<Begin Segment 2>

BN: And so how old was your mom now?

KM: I'm sorry, she was born in 1920. So she was very much, had come of age, yeah, in 1941, she was twenty-one. I think she was engaged to be married, and so she was just really beginning her career at that point.

BN: Thrown into camp at that point. Okay. Did you know your grandparents, the Kadota side grandparents?

KM: I did. We didn't know them that well because the settled in Chicago, and they didn't come to the West Coast until I was about fifteen. So they returned after three of their children moved out to the Santa Maria area, and so they came back and they lived in Nipomo for a while. We would go every weekend, and in my imagination, I felt like we were going every weekend to Nipomo to spend time with them. But I didn't speak Japanese, and so I could never really have a conversation with them. My grandmother would just be smiling and saying things like, "This is wonderful," her English was "Grand, grand." And then my grandfather would just be sitting in his easy chair watching sports, and later on, they lived with us for a time, a few years later they came, we had a little space below our house, which we rented, but they lived below. And I saw them more often, but my grandfather by that time was a little senile, and so he would just, again, no conversation, never really got to know what he was thinking.

BN: Do you know about how long your mom was in camp?

KM: She wasn't in that long. I believe she was in for about six months, and then was sponsored by a Jewish family in Chicago.

BN: And then she left. Did she go to school or did she leave for work?

KM: She was sponsored by this Jewish family and then she went to the Chicago Masters School of Design, to finish her studies on design. And again, my mother would tell us these stories. I actually didn't believe a lot of the things she said, because --

[Interruption]

BN: So we were talking about your mother leaving camp and kind of what she was doing in Chicago.

KM: So she was sponsored by a Jewish family, the Kaune family, that was associated with the Anheuser-Busch brewery. And she loved working for them and they loved her. Two of my other aunts ended up actually working there, too, sponsored by them, and she must have had a really good relationship, because the child that she took care of, who was ten years old, looked her up later on when he moved to L.A. and put an ad in the Rafu looking for her. But he always said my mother brought a lot of happiness into his house because his father was very strict. And then he said when she met my father, he knew that she was going to be leaving, so it was kind of sad for him. So she went to the Masters School of Design, finished the design school there, had intentions of actually probably going to New York or something to do more fashion. But before that, she actually had a fiancé, I mentioned earlier, that was drafted, or volunteered, drafted and was in the 442nd. And I think she mentioned that she tried to go down to see him off, to Camp Shelby, and she took a train down there but missed him, and then eventually he was killed. He died in Cassino. So you hear these stories and you think, "Is that true?" I think it is true, but I can't even remember his name, Mas. Which he eventually, my father, who was stationed at Fort Snelling, and he was in the Military Intelligence Service, and they met in Chicago.

BN: Okay, and we'll return to that, we'll talk a little about your dad's side in a minute. But to finish with your mom's side, it sounds like most or all of them also, siblings, also ended up going to Chicago?

KM: All of them did. The only family members that were left at Gila was my grandparents and the three youngest children who were fifteen, ten and three, something like that. All of them drifted over to Chicago following the oldest ones, and found a place for the family to live, and they all lived in this one, this three-story building eventually.

<End Segment 2> - Copyright © 2023 Densho. All Rights Reserved.