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BN: Were you involved in other sorts of activities, Boy Scouts, sports, choir, music? I mean, there were a lot of different things.

SM: We did not do much beyond going to school. I was too young for Boy Scouts, I remember going to the Cub Scouts. And even there, it was not a lot of time spent there. So there was a lot of time on our hands, and we had to create things in order to make good use of our time.

BN: What sort of things did you do?

SM: Well, there was all kinds of things to be done, mostly other young kids of my age at that time. We had some strange interests like collecting arrowheads. The area was, initially it was the home of the Crow Indian reservation. The Crow Indians lived in there, and so there was, we did things like hunt for arrowheads. And we did some strange things like collecting wildlife, Wyoming wildlife in the desolate area. Like scorpions, and we would have a contest of capturing rattlesnakes, and cutting off the tails and have a collection to see how many rattlesnake tails we can gather. Some people created zoos under the barrack and collected these wildlife and had a show of their zoo underneath their barrack room. But those are some of the things that we did for enjoyment.

BN: And are these with, are these friends that you had primarily kids you knew from before the war or are these new friends that you made in school, or a combination?

SM: It was really a combination. The young fellow I mentioned earlier, his name was Shig Yabu, who's the author of the book, children's book, and he was in my block. Little fellow named Yamoto, Shogo Yamoto and his brother, they were also in my block. And my block also had the famed artist Estelle Ishigo. She was a white, a blond lady who followed her husband, Arthur Ishigo, into the camp, she had the option of going to the camp. And in fact, sad story, she was rejected by her family because she married a Japanese, and so she decided to stay with her husband. And so she came with them, and we got along very well. She was very, very cordial. In fact, at mealtime, she went out of her way to meet new people, other people at the dining table. And so very, very friendly, and very skilled, I remember sketch pads all over the camp, and always making illustrations, and she was very good.

BN: Yes, it's funny, she later wrote that she felt more at home in camp than she ever did before, more accepted.

SM: Yes. I learned later on that her family totally rejected her and wanted nothing to do with her. It's very sad, a sad story about what happened to her after the camp. After Arthur passed away, she was destitute and physically in really bad shape until she was found by another friend of ours who felt it was important to do something for her, Bacon Sakatani found her in a really bad nursing home.

BN: So I've got to go back and ask you about Shig now, because his story, his children's book, of course, was Hello, Maggie! and it tells the famous story about the pet magpie, I guess. Do you remember the bird?

SM: Oh, I vaguely remember the bird. I remember that he had a fascination for this bird that, the magpie that he caught and nursed to health. I did not know he was going to write a book someday about it, but more power to him. Shig has an uncanny memory for details, unbelievable. We would ride together, I would drive up to Heart Mountain on pilgrimages, and Shig would be a passenger. He would speak for seventeen hours with a new story every time. I couldn't believe the memory he had about details. But that was Shig, amazing storyteller.

BN: Now, the illustrator for that book was Willie Ito, who you knew as well.

SM: Willie Ito. In fact, I just saw Willie this morning. And Willie was, he was not at Heart Mountain, he was at Topaz. But they got to know each other. Well, they knew each other from San Francisco, they went to the same grammar school. And so Shig had Willie do the illustrations for his book. And so that was a good combination of good art and a very important book.

<End Segment 10> - Copyright © 2022 Densho. All Rights Reserved.