<Begin Segment 6>

HM: Could we get back to when you graduated, and after you heard about our evacuation -- I should say before you graduated -- when you heard about the evacuation and you were in school, how were you treated by your classmates and what happened between that time and the time that you left? Did some of your friends come to see you off?

IW: They were wonderful. They were sorry that that happened, and they themselves didn't know how to act. So. But only six days, we were so busy, they had curfew time from seven to seven or six to something like that. And so we didn't have so much time to be with other people because we were getting ready for ourselves not knowing what to expect. And when the schoolmates, many of them took the day off from school and came to Seattle even to see us leaving. And lots of people came out, because we were the first people to leave, and that was a novelty. And so they didn't know what to say. They thought we're Americans, too, just like them, but they're putting us away, and they thought it was... the teachers were wonderful. Mr. Dennis and Pop Miller and everybody just was, they even wrote to us and they sent wire to us, I mean, our graduation. And so I can't say anything that they were against us. They weren't. Because that Dennis felt that we should go to the prom. That's something everybody looks for. But the army says no, we can't. And we had others to share our burdens, so it really wasn't as bad as people would say, because the people were kind to us, not nasty like some people met with nastiness. And oh, and we got to see Mt. Shasta early in the morning. We looked up and that Mt. Shasta was beautiful. [Laughs] So we, I think we thought of the affirmative, we thought of favorable things than the ugliness of it, and we made the most of it.

HM: Do you remember the assembly that Mr. Dennis had with the students when we heard about the evacuation?

IW: Oh, yes. He told the students that, "This is war and people make mistakes," that we're Americans, too, and so I think we had... in an affirmative way, and not negative way. And all the teacher, as far as I'm concerned, they were that way, too. Nobody was, say, against us. They're going to lose so many students, the class was only fifty-five, and they're losing thirteen of them. And one girl told me later that she was glad that we went, because she said, "Now I'm graduating with honors when I couldn't do it when you people were there." So she said, "I lucked out." [Laughs] So we had fun thinking about those things and what little ways they think.

<End Segment 6> - Copyright © 2007 Densho. All Rights Reserved.