<Begin Segment 16>

TI: You're in Poston, Arizona, and I think there's a term, I think "Roastin' Poston?"

FD: Oh, Roastin' Poston.

TI: So it got hot there.

FD: Very hot. It went above 120 degrees.

TI: So how did you cope? What did you do when it got that hot? What would you guys do?

FD: Well, there was nothing we could do, just look for a shady spot. And then after a while I guess you get used to it.

TI: Now, it was on the Indian reservation, the Colorado River Indian reservation. So the Colorado River was fairly close by.

FD: Well, it was about three or four miles away.

TI: Did, were people ever able to go to the river?

FD: The first year we weren't allowed to, but then the second year we were able to go to the river to have picnics. And we had to walk. But Poston didn't have any high fences around it. I think that it's probably because it was in the middle of an Indian reservation in the desert and only a few miles from the river. So if somebody wanted to run away, they would be found by the Indians before they could get to any other place. And then they'd be crazy to try to cross the river, they'd probably drown. And so we didn't have any tall fences around the camp.

TI: How about guards? Were there guards there, do you recall?

FD: I supposed there were guards, but I didn't see them.

TI: And Poston was divided into, like, three different camps?

FD: Yeah, three separate camps.

TI: And which camp were you in?

FD: I was in what they called Number 1, that was the largest one.

TI: And so life in camp, talk about your daily routine when you were at Poston.

FD: Daily routine? Well, it consisted mostly of waiting for mealtimes, I guess. The way you knew the meals were ready was by the gong, somebody would bang on a gong to call people to eat. Well, I guess that was about the only thing. Oh, and then they started showing movies after a while. It happened to be, they happened to show them a place just outside of the block that I lived in, which was nice and convenient. But there were no chairs, so we had to sit on the ground to watch movies, or camp chairs if you had any.

TI: Going back to the meals, in your writings you had a story about apple butter.

FD: Oh, yes.

TI: Tell that story in terms of what that was.

FD: Well, apple butter is just sort of like crushed apples. No, it's just applesauce, I think. And somebody gave me a jar of apple butter as a joke, so I tasted it, but then it was sweet, but then the apple butter that we had in camp didn't taste as sweet as that. I think that if sugar had been rationed out to the camps, that maybe somebody was stealing it and selling it on the outside in the black market, most likely.

TI: So the apple butter you had in camp was unsweetened.

FD: Yes, it was unsweetened.

TI: Just like crushed apples, essentially.

FD: Yeah. It was horrible.

TI: Who would you use it for? What would people use it for?

FD: Oh, well, it was used instead of butter. They didn't give us butter.

TI: And so to put on bread or things like that?

FD: Yeah.

TI: Yeah, it was an interesting story about apple butter and how disappointing it was that that's all you had.

<End Segment 16> - Copyright © 2016 Densho. All Rights Reserved.