<Begin Segment 21>

TI: And, you know, a few weeks ago, I was at a dinner of graduates of the Topaz High School, and it seemed like a pretty close group, I mean, that they stayed together all these years, they have regular reunions. Tell me about your classmates. Were you guys a pretty close-knit group?

NH: Oh yeah, we were a very close-knit group. Well, there were, my group was, we were the nerds, if you want, 'cause we were all in science, and we did a lot of... chemistry and physics classes were, we did all of those, prepared the, keep things in order and prepared experiments for the teachers and so on.

TI: So I'm curious, I have a degree in chemistry and I'm thinking, so when I did chemistry, the experiments you did were with chemicals and different things, Bunsen burners. Did you have all that equipment?

NH: We had not one set for each child, but we had a, kind of a demonstration lab, and then we would demonstrate it, and then there would be one set of everything, and that would have to suffice for the experiment. And then we prepared, "we" means a bunch of kids my age that were interested in it. All of us were boys, Howard and Jim and Nakai, maybe about six or seven of us, and we were in the science lab.

TI: And within a block, the high school block, where would the science lab be located?

NH: Oh, it'd be in the, our science lab was in the laundry room.

TI: Okay, because that area had running water.

NH: We had the water, yeah.

TI: And you could do that. That made sense.

NH: All the barracks part were all regular classrooms, and they, and they, I don't know what they did to 'em, but all the small and big rooms, somehow they were, yeah, the little small rooms on the end were not small anymore, they weren't there. They were huge, big, big, big rooms, and then the two middle rooms, so there were four classrooms per barrack.

TI: And in high school, did they have things like a science club and things like that where...

NH: Well, our group was the science club, yeah.

TI: And did you have, then, a faculty advisor and things like that?

NH: Yeah, uh-huh. Joe Goodman, Dr. Goodman was our, was our advisor.

TI: And so as the science club, you were able to do, like, do extra experiments and things like that?

NH: Oh, we did all the experiments, yeah. We did all the experiments ahead of time, and then we had fun. And then we even had some biology stuff, too, but we didn't do any, I don't think we did any dissections or anything, but we did have some.

TI: So it sounds like --

NH: We did look through microscopes, though, we had a few microscopes. Not one for every student, but four or five of them that I recall.

<End Segment 21> - Copyright ©2008 Densho and the Topaz Museum. All Rights Reserved.