<Begin Segment 27>

MU: Anything else that happened there that was of particular interest to you?

HW: Of, of interest?

MU: Yeah.

HW: Well...

MU: I mean that you remember?

HW: Oh yeah. There, there are number of things. One is that we had a PX system. I'll tell you about that later. And then, this was -- we got there in end of August and fall was coming in. There's change of uniform coming up, away from khakis to wools. And there were no dry cleaning facilities available in the whole...

MU: Pardon me?

HW: No dry cleaning facilities available.

MU: Oh, no dry cleaning, uh-huh.

HW: So I got with the laundry staff and took out my woolens and asked them to wash them. I said, "Use 120 degree water, no hotter, wash and iron 'em and I wanna see 'em when you're done." And it didn't shrink. So I said, "Okay, what we're going to do, because there is no dry cleaning, we're gonna offer all these colonels and so forth, washing. And I put a sign out, 'At your risk' it said on there. But we are going to wash in 120 degree water -- "if you want your woolens..." Everything went fine for about a month, and then one operator put in 180 degree water.

MU: Uh-oh.

HW: All the colonel's, that load of colonel's clothing, colonels, majors -- shrunk. And they would come up to the desk and, I didn't hide, I just stayed at the desk, because I knew it was coming. And I point up to the sign that says, "At your risk." [Laughs] "I'm sorry, but they made a mistake."

MU: Well, all they had to do was get re-issue.

HW: Yeah. Yeah, that's right. It was some kind of a bother, but they were really hot. That's -- that's one of the things. There were other laundry -- I mean, tailoring. We asked the Japanese to go out and scour the city for sewing machines and so forth. And set up a tailor shop, because we were gonna have to have all these uniforms altered, if they get new stuff. So they did. They found six sewing machines and set up a tailor shop.

<End Segment 27> - Copyright © 1997 Densho. All Rights Reserved.