<Begin Segment 6>

NW: Were you sort of a nursing assistant then? What sort of work would you do in the hospital?

MW: No, just nurse's aide. Because I had no training at that point. Nowadays, many professions, you get a chance to, even doctors, get into the clinical area early. But in those days, first years of college is all academic. I didn't interview some nurses, Japanese American nurses. But when you have the real life experience of being in the delivery room and seeing that, it's really revealing.

NW: And so what do you think drew you to nursing, then?

MW: Pardon me?

NW: What do you think drew you to nursing?

MW: You know, we weren't so liberated at that age that you thought about nursing or teaching. Now you have engineers and the field is wide open for women. When you think about my generation, that was kind of...

NW: Fewer choices?

MW: My mother was always, I think she could have been a doctor, she's such a caretaker. And I suppose caring for people, just making them well or feeling better was kind of a natural thing.

NW: So you were working in the hospital. What was the rest of your family doing?

MW: Well, my mother didn't get a job or anything, she had enough doing her laundry and so forth. I imagine she... eventually there were groups of women who did knitting and so forth, for the servicemen, how ironic. And there were... I don't think she went to a Buddhist group, actually, but there were Buddhist groups, eventually there were young Christian groups and so forth. My father, I don't know what went through his mind, but he was a man who wanted to have his own business. What could you do in this community? So he wanted to be of service to the community, so he hauled coal and discovered that hard work, I don't know much it contributed to it, but the doctor said he's developed high blood pressure and he shouldn't be doing that. So he didn't do that anymore. But there were so many people doing different things, and before you knew it, in that desert type of earth, they managed to make gardens. And Japanese have a way of bringing about beauty, I think. I mean, it was a regular community, most of those places became like another city, I guess. I'm not sure that Tule did as much as some of the others. Of course, it was a changing, Tule was a different type of place after the "loyalty oath."

<End Segment 6> - Copyright © 2018 Densho. All Rights Reserved.