<Begin Segment 10>

[Location: Outdoors in Clovis, New Mexico, near the railyard.]

AR: -- two hundred yards or so from where we estimate that the Japanese colony of was of Clovis, right? And there's, we've been over there, there's not much left, but if somebody came here in 1938 or something, what would they have seen when they, when they went to the Japanese colony, like in terms of buildings and such?

RE: Right now I'm standing in part of the cattle grazing field that was there. It was quite expansive out there. If you look back in the background there was, there were of course no telephone poles or anything of that sort but there was a huge, huge barrier like fencing that was about 20 feet high that sort of kept people away from our Japanese camp that was established way out over there. It sort of gave us some privacy. Sort of... it just defined where we were out there, of course. And us kids, we used to come out here and pick cactus or catch tarantulas or things of that sort, but this was our playground, so to speak, as kids in here.

AR: All right. Can you, in as much detail as possible, describe the interior of your home, various rooms, amenities like plumbing or electricity, heating system, the decor, the smells, the size, the size of the place and maybe the sleeping arrangements?

RE: Yeah, our house was rather a small house, probably at most three bedrooms. I think it was really two bedrooms where all of us were sort of packed in there, just to sleep in.

AR: How many kids again?

RE: There were... actually to begin with, there were ten of us. But by the time I came along in my mother and dad's life, there were eight of us surviving. So pretty much we lived there, and then in 1938 my brother left. However, there were no indoor plumbing so to speak so we had an outhouse adjacent to the house. There was, electricity came along in the mid-'30s, if I'm not mistaken. And there was running water, of course, I guess, you know, you pump the water from a thing and so it was rather crude. The floors were made out of boards, you know, and you could tell it was warped in places so you had to be careful you didn't stumble over here and there. There was a small living room, probably no more than eight feet by eight feet, so to speak.

AR: Wood heat, or wood stoves for heat?

RE: Uh-huh, we had wood stove, coal burning stove. Us kids used to go pick up loose coals from the railroad yard in the pails here and there and we would pick them up and then we'd bring them home and of course we picked up cow chips out in the field to... they worked both as fertilizer and of course we threw them in, my mother threw them in the stove they kept us pretty much warm throughout the cold nights. Yes, and there was a chicken coop nearby and that's where we got our eggs.

AR: Was there much decor on the walls and was it Japanese in flavor?

RE: No, everything was rather simple. It was just a very, very modest little home. Of course we lived outside the Japanese compound so to speak and everybody else lived in the... these sort of prefab type, prefab like structures.

<End Segment 10> - Copyright © 2008 New Mexico JACL and Densho. All Rights Reserved.