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MA: And what about your mother? How did she occupy her days?

TN: Well, my mother had a very hard time in Topaz, and the stress of incarceration and being called the enemy, and why was the government doing this? She was a college person, so she knew her rights. It just affected her to the point where she couldn't carry on. She never did recover from that. So my mother was a real casualty of Topaz, and I'm sure there were many others, too.

MA: How did that sort of affect you? I mean, you were a young child at that point.

TN: Right. Well, it made my sister and I grow up fairly fast because without our mother to help us, we had to learn and do many things ourselves, and many things we went without. I mean, like brushing our teeth every day and taking a bath every day, some of those kinds of things we lost out on, because we didn't have people pushing us to do it every day. And even after the war, when we came to Salt Lake, we were, my sister and I were put into an orphanage because my father couldn't quite handle us and finding a job and trying to find a place to live. So we spent a year in St. Anne's orphanage, which by the way is still here, and it's quite a large Catholic church. And my sister and I quite enjoyed that stay there. And when we got out, my father had found this adobe house, this pioneer house that I told you about. It was not much of a house, but we painted it and put a picket fence up and tried to put a lawn in front. It actually looked pretty good from what it was in the beginning, but it was home. It was the only home that we ever had, I mean, except for before the war. And I spent my junior high years there and my high school years, and I had only Caucasian friends. And they were very nice, I mean, some were nicer than others. One time I could, I was standing outside the door and I could hear the mother inside telling his, her son, "See? I told you you shouldn't play with those Japs." But those were far and few between, and we overcame them as kids. You know, kids just judged me for the kid that I am. My growing up days in that adobe house were not unpleasant.

<End Segment 8> - Copyright ©2008 Densho and the Topaz Museum. All Rights Reserved.