<Begin Segment 22>

RP: Just a few more questions about Manzanar. You went in roughly when you were six or seven years old.

SK: Yes.

RP: And you left about ten, eleven.

SK: Yeah, if it's three years it's gotta be about ten years old, right.

RP: So did Manzanar ever feel like home to you?

SK: Feel like home. I guess so. I mean it was a place that we were living at the time so I would, I imagine I would consider it home, yes.

RP: And what, how were you when you left? I mean, did you feel like a different person after you left than when you went in? Was there something, whether it was felt independent or something else. I mean, I know you were only ten or eleven years old, but...

SK: No, I can't say that I felt any different. I don't think I even realized that anything really went on. I mean, being that young, I don't think I still understood what happened.

RP: What happened and that you were...

SK: Right, I mean and as far as I was concerned, my time there was pretty nice. So, I can't, yeah, I would say it was considered home.

RP: Do you know how your, how you made connections with Seabrook originally?

SK: Oh, yes.

RP: How did you end up going there?

SK: Well, my Uncle Bill and my Auntie Eleanor who is my dad's sister, and my grandfather and grandmother had already gone to Seabrook. They left the camp and went directly to Seabrook. I don't think my dad and mom really knew what they wanted to do at the time. So, anyway, after they were there a few years they, or maybe a year or some, they must have communicated with each other and told my mom and dad to come over to Seabrook. And I think that's when they kind of mulled it over and decided okay, we'll leave Gardena and go to Seabrook Farm. Because my dad really didn't have any kind of a job opportunity here in California. If anything, I would imagine we would have had to gone up to Oregon and work on the farm up there and I don't know if my mom would have wanted to go to Oregon. So, I think that was, after communicating like I said with my aunt and uncle and grandmother and grandfather, the decided to go to New Jersey.

RP: And your dad found work as a mechanic, originally there?

SK: Yes, uh-huh. Well, Seabrook Farm was one of these frozen food company that was doing, frozen food, I mean, making frozen food for Birdseye and they were also doing it for the military at that time and they wanted a whole bunch of hire-ees. And I don't know, I guess they got the impression, or they were impressed by the Japanese people that came over there and was working for them. So they hired a whole bunch of people and Dad had a little bit mechanical experience because of that, what he gained in camp. So he became a mechanic, fixing the conveyor belts and things like that. Yeah, he got hired doing that.

RP: Did he move up at all?

SK: Yes, he, I don't know how many years it took, but he eventually became a supervisor of the conveyor lines, all the maintenance work. He was the, I think, I don't know if he, I don't think it was swing shift. I think it was during the day shift that he worked. Yeah. And Mom, well she worked at the, at the snack bar for I don't know how many years. But she learned how to make those, what they call submarine sandwiches. Which was, I don't think it was known in the West Coast at the time, but it was called submarine sandwiches. Anyway, she did that. Then she became a housekeeper for the single people or single men that lived in dormitories. And eventually she also became a supervisor. Both of 'em were working. And it was comfortable there.

RP: Seabrook, from what I've read and heard from other people, it sounded like a, like an agricultural company town. Like... can you kind of give us a picture of what, what it was like out there? How it was set up? The landscape. There was a huge area devoted to, to actually growing crops.

SK: Yes, you know, well, Seabrook Farms actually was a community like, I'm gonna say, in a way setup like a military barracks. The same way as the buildings were made in camp, at Manzanar. But they weren't made out of lumber. They were cinderblocks. And each building had five, yeah, they had five families in each one of those. And they were kind of made in a circle. All the way, with the community center in the middle. They had a, a shoe shop in one area and then on the other side of the circle they had a school. And then on the other side of that there were some individual homes. But in essence, all the farming that was done for Seabrook was not within the area itself. They did farming all the way down to Maryland. It was, they, they farmed all different areas. And they grew rhubarb, lima beans, beans, and some other vegetable, maybe spinach, I'm not sure. But they canned all those. The person named Seabrook, I guess he was a pretty big farmer at the time or whatever or frozen food company person at that time.

RP: You were making a comparison between what you left at Manzanar a few years earlier and what, how things were set up at Seabrook. Can you, can you describe what, what kind of accommodations did you have within those rooms? How were the rooms set up?

SK: Oh the rooms were, let's see, yeah, in, in each one of those rooms it had three bedrooms. It had three bedrooms, three separate bedrooms. It had a kitchen and it also had a living room or family room, whatever you want to call it. So it was set up nicely. The only thing is it didn't have air-conditioning. Which, you needed in New Jersey in the summertime. It's terrible. The humidity in the East Coast is terrible. Yeah. Without air-conditioning, it's pretty tough. But otherwise it was set up pretty nicely.

RP: So it was quite a step up from, from where you were?

SK: Oh, yes. A lot of difference. Yeah. I, that much I can attest to. I mean, there is no comparison.

<End Segment 22> - Copyright &copy; 2011 Manzanar National Historic Site and Densho. All Rights Reserved.