<Begin Segment 28>

DG: Okay. For this next segment, you have quite a few personal papers that you've kept, and you have a lot of correspondence that I've had the opportunity to read.

NS: Makes it kind of interesting, doesn't it?

DG: It's very interesting. One of the things that you have...

NS: I did a lot of descriptive work of what camp was like.

DG: Because of your connection with...?

NS: With the YW. I let them know -- well, they wanted to know and so I wrote and I used to write them. I don't know. I look at it and I think I certainly was verbose. [Laughs] But now...

DG: Well, you went there in September and so I notice that there is a letter right away that they are not going to remove you from the board.

NS: Yes.

DG: So you had already been nominated to the YWCA board. How long had you been on the board?

NS: I was only on for a few months before -- I don't remember when the election was, but I know that I was supposedly on the board for maybe about six or eight months, or something like that. I was just on the board.

DG: So there was a lot of YWCA work that you probably had done through the years, and then you were asked to be on the board because you were Japanese?

NS: Partly, I think, partly. And then partly because I was active on the YWCA in my college days, too.

DG: So now when you got to Minidoka, did they contact you or did you contact them?

NS: I probably contacted them. Well, I kept on a correspondence letting them know what we were doing and what it was like.

DG: But first, you contacted -- oh, I remember -- you said the Twin Falls YWCA. Now, why did you contact them?

NS: Because it was the closest town and if we -- when you're confined in a place with a fence all around, you want to go out. I mean, there's something about a fence that makes you feel like, well, I want to get out of here and that was the way we felt. So the closest town was Twin Falls. So probably I contacted the YWCA -- I mean, we can go shopping to Twin Falls. But I think there's always the need to land someplace and relax, and I felt that the YWCA quarters would be the place to do that. You can't do that in a restaurant or there wasn't any other place. So that was one of the reasons why I contacted the YW.

<End Segment 28> - Copyright © 1998 Densho. All Rights Reserved.