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DG: And what can you remember from the first days of camp, getting settled and that sort of thing?

KN: Oh, as you know, we only -- well, we had the cots and just the oil heater. Because in the evenings in desert it gets real cold, extreme. So we got oil every day for our heaters and that's what we used. And then of course we had to go to, they had a latrine, so we had to go out there to, you know, the toilets, and brush our teeth and wash our face and everything, and the shower was there. Yeah, the shower was connected, yeah. And then, of course, the laundry room was separate.

So there was absolutely no privacy, and we had to -- because all, everyone in the family was just in this one big room, one unit, and we had no tables or chairs or anything. My dad went out and scrounged around for scrap lumber, and he made a bench... crude, but it was a bench, and a table, had four legs, so it worked. And of course, all our toiletries, we just put it between the two by fours, which was showing, there was no insulation, no inside wall or anything, it's just one wall with all this two by fours showing. So we just put everything on the ledge, because there was no closet or anything, just one room, unit.

And then, of course, housecleaning was easy. When you had the dust storm and everything, you know, you just put whatever is on the floor on the bed, and just run a hose through it and it all just goes down to the sand again. But later on, they put linoleum down for us, so then we didn't, you know, we couldn't use the hose to clean the room. But it worked.

DG: So what else can you tell me about camp life, those, the first early times in Manzanar? Like food and facilities?

KN: Oh, yeah, we all went to the mess hall and you know, the institutional food is, it's hard to cook for big mass. And so when you think about it now, we shouldn't have complained, but we did. And we all got, we all lined up for all the meals. And then as time went on, we learned that, "Oh, the Block 9 cook is real good," they used the same things, but it depends on the cook how things turned out, right? So we used to stop there, some of us that went to work, 'cause I, I went to Block 44 to the hospital to work. I was working, I got a job at the Public Health Department, so on the way back, for dinner, we'd stop at Block 9 instead of coming home to Block 3. Well, later on, they sent out a notice saying, "Everybody that belong in your block, eat in your own mess hall." So, but sometimes, we didn't obey that, we just snuck in.

DG: Can you give me a sense of how big it -- this is Manzanar?

KN: Yeah, this is Manzanar. Ten thousand people in one square mile, and, well, you know, when I worked in the hospital, the nurses would come to work and said they had one barrack for people that were very, very disturbed. And some mornings she'll come and say, "Oh, they were just climbing the walls." Well, you know, all this thing just made them just go out of their minds. And I don't know how many were there, really, but just what the nurse had said, I just remember. And of course, there was murder and suicide even, like any other community. So, after a while it just became a community. And eventually, well, the young people were playing baseball and everything out in the firebreak, and they had a recreation hall where they could go play games or dance or whatever, and they tried make it as normal as possible.

Because we were there only eleven months and then we were transferred to Minidoka, we requested. So most of us transferred to Minidoka, in Idaho. But at that point, I was not in Minidoka too long, because after I got married in March, then we went out to a ranch, Idaho ranch to work. My husband was working at a, almost three thousand acre ranch because all the Caucasian boys were in the service and they didn't have enough help. So the Japanese boys from the camp went out to work, and I was cooking for about five or six guys, hungry guys. And we had a ration book, and so you know, you just couldn't buy a lot of things. If you used up your ration, that was it. You do without or do whatever else you could without it. And so it was a challenge, education at the same time. And of course, my husband's boss's family, they were just so wonderful. Oh, gosh, they were so wonderful. We were still friends until they passed away. So it was a wonderful feeling, they were so great, so supportive.

<End Segment 6> - Copyright © 2006 Densho. All Rights Reserved.