<Begin Segment 18>
TI: But here's another story about after you got married, that outside your apartment there was a tree. Tell me about the tree story.
JH: Naturally, you live in a camp that long you get friends, and one day this young fellow that worked in the farm project... at that time they had, gee, no escort, no nothing, they could run around anyplace. Well, they went to the river, they pulled up a sapling out of the mud. "John, you want a tree?" I says, "Yeah, I'll take one." So I plant, I planted it. And buckets of water, keeping it alive and so forth and so on, and by golly, it survived.
TI: Well, not only it survived, but to this day it survived.
JH: Yeah, I saw it last year.
TI: And when you tell people that that was your tree, what do they say?
JH: Number one, they challenge it because, then I tell them it's an inverted wishbone. Then there's no argument there. And this is another story, but the secretary of the Heart Mountain, Wyoming Foundation, she called it the Honeymoon Tree. And when I was in camp last year some people start asking, "Where's the Honeymoon Tree?" [Laughs] I don't know if you want to keep this on the record or not, but the Wyoming board that worked from 1994 'til 2010, all their hard work, they got pushed off by the new board.
TI: So there's a change in the board.
JH: They weren't even invited to the grand opening. Didn't give 'em credit for nothing.
TI: And how did that make you feel, that they weren't there?
JH: Man, I thought that was really chicken shit. And as soon as I came back, I wrote all five of them. One told me that they got pushed off, not politely, just pushed off.
TI: And what did you think about that, when you heard that, that they got pushed off?
JH: I didn't hear it. I read it.
TI: Yeah, but after you read it, what did you think?
JH: Well, I'm on a crusade telling everybody I know that they got pushed off. That's a dirty pool. Call it what you want. Man.
TI: You went to the grand opening. What did you think of the grand opening and what was created, the interpretive center and the reunion and all that?
JH: Well, the Wyoming board asked if we had any furniture that we had saved, and for some reason we saved the vanity and the chest of drawers, and I shipped it by truck and it was on display. And then a chair that I made, it was on display. That's all I went to (see). I didn't even register the register. But it's a shame.
TI: Yeah, 'cause I know they put a lot of work into the Heart Mountain -- you're talking about, like, Dave and Pat, I think, were two of them. Dave Reetz and Pat were on, the board members you're talking about.
JH: You're mentioning names, not me.
TI: Okay. [Laughs]
<End Segment 18> - Copyright © 2012 Densho. All Rights Reserved.