<Begin Segment 7>

HM: You left camp before the rest of your family, and where did you go? Not on these jobs, but how did you get to Payette?

JK: You mean after the Minidoka camp?

HM: Uh-huh.

JK: Well, it's when my dad came back in 1944, '44, I think. I went out to work outside of the camp because they got all of us west of Cascade. So I went Chicago to get a job over there, and then I worked in a cab company, that was the Yellow Cab company. I went to Chicago to get a mechanic's job, and we got, Yellow Cab company hired us to do the mechanic work in their garage. And I worked with the colored people. Well, those days, they know how it was for the colored people. They were real nice people. But those days, why, it was a little different. Now, there's no discrimination for different color or different hair, but those days, there was discrimination. So I worked with... well, a lot of colored people working in that garage, too, so I used to work with the colored people, and they were really helpful and courteous. I learned quite a bit from those people. Then I came back, after that I came back to camp again, and we stayed there about a couple of months before we got out of there with the family. And then 1945, we came to Ontario to work on the farm.

HM: Did you work for someone on the farm at that time or was it your own farm?

JK: Yeah, before we evacuated to Ontario, I was working one spring and fall, I worked for a farmer in the Ontario area. So we all, they didn't help, so we all came out to Ontario.

HM: And what brought the rest of your family back into the Pacific Northwest area, to Seattle?

JK: Well, you know, after the war, then we don't have no place to go, because the county took our properties. I think they sold it to some people. But that's why we're doing, helping some farmers in the Ontario area.

<End Segment 7> - Copyright © 2007 Densho. All Rights Reserved.