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JN: We'd like you to share some of your personal stories about Manzanar, what you did there. You were fifteen, so were there other kids your age? And what kind of things you did at Manzanar? How'd you feel?

VT: Yes, one thing I remember about Manzanar -- the first thing that really hit us was the food that we were given. One of the things that they served more than once was lima beans, and I just didn't like lima beans. [Laughs] But I could understand that the camp was just starting up and I'm sure they didn't have a good supply of food there yet since we were in Block 3 and that Manzanar had thirty-six blocks. So, this was right at the beginning at Manzanar, camp at Manzanar.

Another thing that was bad there was once in a while we would get very strong winds, and we'd have real bad dust storms. I've seen some dust storms in eastern Washington, but that's nothing compared to what we got down there. There were times that you couldn't see halfway down the block because it was so dusty. And although that sort of let up after, oh, a year or so because I guess people started planting things and, and that kinda reduced the dust. It's a sand flying, you know, real dusty. And I... we've never experienced that before, that was terrible. The barracks weren't... well, they were built fairly good, but the sand would come through and it's inside your house, too. So that was kind of miserable there for a while.

We, as far as us young kids, we were enjoying ourselves because the kids -- at least my age, fifteen -- had our friends there. But then the... that didn't last too long because we got there in '42, April of '42. But early in '43, most of the Bainbridge people left to go to Hunt, Idaho, and just four or five families remained in Manzanar. And it was real sad for us when our friends left, because most of our friends left, although we eventually had a few other folks in our block that were still there, didn't go. Most of them were from California, L.A. area.

'Course, we all liked to play sports. But at the beginning we pretty much had to arrange our own games, you know, pick-up games, and baseball, mostly baseball and basketball. But like high school kids, that's what we did. But 1943, after the Bainbridge people left, I had by then some classmates that were, I became friends with, and people from the L.A. area or some, some even from the Sacramento area. And so we did have some high school friends that we'd play together with for a couple of years. I left there in '45, so ... so actually about a year and a half or so.

JN: Do you remember or can you explain why your family decided not to go to Minidoka?

VT: Yes, my dad said he liked the weather down there, and he didn't see any reason for havin' to move back to Idaho. He, he, I think he kinda thought that Idaho was too cold for him, but I didn't know. I didn't know what the temperature was up here but I wanted to go because my friends went. But that's the only excuse that I got from my dad anyway. He thought the weather was just good or better down there so he decided to stay there.

JN: Were you, were you upset that you couldn't go with your, with your friends?

VT: Yeah, I was, but... there wasn't much I could do about it.

JN: Do you remember anything more in, in terms of at Manzanar? Like were there other people that came or left? Were they, were you able to come and go? We have some stories of people, you know, in the course of the war years, being able to leave the camp in Minidoka to, to work on potato farms and things like that. What, what did you...

VT: Yes, I... as long as you went inland, the only thing they couldn't do was go back to the coast. They can go east, a lotta them went to Salt Lake and, or went further east to Chicago. They also had some people from New Jersey, recruiting people to work in a farm in New Jersey. The name of that farm escapes me right now, but I know that they were recruiting families to move there. And as it turned out, those people that went there did well and there's still some people there in that area. I really didn't know of anyone that went there and then came back. I only know about it because of what I was able to read in newspapers and ads that they put out.

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