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HM: Did your family come straight back to Bainbridge or was your family spread out to... after you left camp?

IW: Yes. My older sister was married, and I went right away out from camp. Minidoka I was there just two months or so, not even that. And I went out to Chicago not knowing anyone there. I thought, "Wow, I'm brave," come to think of it, at nineteen. And I didn't even tell my Hide, my husband, because I know he wouldn't want me to go, and he would go himself first. So he was in Idaho picking beets and all those things, so I left, and I didn't tell him. And the first time I went, it was a hostel. Before that, it was Dr. Thomas from New York, and he was a Baptist, I think, secretary for all the churches. And he told my mother that my father's still out in a prison camp, and he told him that I could have a job there as a clerk or something and come out to New York. And I thought about it, and I thought, well, New York is kind of far, so I chose Chicago. And I went out not knowing anybody. The first Sunday I went out was to church, and I met a man, and to this day, I think of him. Heller, Mr. Heller, and told me to come down to the USO office. He was the head of the USO in Chicago. And he called around, and so I went to Travelers Aid and got a job there as a clerk. And it was very interesting. And when I pulled up a file, I find that the children are in trouble because the father was in trouble. And it goes down to the caseworker invariably, so I started to learn a lot.

And they did want to send me to Chicago, and I was at Reverend Norry's home as just someone to help with cooking and breakfast, get it lined up before I went to work. And they had four girls also, and now we had four girls and I became the fifth one, but I was the oldest of them all. [Laughs] So I felt at ease at their family. And I had many friends come, and later we got an apartment, and there were four girls of us in that apartment. And so many of my friends would come out for the -- oh, first time trying to find work, and I helped them. But before that, I went back for my sister's wedding to Minidoka. And while I was in all brown, brown shoe and a suit and a hat, and I looked okay, so oh, my friends' mothers thought, "Oh, she could get a job, then I want to send my daughter out." So many of the daughters came to our apartment to find something and then I helped them that way, and I was happy.

I remember, okay, when he came out later, my husband-to-be, and he found out that his classification was 1-A before he got to camp, and in camp it was 1-C, "enemy alien." But so anyway, we have to laugh about it now, but when he got out, then he got drafted. So we got married in 1945, it's sixty-two years, we finished our sixty-two year anniversary. Do you want me to go on?

And I remember we came back to Manzanar, and the war was over that next day, oh, that day it was over. And we heard the Isseis crying, and "what's going to happen to us?" Because they were now older, lot of 'em didn't have their homes, and so we told them, "Something will come up. You came here and you got your vacation," or something. But they didn't believe it until they put on the radio, what do call it? Radio from Japan and they heard Hirohito talk and say that the war, they lost the war in Japan. And so that's where we went to Manzanar. And to think that Manzanar was gorgeous, the plants, the flowers, the little lake that they had, little pond, and it was like a different place than when we arrived at first. And it's the same way in Washington, D.C., Smithsonian, they had a Manzanar picture, you go into that base itself, and we said, "Oh, we didn't have it this good." Everything more comfortable, and it's a fairly large area. They had the thought that they would just have it for two years. But we went back another time when it was still there. So I'm sure it's still there now. It was something good for them. And we took his mother to see his side of the family to where he would go. And when we got to L.A., my husband wanted a haircut, and he went into a barbershop, and they said to him, "We don't serve Japs." So that was really something we didn't expect. And so he got a haircut from some Japanese friend later on anyway.

<End Segment 5> - Copyright © 2007 Densho. All Rights Reserved.