<Begin Segment 5>

JN: What are your memories of March 30, 1942? Going to Eagle Harbor, leaving your friends, walking on the ferry?

VT: Yes. I remember we had to get up pretty early. I think the army trucks came by, oh, about seven-thirty, eight o'clock in the morning and picked us up. And in our case, it was... they just picked up our family and took us down to the ferry. But most everyone was already there when we got there so they must have had a lot of army trucks to round everyone up. And looked like everything was going pretty smoothly, no riots or anything. We did have some of our, our friends were down there to send us off. Some were in Seattle, on the overpass over Western Avenue. There was a few families that had friends up above while we were boarding the train. They would be waving to us. That's about all I remember.

JN: How did you feel?

VT: Well... didn't feel good, but I mean, what can you do? [Laughs] We were kinda anxious because we were going to someplace we've never been before. And when we got there, we had sunshine and the weather was nice. But they were just building Block 3, so the construction had just started. Block 1 and 2 were fixed, were already completed, but we were put into Block 3 and they were still building Block 3. The latrines weren't hooked up yet, we had to use water from a pipe outside. Lavatories were regular outhouses, you know, and we had that, we had to use that for several days until the plumbing was all hooked up. But I think it only took about two days or so, and we had normal showers and bathrooms and such.

JN: But on the day you left Bainbridge, do you remember walking down that Eagle Harbor to board the ferry?

VT: Yes, I was also reminded that some, some people took some pictures and I noticed that they had taken pictures of us walking down the, the ramp. We've... that's nothing new because we've always gone to Seattle and that's the way we board the ferry. So, it wasn't anything new. But someone did take a picture of us boarding the ferry.

JN: Was the mood going, boarding the ferry, were there... how did you feel about having the guards, people all there, and seeing all the families going on the ferry?

VT: I think that as a group, we were all pretty well-behaved. There was no one saying bad things about, you know, what was happening. We figured, I think most of us figured that this is... hopefully that it was just temporary, that it wouldn't be too long before we'd be back on Bainbridge Island again. So, I think that the feeling wasn't too bad, I don't think. I... well, it's natural, everybody was disappointed that they were taken out of, taken from their homes, but at least I felt that it was something that we just had to bear for a while.

<End Segment 5> - Copyright © 2006 Densho. All Rights Reserved.