All Rights Reserved.