<Begin Segment 5>

BN: And then I want to go back now to Santa Anita, and you mentioned that you were in one of the horse stalls. Do you remember what your, did your parents work there?

JB: In Santa Anita?

BN: Yeah.

JB: In Santa Anita my father and mother did not work. My sister worked in the white mess hall.

BN: And when you say "white mess hall," the mess halls there were color coded.

JB: Color coded, everybody had to eat, was assigned to eat at a certain mess hall. Red mess hall being the best because it's in the grandstand, blue mess hall being the worst because it's in the horse stalls.

BN: Which ones...

JB: The blue.

BN: You were in the blue?

JB: Blue.

BN: Because you were horse stalls.

JB: Then my sister worked in the white -- [phone rings] -- sorry. My sister worked in the white mess hall. She met her to-be husband there because he was the bookkeeper. She was always late so they met and then one of the things that happened in Santa Anita was, they had dances on Friday nights, and there was a teacher from the outside that would come in, and I think they even formed a band in Santa Anita, but there was always records. So us young kids would go up to the grandstand to watch the older kids dance, and that's how we learned how to dance.

BN: This is the western style dance.

JB: This is the foxtrot and the jitterbug. And there was a young man named, we called him Boogie because he could play the boogie woogie on the piano so well. So I remember following Boogie around, and he ended up in Rohwer. And then even after camp, he still carried the name Boogie, and he became a hairdresser. So in camp, there were, I think each camp almost had their own band, swing band. At least I know there was one in Poston, one in Gila, one in Manzanar, which is very famous. So I think the swing dancing was very popular in camps, and that sort of caught my eye, too, I enjoyed that.

BN: Just to clarify, how old were you when you entered?

JB: Ten.

BN: And the your sister was...

JB: She was eighteen. Just graduating from high school, so she was very upset and angry because she had just finished her civic lesson, she was supposed to graduate, and she knew that it was against the Constitution to put Japanese Americans in camp. So she told my parents, "You're going to go to camp because you were born in Japan, but all of us born here in America will not have to go to camp." But she found herself in camp, so she was very upset, angry. She never moved back to California, she stayed in Michigan because she was so angry at being, she and her husband both felt the same way, being kicked out of California. And it was really something that they lived with all their lives. Whereas myself, I was so young, we were just having fun, and we were not thinking about civil rights. If there was a riot in camp, I remember one riot in Santa Anita, we just said, "Oh, there's a riot, let's go see what's going on," so we would just follow the crowd and see what's going on. And we saw soldiers and bayonets, tanks coming in. But to us it was just an adventure, because we were so young.

<End Segment 5> - Copyright © 2018 Densho. All Rights Reserved.