<Begin Segment 12>

TI: Going back to the Portland Assembly Center, any other events or memories before we move to Minidoka?

FM: Yeah. I got a job, I was sixteen. I don't know whether that made me eligible to get a job, but I think about sixteen was when I, the age that they started hiring people. I became, I was a busboy in the dining room. They had one large dining room, there were about 3,500 people there, I think. And they fed them in two shifts. And in order to do that, of course, the dining room had to feed about half of them, fifteen to seventeen hundred people in a very short period of time. I think we had about three hours... maybe not that much, maybe more like two hours to feed the 3,500 people. And so they had this, a whole bunch of picnic table-type tables, and each table had a... (...) waitress, and we would bring the, say, the dishes out from the kitchen, and they would set it up, and then we would bring the food out. And the food was placed on the plates before a bugle was blown to call the people in to eat. And, of course, there was not a whole heck of a lot of things to do, so by, say by eight o'clock in the morning, the whole perimeter of the dining room was just lined with people waiting to come to eat. And there was a group that ate the first shift, and then another group that ate the second shift. But when that bugle was blown, people just kind of rushed in, and about forty-five minutes later, they were through and out and gone. And we then had to bus the dirty dishes back. (...) The next meal was placed on the table, and within a total of about three hours from start to finish, we fed 3,500 people.

TI: That's an interesting process. I always thought of the meals being more cafeteria-style, and people had their trays, go through, and then they'd sit down. But I guess this would be, I guess...

FM: Quicker.

TI: Quicker. Because otherwise, if you had a lineup of 1,700 people, that would have taken...

FM: That would have taken four or five hours on its own, huh?

TI: Yeah, so you had to, like, get the food out there. The problem being it would get cold, though, the food.

FM: Yeah. And so we had a few hours... we fed 'em three meals, breakfast, lunch and dinner. The food wasn't all that good, but we still had to feed 'em. So in between time, we had a little bit of time, but we worked nine hours, eight, nine hours a day every day that we were there working. And that day, we had to feed 'em every day that we were there.

TI: And so did you work seven days a week every day?

FM: Yeah, we worked seven days a week. (...) Fortunately we weren't there that long, totally. We were only there from May 'til about September when we had to leave.

TI: Now, do you remember how much you got paid to do that?

FM: Yeah, nine dollars a month. Nine dollars a month we were paid to do that. I don't know, I think that was probably not a professional job, hardly.

TI: Well, nine dollars a month, that works out to, like, thirty cents a day.

FM: [Laughs] Yeah, we didn't get too many. We had a canteen there, after a while a canteen was established to... I don't know what we bought, ice cream and things like that, things to eat.

TI: Now, why did you do this job? I mean, most teenagers, sixteen, rather than making thirty cents a day would rather do something else.

FM: Well, I felt that I had to keep busy, and I did. I wanted to be busy. We had a recreational program that involved baseball and a few things like that. But pretty much, it was just a drag not to do anything. I didn't do it right away initially, but it was kind of tough to sit and do nothing all day long. I just felt that I had to be doing something. I had... let me tell you a story. There was a contingent of people from the Washington... initially, the people that got there were all Oregon people. Not only Portland, but surrounding cities and so forth. We also had a contingent of people from the Yakima, Washington, area, Toppenish, Wapato, and that area there. And about the time I got the job in the dining room, a couple of the guys that worked with me were from there. Mas Jio and Kay Iko, and a couple other guys.

<End Segment 12> - Copyright © 2015 Densho. All Rights Reserved.