<Begin Segment 8>

DG: Let's see, I had some notes here. What did your parents tell you about, to explain that you were going to have to leave your brand new home on Bainbridge and go to these camps? What did they tell the kids? Do you remember?

HM: Nothing that I can remember. But maybe they did and it just went... I don't know. But I don't think they said anything. I don't think they knew why we had to leave in the first place. There was really no... so they didn't know what to tell us because they didn't know themselves.

DG: And, jumping ahead, can you describe the conditions of your home and the belongings of your home and your farm when your family returned?

HM: Oh, when I was in, when I was in camp and we were told that we could go home, in my mind I had all these pictures. I said, "The first thing I'm gonna do is open that wood box, crawl through it, and not even use the door but crawl through that wood box, get into the house, run down the basement, run around the furnace and all around down there, and run back upstairs, and run around to the bedrooms and the dining room and the kitchen, and peek down that laundry chute and throw some laundry down that chute. Then I'm gonna go upstairs, up those stairs and go to the bedrooms and look inside our little cubbyhole dormers or whatever you call the storage places, and that's what I'm gonna do when I first get home." When I first got home, that was pretty much what I did, because everything was there. Things were kept nicely for us. So we were very fortunate that we had all of this. We still had our wood stove so we still had that wood box. Then we still had the same kinds of things that we had before. We still had our horse. Later on we got a little dog. So it was nice. Yeah.

DG: And how about the farmland?

HM: The farm was still there, but no berries. As I said before, everything had been let go. Before, way before the war, we used to farm when I was little, little, little, like two or so, they used to farm that whole acreage up around our house, which would be about twenty, forty acres anyway. And then, and then farm on Manzanita, which was by Kouras' place. But then after when it was just my dad and Hohoy, they just did the one, the acreage in Manzanita. That's when, that's the one I would remember. They had cleared that land way before they were married and taken the dynamite and blowin' up the stumps and things like that.

DG: And, one other thing I circled here, was did your parents ever talk to you or tell you stories about when they had to sign the so called "loyalty questionnaire"?

HM: When they what?

DG: The "loyalty questionnaire" where they had to sign "yes-yes" or "no-no."

HM: Oh, no. See, it would not have applied to my dad in the first place. And I don't know. My mother never said anything. They never... so it didn't seem like it affected me at all.

<End Segment 8> - Copyright © 2007 Densho. All Rights Reserved.