Densho Digital Archive - Fred Oda Interview (denshovh-ofred

<Begin Segment 19>

TI: What are some other activities that happened in Salinas? So there were baseball games, you had to do things like --

FO: Well, we didn't have much time, because we went in February of '42, and we left July the 4th. So just a matter of so many months.

TI: Oh, so that's ironic. So you left on the Fourth of July?

FO: Yeah, then we left on a train, you know, and they had the train all dark, curtain down. My father got sick, and I had to go find a doctor and trip over everybody. Stuff like that really burned me up, you know. We're going through all this, what for? Then once we reached Arizona, it was 120 degrees, and we left here, you know, in this kind of weather. Oh, boy, it's really too much for people around here. So you see guys from around here walking around with a wet towel on their head, they cut their pants, you know, make shorts. Then you see guys from the valley, they're throwing baseball and stuff out in the, football out in the firebreaks. And find out they're from El Centro, out in the desert country, east of L.A. So they could, nothing to them, but for us it was just... [laughs] yeah, drink lot of ice water.

TI: So the people from this climate in Watsonville, which is pretty temperate...

FO: Yeah, Watsonville, Salinas, Santa Cruz.

TI: It was very different, very dry, hot weather, that was hard.

FO: Then the big dust storm that day, and they told us young guys to volunteer to cook. So I went to help in the mess hall, and then we didn't have no pot cover, so I had to walk to another block to borrow one. And by then, those barracks, they didn't have any covering, just wood, it was so dry, there's cracks all between, the dust all came in and that was end of our okai, full of dust. [Laughs]

TI: Oh, because the dust just got into all the food.

FO: Yeah, just come up from underneath. But after that, the government, they laid linoleum on all the barracks and stuff. But then, it's so dry, the cracks.

TI: So that day, when the dust got in the food, then did people just go hungry that day?

FO: I don't know what we ate that day after that. I wonder if they re-cooked again. Gee, that was really something, the dark, you know, and just that dust.

TI: And so when all this was happening, you said that it kind of burned you up. What were you thinking? I mean, in particular, going back, you left on Independence Day, the Fourth of July, and you're, again, a U.S. citizen being taken away, and you did nothing wrong. Were you thinking about these things?

FO: Huh? Well, no, not at that time. But it'll keep building up. Then our block, too, there used to be an amputee, and those days, I mean, in the latrine, toilets, they had no partition. Just all lined up. So you know how you'd feel if you've got a wooden leg and stuff like that. So he has to go late at night when hardly anybody around and stuff like that. Then I understand that lot of these other camps, too, lot of the ladies, they got cardboard and they made their own partition.

TI: And so for many people, the lack of privacy was really difficult, especially in the latrines and showers. Because you hear lots of stories of, yeah, people using the facilities in the middle of the night.

FO: Then another thing, too, is that guy died, too. He died, a person. And that was just so many months when we went in camp, so nothing organized yet. And the funeral was a sad funeral, huh. But later on, the lady folks started making paper flowers and stuff, kind of halfway decent funeral. But stuff like that, it builds up in you.

TI: Oh, so the very first death in the camp, no one, you just weren't prepared for that, to have things.

FO: Yeah. And really sad, yeah.

TI: Now, was this a person from Watsonville that...

FO: Salinas, yeah.

TI: Salinas. And so there was... and so did they have a service with a reverend or something?

FO: Yeah, yeah.

TI: But no, none of the amenities, and that's why later they did flowers.

FO: Yeah.