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BN: The whole community, basically, was all going to Tulare together.

EO: Yeah.

BN: Do you remember what your feelings were when you arrived and first saw?

EO: No, I think more curiosity than anything.

BN: And I think as far as I could tell, the Pasadena group kind of came last and was already full.

EO: Is that right?

BN: Was that not your recollection?

EO: You know, I really don't know. And being a teenager, I was probably looking for different things than an adult.

BN: Do you remember which block or which...

EO: I think it was 61-B.

BN: And was it other Pasadena people that were all together there?

EO: No, I think we were scattered, they scattered us. My girlfriend, she was in the next block. She was in Block 61.

BN: Were you in a barracks? Because Tulare was one of the camps that also had horse stalls.

EO: No, Santa Anita had them.

BN: Right.

EO: They had horse stalls in Tulare, but we weren't in one.

BN: You were not in one of them.

EO: Yeah.

BN: Did you go to any sort of school there?

EO: High school, I went to high school. I graduated high school.

BN: Right, that was at Gila. You graduated high school at Gila?

EO: Gila, yeah.

BN: But at Tulare, was there, did you go to school at Gila also?

EO: Where? Tulare?

BN: Yeah, at Tulare.

EO: No, that was just a temporary stop.

BN: Because it was summer also, so you didn't go to school there. Do you remember what sorts of things you did there, at Tulare?

EO: They were organizing classes for young people at Tulare. And everything was sort of on a temporary basis. So I remember going to a few classes, and we didn't stay there long, less than a year. But at Gila, we had a regular high school, lot of teachers, and we were the seniors. I want to tell you something about myself. We were seniors, we found out that we would not have enough money for our school annual, so me and my group decided to do something about it. So I asked the administration, "Can we have a carnival?" because we wanted to raise money for our annual. And they said okay, so we started planning a carnival for the camp. When the principal heard how big we were planning it, they got kind of scared and they had someone monitor us after that, but we went ahead with our ideas. I forgot what we sold, but we were selling things, and I asked my girlfriend, and we took one barrack and made a ghost house out of it. So people would pay their money to get scared, and they went through that, they paid money for that, and we had all kinds of things. We raised a lot of money. I have proof from my annual, in the annual people wrote, "Thank you for being chairman of the campus carnival," and all that kind of stuff.

Anyway, about that time, too, my English teacher asked me, "Elsie, would you like to go to college in Nebraska?" I said, "Yeah, I think so. My brothers are in Nebraska." So he says, "Well, I'll see if I can get a scholarship for you." And he applied for me, I didn't do anything, he just took care of it all, and what do you know, I got a scholarship. It was a part scholarship, part work contract, which was great, because I worked for my way, too. So that's how I got to Doane college.

BN: And before we get there, I wanted to kind of circle back a little to Gila. Which camp were in you in in Gila?

EO: I don't know. I saw the question --

BN: Because there were two camps, right?

EO: -- and I can't remember, one, I think it was two. But I'm not sure. It's the camp where all the people from Santa Monica, no, Santa Maria and Guadalupe ended, and also Pasadena. And I think it's Camp 2.

<End Segment 8> - Copyright © 2018 Densho. All Rights Reserved.