<Begin Segment 4>

RD: And what was your first impression of Heart Mountain when you got off the train?

KS: I remember the whole area being very desolate, just sagebrush, desert kind of surrounding, with... just complete emptiness, it was desolation. And here's this one mountain sticking up there, which I found out was called Heart Mountain.

RD: And then you had more barracks, and what did the barracks look like in your first impression?

KS: Like Santa Anita they were all lined up neatly in a row, they were all black tarpaper shacks again. But these surroundings were desolate versus Santa Anita. We're still in the city in Santa Anita with some trees and growth, plants. But Heart Mountain was just a desolate space, there was nothing there.

RD: Do you remember when it first started to snow?

KS: Yes. We had no winter clothes, summer clothes, actually. And it was my first experience with seeing snow.

Off camera: Can you say that one more time? One sec... there you go.

KS: It was my first experience with snow. And I went outside and I grabbed that snow and made a snowball and was snowing it around and eating it and everything. Yeah, I remember that.

RD: It was kind of exciting, huh?

KS: Yeah, first time I felt and tasted and felt the coldness of the snow coming down from the sky.

RD: And then pretty soon you realized how unpleasant it can be, right?

KS: Our first blizzard, oh my gosh. Yeah, it was extremely cold and the blizzards were just terrible.

RD: Do you remember how long it took before your place became comfortable? Because I know everybody worked very hard on their barracks.

KS: Their room, their one family room. Well, my father was gone, of course, and so there were neighbors who helped my mother build a little kitchen table out of scrap wood. And in the center of the camp they had piled all the scrap wood from building the entire camp, so there was a huge pile of scrap wood. So we would all go down there and pick up all we could to build tables, benches, chairs or whatever from that scrap wood. From that scrap wood, I believe our neighbor, Mr. Matsumoto, and some of the other neighbors... there were some bachelors, too, living in the next barrack, and I think they helped build my mother a little table, a kitchen table and some benches, and that was the only furniture we had in the room. One table, two benches and one larger bench, which replaced the living room couch, was a large bench. That was it.

RD: So everybody just had cots, right?

KS: I haven't been in...

RD: I said cots to sleep on.

KS: Oh, yeah. We had the GI cots, the army cots, and the mattresses and the olive drab U.S. Army blankets. And they issued army surplus clothing, and the navy pea jackets, that came in handy because they were big and heavy, and that really did the job out there in the wintertime especially because it was so cold. I remember a lot of the people wearing those black pea jackets. And, of course, everybody started ordering winter clothing from the mail order catalogs, Sears Roebuck or Montgomery Ward and Spiegel. The mail order companies did tremendous business from all of us in all the ten camps. [Laughs]

RD: But how could you pay for everything?

KS: My mother worked, and workers received sixteen dollars a month, and the professionals like doctors and such got nineteen dollars a month. So you had to accumulate and save, and I guess my mom had some money with her, too.

<End Segment 4> - Copyright © 2010 Raechel Donahue and Garrett Lindemann and Densho. All Rights Reserved.