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MN: Do you remember what month you left Santa Anita for Heart Mountain?

BS: I believe it was all, let's see... August or September? August probably. August 1942.

MN: So from a child's perspective you're very young. What did you think about this train ride?

BS: Well, that was sort of exciting. I never rode a train before, and we got to ride on a train. And at that time I didn't know it, but my mother and I think my younger sister got to ride a Pullman car. Pullman car has a sleeping facilities, and she was pregnant at that time, so I guess that's the reason she got to ride that. Whereas we had to ride a coach car. And then it was unfair because we had to pull our window shades down. I was hoping an exciting trip, and we didn't get to see the outside.

MN: Do you remember how many days that ride was?

BS: I don't know, I think no more than two days, I'm not sure.

MN: Did you get any motion sickness?

BS: No, I didn't.

MN: So did the train go straight from Santa Anita and straight to... when it got to Wyoming, did it stop in front of Heart Mountain or did you have to get off and get on a bus to get into Heart Mountain?

BS: No, we got off right there, and we got on trucks, army trucks. So we called them two and a half ton trucks. So we just climbed the board there and just stood on the back of the truck, that was our means of transportation at camp life.

MN: So what was your first impression of Heart Mountain?

BS: Again I thought, wow, big place in the middle of nowhere. There's nothing around us, but the camp again is all black barracks. I thought, wow, we got to live there? That's all I saw. But the mountain looks beautiful over there, I think there was snow on that at that time in August. I don't really recall that. But after a while, our first Christmas, we had a white Christmas, so I remember that.

MN: I think that was one of the coldest Christmas and winter in Wyoming history, isn't it?

BS: Yes, it was minus twenty-eight degrees that time.

MN: How do you live in that kind of condition?

BS: Well, it was, again, it was sort of exciting because I never lived in snow or even see snow fall. Exciting, but yet it got cold. But we're always trying to find enough snow to make a snowball or knock off the icicles off the rooftops. So those were adventures, something different, something new.

MN: Do you remember your address at Heart Mountain?

BS: Yes. We lived in Block 28, Barrack 14, Unit B. That's where we lived, six of us.

MN: At first you lived there and then you moved, right?

BS: Yes. So my kid brother was born in December of '42, so then we had seven so it was a little bit crowded, so we were able to get a total of two units, so we moved to Barrack 18, Units E and F.

<End Segment 10> - Copyright © 2012 Densho. All Rights Reserved.