<Begin Segment 29>

DG: Because one of the first letters from Seattle says that they're going to keep you on the board, "But would you please do a monthly report?" And then I notice that you did quite a bit of descriptive work about what camp was about.

NS: Good thing I did.

DG: Right. So maybe we can go through some of that. So starting in September, the first thing was relocation of students.

NS: Yes. I felt that people that -- usually the schools started in the middle of September to the first of October and, if possible, we could get the students who had acceptances from the eastern colleges, let's hurry and get them all through. And when I got into that relocation office, they didn't know what to do. I mean, the man that was in charge of it was still a student in the School of Social Work over here and he didn't know -- he didn't have any organizational insight or know-how or anything, and he was just there because of the job. And then, of course, Kaoru Ichihara was helping him, but she was a secretary and didn't have the professional acknowledge at all. And so I offered to work there and I got mostly -- first of all, I got the people who had... students, of course, had written to the different colleges to which they wanted to go, and they had acceptances in their hands. But they needed the clearance from the San Francisco office to leave the camp. And so those are the people that I focused on first.

DG: Okay. Now San Francisco office is a WRA office?

NS: (Yes).

DG: Okay. And it was a special office.

NS: And that was the office that released the evacuees to go out. So the people in Minidoka couldn't do that. They had to refer the people to San Francisco and the San Francisco office released them. The man, who was in charge of relocation, stopped by Minidoka. And so I told him that the first thing we were going to do was to get the people who had acceptances -- that we were gonna send those in, wire them to him as soon as we had them in hand, and, "Would they please get those people out first?" And so they did. I think we were quite fortunate in getting...

DG: How many of them are we talking about?

NS: Oh, there might have been fifty or more, fifty to a hundred. And then after that there were high school graduates who wanted to relocate and go to some college, but they didn't have any correspondence with them.

DG: Or place to go yet.

NS: Yes. And so I left that office for them to follow through. I was only in that office until all the ones I knew had acceptances got released.

DG: Did you get paid?

NS: Sixteen dollars a month [Laughs], which was the going rate at that time.

DG: Then at the same time...

NS: The professionals, like my husband, got $19 and the other people got $16. They didn't consider me professional, I'm sure.

<End Segment 29> - Copyright © 1998 Densho. All Rights Reserved.