<Begin Segment 15>

TI: And then that's when you eventually went back to Drake?

FM: Yeah, I went back. And then the following year in '47, when George and my dad decided that they would begin a grocery business in Portland (...). I think it was about six months or so before they got things going. But in the meanwhile, Marge's folks... well, they lived in Milwaukie, (...) they went back to the house that they lived in, actually. And Marge came back on a (...) leave from the nurse's training from Iowa, and we, on very short notice, decided to get married there with the parents there and the family there.

TI: Oh, so it just happened to work out timing-wise that you had returned and she was on leave, the families were all there.

FM: Right. And I knew that I was going to go back to Drake at least (...) for a while.

TI: And she was still going to school in...

FM: In Des Moines.

TI: Des Moines.

FM: Yeah, so she had not finished her nurse's training. So she went back and I went back.

TI: But at that point you returned as a married couple, though?

FM: (...) But she went back alone, because I still had (...) work to help George and Pop get the grocery store business going. And I stayed back 'til sometime in September probably.

TI: Okay, and then you then returned.

FM: I returned to Drake for another year. Drake is a liberal arts college, and I was taking an engineering course. (...) When she graduated as an RN, we moved up to Ames, Iowa, where Iowa State University is. Kind of like Washington State.

TI: University of Washington, or Washington State. And this is where you got your engineering degree?

FM: Yeah, I finally got my engineering degree. I'm a mechanical engineer.

TI: During this time, 1940, when you're going to school in Iowa, back in Oregon, Portland, there was the Vanport Flood?

FM: Yeah.

TI: And I think you told me earlier that that's where the store was located.

FM: Well, the store was located in Portland, but they were living in Vanport.

TI: Okay, they were living in Vanport.

FM: Living in Vanport. When they had the flood, they lost everything, and all of my stuff, the few things that I had gathered between Minidoka and that time, (...) the majority of it was my military uniforms and stuff like that, the few things that I had gathered. And that was all lost then. (It) just quickened their getting their own house. They were there in Vanport and it got flooded out, so they bought a house someplace near where their grocery store was.

TI: So you mentioned you lost everything that you accumulated between Minidoka up to that point, the Vanport flood at the house. How about the belongings before the war? Were there some things there that were, what happened to those things?

FM: Well, the stuff before the war, again, being a poor family, we didn't have a whole lot. But you still have household goods, and our household goods at the time we moved into Portland Assembly Center was placed in an upstairs of a barn that... a friend of ours had (...). He rented the whole farm to some guy, and about six months later, Ed ceased to get his rent money. And not only our stuff was in the upstairs of this barn, but probably maybe another six or eight other families had their stuff placed there. And when Ed had it investigated, everything that was in the upstairs of this barn was all gone. And so when we left Portland (...), whatever we had accumulated was gone. (...) When the family moved into Portland Assembly Center and subsequently Minidoka, we had the stuff that we carried in our suitcases, and that's all we had. And so the household goods were all gone.

TI: And what would those things be? What were some of the things...

FM: Oh, dishes, a few things like that. Clothing, extra clothing. We didn't have any Japanese goods left by then because we were one of the families, (...) that destroyed Japanese (items), I remember doing that.

TI: Oh, so destroying documents?

FM: Destroying documents, pictures. We did kendo when we were there and living in Portland, and I remember burning that kind of stuff. A lot of kendo stuff, a lot of it was metal. And not only it burned, but we had to dig deep holes to get rid of that. (...) Kendo has the swords were (that) split bamboo. We had a bundle of swords, I would imagine they were that big, we must have had fifty of them. And they burned pretty well, though.

TI: So I'm curious, why... and maybe my timing's off a little bit, but after the bombing of Pearl Harbor, the next day, you had those...

FM: People coming?

TI: ...soldiers, yeah, coming, and they kind of checked everything out. Did you burn the stuff after that?

FM: Oh, it was after that. Within probably that week maybe.

TI: But why did you feel a need to do that? Because the soldiers probably already saw that stuff.

FM: Yeah, well, I don't know whether it was the FBI, but there were some civilian people there too.

TI: But I would think that you would have thought, well, they checked it out, and that stuff must be okay?

FM: Yeah... no, Dad didn't think that, I guess, unfortunately. Because I know that we burned a whole lot of stuff. Pictures...

TI: Yeah, so probably your connections Japan.

FM: Yeah, all the connections.

TI: Things that would you help you learn more about your family and things like that.

FM: We burned a lot, we just destroyed that sort of thing, the connection that we had with Japan. Like you say, maybe we should have been a little bit more understanding and kept 'em, it would have been nice. But on the other hand...

TI: You would have lost all the stuff anyway.

FM: We would have lost all that anyhow.

TI: That's true, you would have lost it all anyway. So that would, in some ways, may have been even more painful. Interesting.

<End Segment 15> - Copyright © 2015 Densho. All Rights Reserved.