<Begin Segment 18>

KN: Besides the heat and everything, and we're not used to that heat, that desert heat, and it was just all the sage brush and sand and all these tar paper barracks and no green trees. Oh, it was a totally different feeling especially going from this nice, green Puget Sound to desert country.

DH: So you got off the trucks at Manzanar and you were one of the first ones there, so it was pretty rough.

KN: Yeah. They gave us canvas bag, ticking, and we had to go and fill it with straw for our mattress and pillow, and then they gave us a khaki blanket.

DH: And that was it.

KN: That was it.

DH: And how many people to a room?

KN: Well, for us there were eight of us, so part of a barrack, one unit, all the beds lined up. No chairs, no tables or anything, and so we just sat on the bed. That was our couch and everything else.

DH: And then there were long lines to...

KN: The mess hall, and then if you were lucky not to have the windstorm hit you, it was okay. But lots of times when you were standing in line for the mess hall to open, the windstorm would come up and oh, you'd be just covered with sand. And if you had your mouth open, you were eating the sand with your lunch, your dinner.

DH: And then yet among these conditions, you got engaged.

KN: Yeah, after a fashion.

DH: At Manzanar.

KN: Uh-huh.

DH: And then you said that you worked outside the camp then at Manzanar after a while.

IN: I...

DH: You went out to harvest sugar beets?

IN: See, in June, middle of June, people from Idaho who were -- they were short of help and they recruited people to go to work in the fields in Idaho. And I said, well, I might as well get out of here. I'm not doing anything here so I volunteered to go to Idaho. And I worked in the fields in Idaho, and it was a totally different country from what we were used to.

<End Segment 18> - Copyright © 1998 Densho. All Rights Reserved.