<Begin Segment 9>

AI: And when you got to Wyoming, and, train stopped, and you are getting off, what did you see?

RS: We saw nothing but dust storm over there at that time, [Laughs] barren waste and I thought, "What? How come?" You begin to start thinking that, how come we're over here and we're American citizens, you know? So I wasn't that old, but I felt pretty bad. I felt lonely again that they put you out there in the desert.

AI: Out in the middle of nowhere.

RS: Out in the middle of nowhere.

AI: And that would have been July?

RS: Yeah, about July.

AI: And whereabouts is Heart Mountain in Wyoming?

RS: Well, Heart Mountain is close to Cody, Wyoming, and that's a little wide spot in the road. And I think it was seven miles from Cody -- to this Heart Mountain camp.

AI: And what were the conditions there for your family, where, what were your living quarters like?

RS: Well, the living quarters itself was crowded of course, and you had this potbellied wood stove, coal stove. There's no restroom there. And the walls to the next and your neighbors were just paper thin, because you could hear everything. And there was, I guess yeah we had ceiling there, but you could hear the neighbors.

AI: And were you all together still, your parents and all your brothers and your sisters?

RS: Yeah, we were all together. So you can see, that I don't know what size the room was, but there's no partition or nothing. So...

AI: Oh, just one room for...

RS: One room. One room, so, I mean no privacy at all. Although your family itself, it was okay, you got by. But I think the restrooms, if you had to go three, four times a night, and you got that blizzard and the mud and it was terrible, 'cause we didn't have any sidewalks, no gravel, nothing, just mud.

<End Segment 9> - Copyright © 1998 Densho. All Rights Reserved.