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SO: Can you talk about how the community changed after Pearl Harbor?

EY: Well, after Pearl Harbor things quieted down quite a bit and they did have what you called a curfew where we were not allowed to stay out late. However, we had a group of boys that used to play basketball, practice basketball, oh, once a week. And then after basketball practice we would stop in my dad's store, buy a pop, a soda pop, and go up to the third floor of the church and draw the blinds and play cards until 11 o'clock and then after that, we were a bunch of young kids and, "Say, Joe, you sneak out first. Hey, Tom, you go out, sneak out next." [Laughs] And that's the way we got around thinking, a little mysterious effect on the situation, it was a little fun thing, exciting.

SO: And once the evacuation started, what was the sequence of events?

EY: Well, my parents had to sell most of his, just about all of his grocery, and eventually they ended up with a co-op, people coming in, buying up the whole supply of grocery that we had at one-tenth of the cost. And then my mother would say, "We're going to have steak dinner tonight because this is the last time we're going to have steak." And so we had our steak dinner and then we packed up and went to an assembly center called Walerga.

SO: But before, what about your possessions?

EY: Oh, our possessions, we did have a washing machine and a few other things that we stored in the church basement which was right across the street. And the church is the Japanese Methodist Epworth Church we often called ME Kyokai, for Methodist Epworth Church. Anyway, we stored all our big items in the basement there. And all we can do is whatever we can carry is all we could take with us.

<End Segment 4> - Copyright ©2009 Densho and the Twin Cities JACL. All Rights Reserved.