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MA: And so then tell me about your high school and your high school experiences.

HT: My high school was really fun. We took the bus and went. And my freshman, sophomore, I took three years of Spanish. I could speak a little bit, but that's about it. And then in the junior year I became, the teacher selected me as the athletic director. And then I used to cut the, get released from each class to go to the PE department to get teams. They would really work hard to see if I would choose them. It was fun. And then you'd form, and then they used to have tournaments and stuff. It was really, really fun. A fun time for me.

MA: And you were involved in sports yourself?

HT: Yes, I was. I just loved it. And then in those days nobody had cars. There was one guy that had a car. But he couldn't drive it there. And that's about it. But it was a fun time in high school, it really was. Everybody was friendly and the time that Pearl Harbor came, that it happened on a Sunday and I didn't want to go to school. My dad and mom said, "You have to go to school." So we went. The first day was, they had, everybody was in the auditorium listening to President Roosevelt, "Day of Infamy." And then the next class was my social studies class and I could still remember his name was Mr. Woodcock. And we went in, and he said, "Today we are not going to study. We are going to talk about what happened. And I don't want anybody to talk bad about Helen. She is an American citizen and she has nothing to do with this." And I just, just had tears in my eyes and everybody was nice to me. We were, we all got along real well. Whether they talked bad about me around somebody else... but we did talk about that and I thought to myself, "What a thing to say." Because everybody was against us. They thought we had something to do with it. We did not.

MA: But you felt that in your high school people understood.

HT: They understood and they were really good. They had me running for next year. They wanted to have me as secretary and everything, but I couldn't do it because we were evacuated and sent to camp.

MA: So how many -- I'm trying to understand your high school -- and how many Niseis were there? How many white students?

HT: There were quite a few Niseis there. And then they were quite smart. In fact, some of them were valedictorians or whatever. And then there was, we all got along real good. I don't know what it, what was it. There weren't any other, there weren't any blacks, I remember, I don't think there was any blacks.

MA: But there were like Mexicans?

HT: There were some Mexicans, yeah. And I had a, yeah, two of my real good friends were Mexican, the Villanovas. And then they had a real, they had a sort of like a reunion and they invited me to come later on. And I couldn't go because my husband had a stroke that time it was so hard. And then I told the person, she was my real pal in school and I said, "Be sure to tell these people, if they come, tell them that I said hello to them." They were really, we all got along good. We did.

MA: And at the time, when you were in high school, what were your, what were you thinking about the future? And what were your goals, your dreams for the future?

HT: Well, I wanted to be in business. I wanted to be... because I took shorthand, I took, all ready to go because I knew we couldn't afford to go to college. And then I thought to myself, why go to college when you graduate? You're not going to get a job. In those days, they had college degrees and they were working as a gardener or whatever. It isn't like today. But my sister was the one. Her real good friend went into that and she was earning good money. So that's, that's the way I learned it.

MA: But when you were younger it seems like...

HT: I wanted to be a teacher. I really wanted to be a teacher or a nurse. And my sister, to this day, she said, "Helen, I don't think you are going to be a teacher. You would be taking all the stuff for the kids that can't afford it or you would bring all the sick people home." [Laughs] She knows how I felt. I certainly would have done that. She was a nurse. She has a different personality. You have to have that kind of personality, she said. She was a very good nurse. But she said if you felt sorry for every one of them, you're not going to survive. But probably I don't think I could have done it, come to think of it. 'Cause I'm always so sad.

<End Segment 7> - Copyright ©2009 Densho and the Twin Cities JACL. All Rights Reserved.