<Begin Segment 19>

TI: Earlier you, you mentioned Mr. Davis with the sugar company, and there's a point where someone wanted to go visit Heart Mountain and he helped make this happen. Can you tell that story?

LH: Okay. Sam Kanemoto, he's the oldest of the Kanemotos and, and his daughter is my best friend. We're, his son is my brother's, we're all friends. He, it got, he thought about it and so he asked Mr. Davis and Mr. Davis evidently said yes, and so for some reason I got to go. My brother, and I can't remember if he went, too, but I don't remember, but anyway, so his family, he had one son and two daughters, Marie, Rosie, and myself, so we, and he had a new Chrysler New Yorker. He had bought that just before the war started, so it was a big car. Anyway, Mr. Davis arranged to get the green -- not the green stamp, but the stamps, for gas stamp -- so we could go to Heart Mountain. I thought that was really nice of him. And I don't know why it was just us, Maybe it was because he's the only one that asked. Anyway, so I, we went through Yellowstone, which was an experience, and then we went through Billings and then got to Heart Mountain. And I had a good time there. I mean, I didn't go to any, I didn't see any dances or anything. I just went to visit my old schoolmates and family friends, and I don't know if you know the Ichishitas, but there the one's I said had a laundry on First Street, South First Street, and I knew them, so I stayed with them. And the Kanemotos stayed with their friends. So I got to visit my girlfriends from school and family friends, and the one family I remembered was my father's friend. He told me to look them up and it was someone he knew in Los Angeles and they lived in the opposite corner from where I was. We walked down there and he had a rock polisher. He collected these rocks and he polished them, and so he had big ones and little ones. They were works of art. I mean, they, I don't know what the rocks were, but I know there's such a thing as agate and whatever there is around there, but that was his hobby, I guess, while he was in Heart Mountain, because a lot of people developed hobbies because they didn't have to do anything, no work unless you went down to the farm area. But anyway, that and then the girls, the Ichishita girls are sewing all these Hawaiian shirts and they were knitting and crocheting and things that I never got to learn to do and I envied them so much. [Laughs] Anyway, and like I said, I used to wish somebody would adopt me from there so I didn't have to go back. Isn't that terrible? But anyway --

TI: Because from your perspective you had to work a lot harder and didn't have free time to do these kind of things?

LH: Right.

TI: And you're just a teenage girl.

LH: [Laughs] Right.

SF: So did you ever feel that you wished your family had waited to be evacuated?

LH: No, I never thought that. No. I guess in my brain I just, like they did, we just accepted whatever was there and we did it. And like I said, it was just wishful thinking about camp, because they didn't have to work and I, in my heart I knew I had to go back. So I envied them, and then I had girlfriends in other camps, too, and they used to send me, I think it was Tule Lake, no, the one in Utah. They used to make these carved birds and they'd send it, and I thought they could do these things which we didn't have time to do. But that's alright. Everybody had their own experience. We had ours. And like I said, after the, the turkey processing we went to Salt Lake City to work. So that was...

<End Segment 19> - Copyright © 2010 Densho. All Rights Reserved.