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PW: I understand that your father picked up a woodworking hobby.

HS: Oh, yeah, that's right. So that's something he could do, you know. It was great because he couldn't do anything like that when he was living on the farm, but yes, they would go out and find wood out on the outskirts of where we lived in camp. And he would... I don't know where he got the chisel and the... what is it? Not knife, but what did they, I don't know what they used to...

PW: To just carve?

HS: Yeah, to carve it. They would have, not a knife, but something. What do you think, you're an art person.

PW: Well, I don't know what exactly he was doing, but carving tools.

HS: Yeah, he would use something, hold it, it was something like a metal thing on it, and then he would just use a hammer, right. So that he would make very nice pieces of art, yeah.

PW: Were they like statues?

HS: No, it was actually something that he could put... what I remember is that he could put it on a wall. So it was a flat piece of wood, and he would bring it down to a flat piece of wood that he would chisel to make a picture of an owl. I remember the owl, and one was a fish? Yeah, I think my brother Tom still has something that my dad chiseled or made in camp. I don't know what other kinds of hobbies people had when they were in camp, because there's a lot of time to be, not wasted, but to do things. I think there was a... I didn't see, I don't remember seeing them, but I think they had vegetables grown on the outskirts for their own use at least. I don't know whether it was sold anywhere else, but they had that. And other things I remember about camp is that in the winter it was deathly cold, it was so, so cold. And I remember the icicles, I do have memories of icicles coming off the roof. And in the summertime I remember it was so humid and hot, mosquitoes around. Because I think they were saying it's a marshy area where we were living. So the weather was awful in those times, in the dead of summer and really bad part of winter. But you know, during spring and the fall it was fine. And another thing I remember is that there was a... they would allow people to get on a bus and go to some town nearby and buy things. You could go and buy things, trinkets or... my mom wanted to buy, whether it was candy or anything that she wanted to use, of course, they couldn't cook, but she would buy knickknacks from the store that they went to by bus. So for other memories of camp, I think of... I know there were guard towers and everything, but I never felt threatened.

We were just kids, and I know that one thing that I was so lonely, when we left camp and went back to Linden, I know I was so, so lonely, so I told my parents, "I want to go back to camp." It was miserable for me because of course I had my two sisters, but there were so many kids that we used to play with and went to school with. So it was very lonely for me, and I don't know how Florence and Marge felt, but I certainly felt that way.

<End Segment 8> - Copyright © 2022 Densho. All Rights Reserved.