<Begin Segment 11>

BK: Let's just, if you can kind of go back, and if we can take it day by day. Your entire family, the adults, were taken to jail. You were left in charge of two, three children...

JT: Uh-huh, about seven children.

BK: Right. What happened? Could you go through a typical day? Did you go to school? Did you...

JT: I think I... I don't remember clearly, but I think I went to school. Well, no, I couldn't go to school, I couldn't go to school. Because my father went first and then when the rest of them were taken, it must have been -- as Frank says -- it must have been close to the time when we were being, going to be evacuated from Petersburg. Now he, that's what he's surmising and it seems to make sense to me, because they, because it was soon after that they we... when they went to jail, then the men were separated from the women at that point and they were shipped on ahead to go on to the internment camps. And so then the women came home, which was in a matter of about a week. So within that time, week's time, this all occurred, that they took the men. And my father was the very first to go, and he was in there, I imagine, about a month before they picked up the rest of the people. And it was still early in the year, beginning of the year, well, it was after December of course. Because I understand that we left Petersburg on April 12th of 1942. And so the women were able to come home after about a week. But in the meantime they had arranged to hire this, the wife of the foreman of the cannery who came in and cooked for us but we were on our own otherwise. But she came in and cooked for us. And Frank says he remembers that she was very hostile at the time and it was just not a great atmosphere. Things were just gloom, doom and gloom around that time. And then the men were all shipped back and within the end of that week, they sent our folks, mothers home to prepare, to get us ready to go to Puyallup -- or to the internment camps.

BK: I see.

<End Segment 11> - Copyright © 1997 Densho. All Rights Reserved.