<Begin Segment 15>

AI: Can you tell me about this picture?

RT: Oh, yes. This is a picture of our family. Now, my mother had this picture taken. It's a formal family portrait. Had this picture taken so that she could send it to my father. She communicated, she wrote letters to him. I don't know if he wrote back, but she wrote regularly. And this picture shows our family as it was then, for him, and you can see that my mother and my two brothers, and this is me, and this is my little sister. And I assume that this is what he had when he was in Missoula as a family remembrance, so to speak, because we had no idea when he was going to come back.

AI: Right. So you really don't know what was going to happen to him.

RT: No, not at all. Not at all. Nobody could tell us. After all, he went in at the end of the December, and we understand that they didn't -- they just held them. There was no procedure that was being followed, as far as hearings, when he first moved to, well, when he was moved to Missoula. So we had no idea. And in the meantime, the farm had to go on, and she had lots of things that had to be taken care of. But she had Uncle Tok, and there were a lot of good friends that helped out, so... because it was physical work that had to be done, she couldn't do it by herself. She probably would have if she had to, but there were friends that would come and help out. And in the wintertime, it isn't quite the pressure, the farm work, so that was one thing, she could manage. But I remember her standing by the living room heater. There was a... I think it was oil, but anyway, she would be standing there, and so determined to keep going. And she never showed it to us, never, the despair that she must have felt at times because after all, she had to make all these decisions by herself.

<End Segment 15> - Copyright © 1998 Densho. All Rights Reserved.