<Begin Segment 6>

TI: And then after that, where'd you go next?

LP: Well, you're talking about after I got out of the service?

TI: No, I'm sorry, still in the service. So you...

LP: Oh, okay. Well, when they had the riot at Tule Lake -- it wasn't really a riot, I don't know what the heck happened up there. Jim can tell you about that. They transferred us from Auburn to Tule Lake, stopped us... which I understand, I think I heard it from Jim, that they just did that to cause trouble because they were angry about what was going on and they just stirred up whatever, who knows? I don't know. But when I got there, there was nothing going on, it was over.

TI: Okay. Do you remember when they said, "Okay, you have to go to Tule Lake," what were you expecting? When you think about...

LP: Well, we thought there was a riot going on and we were gonna go up there to try to stop the riot. There was a riot, I kind of think it was like a controlled riot. And when we got there it was over. I'd never seen anything wrong up there. Everything... I pulled guard duty on those towers in the area and I never seen anything, nothing happened while I was there.

TI: And when you got there --

LP: But I didn't see Jim, but he was there.

TI: Yeah, Jim was there. When you got there, how much... what's the right word? How much interaction was there between the guards and the Japanese in the camps?

LP: Practically none. In fact, some of the Japanese girls used to come over to the towers where we're at to talk to us, and those guys tried to put a single wire fence about a hundred feet in so that they couldn't come and talk to us. I guess the military did it, I don't know.

TI: So why'd they do that?

LP: I still, to this day, I have no idea. There weren't, you know how that was, about getting the wrong information into the wrong hands. We were out there in the boonies, what information could we be doing? Those girls that we talked to were people we went to high school with. And so they'd come out there, they didn't have anything better to do either, and we'd visit with each other, or I was up on the tower and they were down on the ground. And then they stopped that when we left.

TI: So that's interesting. So did you actually someone that you went to school with or knew?

LP: I met one young fellow that I went to San Jose Tech with, and he lived in Berryessa. And I was pulling guard duty as they went to go on work details. And he went out, there was two lines, and he went out that line, and I called him and he looked back and he didn't recognize me because I was in a uniform and a helmet and he wasn't used to seeing me in that. And he kept right on going. I guess he figured, "What is he gonna do? What does he want me for?" especially knowing his name, you know. And then when I came back in I got him, then he realized. But I swore I was gonna go to Berryess and see him when I got out of the service, but guess what? Like everything else, never did get around to doing it. He's the only one I seen up there that I knew.

TI: And what was his reaction when he saw you?

LP: Surprised.

TI: And was it kind of like a happy kind of thing?

LP: Oh, sure, sure. We went to San Jose Tech together. I asked him how come he wasn't in the military, and he said something to do with his parents had control or whatever, I can't remember the whole deal. He was smart by staying out. I wished I could have did that. At least he isn't going to get shot at while he was there.

TI: I'm guessing that you were one of the few guards who actually knew Japanese Americans before the war.

LP: Definitely. There was a lot of them here in the Bay Area.

TI: Yeah, so you knew Japanese Americans.

LP: That's right.

TI: But the other guards, did they know...

LP: A lot of 'em didn't know. And they came from who knows in the United States, and sure, this war is on and they start hating people they don't even know. But we didn't do anything to 'em. There was control. There was control. We had officers and noncommissioned officers, they didn't abuse the people there. Life was not nice there, but they didn't, the military didn't abuse 'em. In fact, we had very little contact with 'em. We were pulling guard duty on the towers around the outside, so we didn't have contact with the people who were in there.

TI: Now were any of the guards surprised that you knew Japanese before the war, that you had this friend?

LP: You know what, I never heard anybody really talk about it. But yes, I did, I knew quite a lot of 'em. And I don't know, the people that I went to school with and so on were all good people, they were just hardworking and they were good to be with.

<End Segment 6> - Copyright &copy; 2012 Densho. All Rights Reserved.