<Begin Segment 10>

MA: And what type of work did you end up doing in Topaz? You had an interesting job.

CY: Yes, I had a very interesting job. Well, they recruited me, they, I don't know how they, I got recruited, but the project director called me and asked me to, he needed some kind of record for me, so for me to set up the office. And they called it the Central Statistics.

MA: And what did they do in that office?

CY: Well, we knew everybody who came in, and so he didn't tell me how to do it, he just said, "There's no way of knowing who came in Friday, who came in Monday and where they went." So we had to have a record right away. So we got a list of the people that they brought in on a certain day, and then from there, we didn't have anything like a computer, it was all by hand. And so we had several people helping me, and we made the last name, first name, date of birth and age, and where, what barracks they were assigned to. So we had to do that very quickly because then we put them into alphabetical order so that we could find them, but that's what kind of job we did.

MA: So it was like, kind of a census of all the people in camp?

CY: Census, uh-huh.

MA: And what did they do with, what did the WRA do with this information? Just kind of kept it for --

CY: Oh, they had offices in Washington, D.C., they called it the Statistics Department, and it was run by Mrs. Fern French, she was a U.S. Berkeley statistician, a college professor, I guess, and they recruited her ideas immediately. And then they had another, two other assistants, one was Evelyn Rose, I remember I worked under her. And then they asked me to go to Washington, D.C., and I went to Washington, D.C., for three months.

MA: And this was during the war?

CY: During, while I was in camp. And so that's why I came back, because I was already, after I was married, and I was pregnant. And so I went back to Washington, D.C., and I came back to join my mother and my father, because my husband was already recruited for OSS.

MA: Okay, so you went to D.C., this was after...

CY: After I got married.

MA: ...you had married and everything, okay. So before that, though, you were working --

CY: At Central Statistics all that time.

MA: Right. And you were working pretty closely with the director Ernst?

CY: Uh-huh, Ernst, Charles (...). So when I went to Seattle to come to, go to Japan to join my husband, he was in Seattle with the Social Security Administration. So many of those workers there were hired through the social, they were former employees, these temporarily were loaned to the War Relocation Authority, it was all civil service jobs. So they took workers from one office to another to set it up because they didn't have time to train them. They had to know what, use their good judgment as to how, they had a set of rules of what they wanted, but then they had to set up their ideas. Mr. Ernst was one of the very good project directors.

MA: So you had a, a pretty good relationship with...

CY: Oh yes, I had a very good relationship with him.

MA: And who, how many people worked in your office, how many internees, I guess?

CY: There must have been about ten of us.

MA: And all had sort of been recruited like you?

CY: Then they had an employment office, and we would request workers for this office and that office. And I remember... and the person who was the recruiting office was an interesting man. He was the brother of the director of the Mormon Tabernacle Choir, and so he told me that any time I was in Salt Lake City, let him know. So I did, I heard the Mormon Tabernacle Choir several times after the war, but I heard them last time I was there. But one time I went and they were on a tour, and so they didn't have it.

MA: So when you were, then working -- you were one of the first people, then, to start working in this office.

CY: Uh-huh.

MA: So as people sort of arrived and got settled and you finished your census of people arriving, what type of work did you do? Kind of tracking what they were doing...

CY: Yeah, we had to constantly, people would be dying or going, being born, so it was a constant work.

MA: And how would you get the information, like, of weddings or deaths or births?

CY: Oh. For births and deaths it was easy because it came from the hospital, camp hospital. But, but births, weddings, too, you had to get a permit to leave, to get a permit, marriage license to the county seat of that place, people who went to, and you had to have a reason to leave. And so you knew right away that they were getting married.

MA: So you would, okay, so you would get, like, reports every once in a while from the camp hospital and then compile all that information, and then send it on to Washington, D.C. where they had a central office?

CY: Uh-huh.

MA: That's really, that's interesting.

CY: And it was a big operation because we had to do everything by hand. And then in that book, there's a, they called it the "Tree of Topaz," do you know about that? I made a tree, the top was small and the bottom, and then the, right around when they're seventeen to twenty-five was big, and then the little ones are born down here. So then you cut that tree in half vertically, and then it became like a key because the key is like this. And so they, Mr. Ernst used to give that to visitors that came to see Topaz, it's the "Key to Topaz." And it's in that book that was written by the, Sandra something, the professor from, history professor from UC Utah.

MA: University of Utah?

CY: Uh-huh.

MA: Wow, that's... so you mentioned Director Ernst would give that to visitors who would come? Like people from the WRA central office?

CY: People who visited... well, there weren't that many visitors, but he cut that in half and he used to call that the "Key of Topaz."

MA: So then your office was really in charge of all the information about the internees in Topaz.

CY: Uh-huh. We had, we knew everything about a person. It was a very confidential job. I couldn't, we didn't go out talking about who was this and who was that, otherwise we'd get into trouble. [Laughs]

MA: But an important job.

CY: Very important job.

<End Segment 10> - Copyright ©2008 Densho and the Topaz Museum. All Rights Reserved.