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MN: What were some of first jobs that you had at Manzanar?

SO: Well, these were summer jobs, more or less, and my first job that I can remember was a junior cook. I worked in the kitchen chopping the vegetables, lettuce and, you know, for salads. Then the second job I worked delivering oil. I remember working in the camouflage, weaving nets.

MN: Before we go on to camouflage, tell me a little bit about delivering oil. Was this delivered in a truck?

SO: No. At the end of each block they had these oil tanks that were filled by different oil trucks, and we'd have these five gallon cans that we'd fill and load onto a little hand truck, and we'd pull that around and... you know, the apartments didn't have any oil, or locks on them, and some people who were trusting, we'd just walk in the door and fill their heaters. And others, they'd have, I don't know where they got 'em, but they had five gallon containers, glass containers set up outside of their apartments, and we'd fill those. So that's how we delivered oil. There were three of us.

MN: And was this the entire camp?

SO: No, no. It was, each block had their own delivery service.

MN: So how many blocks did you, you did your own block?

SO: No, we just, I did the adjacent block, Block 35 -- 36, rather.

MN: And these are, what are these oils, kerosene oils?

SO: No, it was crude oil.

MN: And then you said you went to the camouflage net.

SO: Yeah, I worked there for a little while.

MN: What was that like?

SO: Well, it was enjoyable. We'd, they'd set a quota of three large nets or five small nets, and I guess a team was maybe four or five persons and what they had was a pattern, and we'd put an empty net in front of the pattern and follow the weave of the pattern. And we used to finish in a half a day. Then we'd play pinochle for the rest of the day to conclude the hours. Then they said we had to work eight hours a day. Well, when we, I think we went on strike and said that if they wanted to work us eight hours a day then they would have to pay us the same as the, same wages as the people that were doing the same thing outside. But they shut it down. I think there were rumors that we were aiding and abetting the Japanese by weaving codes or something into the nets. But anyway, they shut the facility down.

MN: So after this, is this when you went to work for the guayule project?

SO: Yeah. We had a chemistry lab in Block 35, and I was just a gopher. I didn't do any of the experiments or anything, but I helped the chemists out there.

MN: For those who may not be familiar with the guayule project, can you sort of briefly tell us what it was trying to do?

SO: Well, the guayule is a rubber producing shrub, and apparently it makes better, better rubber than the latex. But they had a project going in Manzanar and they had a bigger group that was doing research up in Fresno, I think it was, but the group down in Manzanar were able to propagate the plant from cuttings, which the Fresno group wasn't able to do. They developed a machine to extract more guayule per plant, and it was headed by a physicist that used to teach at University of California, Berkeley, guy named Shimpe Nakamura, and another doctor, which I can't remember his name, Caucasian fellow. Gosh, slips my memory. But anyway, they were responsible for developing the product from the plant, and I think that that product was kind of shot down because the bigger manufacturers of tires, they were developing their own synthetic rubber. But currently I understand that the only thing that they're making from guayule is hypoallergenic surgery gloves, 'cause it's supposedly nontoxic.

<End Segment 13> - Copyright © 2011 Densho. All Rights Reserved.