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JH: And what I remember mostly about the Pinedale Assembly Center was that we couldn't, we didn't have any money, no way of earning money at first, and so we had to beg money from our parents, whatever little they had. And I remember my mother giving me fifty cents to go and buy something at the canteen. Then soon we had the opportunity to find work in the camp so that I remember my first job was washing dishes for eight dollars a month. And the rest of the time we sort of ran around in gangs. Because of my very strict Christian upbringing, of course, we weren't allowed to smoke or drink or anything else. We weren't even allowed to play cards because cards was connected to gambling and things like that. So I didn't learn how to play cards until I went into camp. Learned how to play rummy and pinochle and things like that. Then it got so that I was not going home except at night. Now, the barracks in Pinedale, the walls went up only to the rafters. And there was no ceiling so you could hear all the other families right down the entire length of the barracks. And I depended upon that to keep my mother from reprimanding me whenever I got into trouble. So I would just come in late at night whenever I felt like coming back home to sleep. You had to do that because that's the only place you could sleep. And then one time, my mother figured that I was getting out of control, so without further adieu, she gave me hell and all the neighbors heard, but that was the way it was. And she was trying to maintain her control.

Other than that, the main thing I remember is playing ball. So we organized baseball leagues, and my friends and I spent a lot of time playing ball. We -- after about three months or so in the assembly center, we got back onto the train and were shipped up to Tule Lake, California, where the permanent camp was being set up. And there I just remember fooling around a lot in gangs. I got a job working with the building crew. The barracks were not finished in Tule so that there was a lot of sheet rock piled up in big piles. And our job was to pile the sheet rock onto trucks which would take 'em to the individual barracks. And my friends and I would hide in the piles of sheet rock and play cards, and things like that, fool around. And we again started out doing sports activities, so there were sports teams, leagues, according to ages and so on. Well, my friends and I were also interested in track so we were wanting to fix up a pole vaulting pole and a standard for doing pole vaulting. So we went to the local, they were building a big building, to, I think they were going to make a camouflage factory there, so they had lumber. So we waited until noontime when all the workers are laid off -- I mean, were eating, and then we stole a long piece of 2 x 4 and my friend and I grabbed this 2 x 4 and jumped into an empty irrigation ditch and we were walking away when he dropped his end and I says, "What's the matter?" And he says, "The guard saw us." And I says, "Well, so what? Grab your end and let's go." And he says, "But he blew his whistle." And I says, "What?" And we dropped the 2 x 4 and we ran off. But we went off, we went back later on when the workers were there and got even a longer piece and the workers didn't care so we got our equipment and we built our pole vault pole and standards and we did things like that.

And at night, what we would do is just for entertainment was to hassle the girls and we knew that they would have to go to the bathroom in the evening. So that what we'd do is get some black gum and we'd chew gum and we'd blacken out some of our teeth. And we'd put towels under our sweaters to make us look like real husky hoodlums and wear a hat and we'd go creeping around the corner and scare the girls. We did things like that to entertain ourselves.

Then pretty soon school started. And the school, of course, we didn't have regular teachers, we didn't have enough chairs, we were sitting on the floors, no blackboards, no paper, no books, nothing. And so I remember taking a typing class and I never saw a typewriter. And what we did was we drew circles onto a piece of paper and practiced typing that way. Then soon the school was shut down so the students could help harvest potatoes in a local area. And about then, I figured going to school was useless. And some of my parents' friends were signing on doing contract labor in Idaho. So while my parents went up to attend the trial of my brother up in Seattle, I left with some of my father's friends to go to work in Idaho. I skipped school for a year and worked on a farm. And we, soon after my brother's trial ended, my father joined me and then we stayed throughout the winter. And then the subsequent year, in the spring, my mother and younger sister and younger brother joined us in Idaho. Then the subsequent year, I went to my junior year in a town called Weiser in Idaho.

<End Segment 9> - Copyright © 1992, 2003 Densho and Emiko Omori. All Rights Reserved.