Densho Digital Archive - Francis Mas Fukuhara Interview (denshovh-ffrancis-01-0012)

<Begin Segment 12>

TI: Well, so, when the word came out that you were going to move again...

FF: Yeah.

TI: How did you feel about that?

FF: Well, you have some feeling of insecurity, of course, because you really don't know where you're going. And even if they tell you you're going to Minidoka, Idaho, heck, what does that mean to anybody? None of us had lived in the Minidoka desert before. We didn't know what to expect. But we went on to... they put us in these old railroad trains and we went off to Idaho and they pull all the shades down so, mostly so we couldn't see out, I guess. What difference that made, I don't know. But we went, finally got to Idaho. We got to this spur, and from there they trucked us into Minidoka. And there we were met again with these tarpaper shacks, and dust, and tumbleweeds blowing all over the place. We got there, I think, in August, and it was just hotter than blazes. Yeah. But after a little while of being there, we got kind of acquainted with the lay of the land and where everything was. And then life slowly went back to as normal as possible, under the circumstances.

TI: And how old were you at this time?

FF: I was, let's see, that was '42, so I was seventeen.

EG: And you were still in school?

FF: Yeah.

EG: How was school in camp?

FF: Well, I, I never did attend school in camp. I mean, I had to finish... I was, I was in one of these -- they used to have a category called mid-term, here in Seattle. And some people were full-term and some people were mid-term. The full-term people in my class graduated out of Broadway High School. And us mid-term guys were short, not number of credits, but kind of credit. And so we had to make these up when we went to Idaho. I was supposed to go to school, but I, I finally never did. And I don't think I ever should have gotten a high school diploma. But I left camp in '43, the summer, the summer of '43 and I applied for a college in Iowa. A place called Dubuque.

TI: Going back to your high school, I'm not sure if I understood. So, where did your high school diploma come from? Was it from Broadway or from Hunt High?

FF: Well, it eventually came from Hunt High, but I didn't get that until I finished a year of college. 'Cause I never did go to Hunt High. I was supposed to go. Your dad went? Yeah, your dad went.