<Begin Segment 22>

TI: Okay, so when you, when your family decided to go from Tule Lake to someplace else, when you went to Jerome, were you one of the first families to leave, or had other families already left?

BK: I think there were quite a few, but then being that Jerome was already settled, and so they put us, not together, but all different blocks. So that was kind of sad, and then we were only there, I think, six weeks.

TI: Okay, so you went to Jerome. But before we move on to Rohwer, what was Jerome like? What was your first impression of Jerome?

BK: That there was a cute guy named Roy. [Laughs]

TI: And so who was Roy? Where did you see Roy?

BK: He was in our block. But there was only, we were only there for about six weeks, because my brother said he heard that Jerome was gonna close. So we moved on to Rohwer, 'cause Rohwer was gonna stay open 'til the very end.

TI: Now, so Jerome and Rohwer were pretty close to each other.

BK: Uh-huh, about maybe ten miles.

TI: Yeah, were there very many differences between Jerome and Rohwer when you went to one versus the other?

BK: I don't know too much about Jerome other than what I was telling my friend about, you know, being driven in a truck and all this dust coming up from the back. And then he said, "I might have been the driver." [Laughs]

TI: So you were just, maybe driving a little bit too fast and kicking up the dust.

BK: Yeah.

TI: How about the weather in Arkansas versus Tule Lake?

BK: Oh, it's a different kind of weather. It's like sleet, it's rain and ice, it was real, real cold weather.

TI: And so how long were you in Arkansas? You were, what, you said six months, or six weeks in Jerome?

BK: Six weeks in Jerome, and until the camp closed in September, I think.

TI: So about how long would that have been?

BK: I don't know.

TI: Okay. But were you there long enough for a whole year or was it less than a year?

BK: Yeah, I went to school in Rohwer. And towards the end, when people started leaving, I was the church secretary, I mean, the camp, block secretary for a while, and I even taught third grade school. And I said, "I'm not even a teacher, I'm only fifteen." I was fifteen or sixteen at the time. But then since everybody was leaving, they needed somebody to teach summer school.

<End Segment 22> - Copyright (c) 2009 Densho and Preserving California's Japantowns. All Rights Reserved.