<Begin Segment 8>

RP: And where did you end up in Santa Anita originally?

MK: Because they didn't know where else to put us. Tanforan was not existing then.

RP: You were in the horse stalls for a while.

MK: We were in the horse stalls and then because my sister needed to be close to the hospital they moved us to barracks that they erected in the parking lot.

RP: And where was the hospital located?

MK: The jockey accommodations. That was the hospital. And there were quite a few doctors already and nurses and they more or less worked around the clock when it was necessary. But we all got our typhoid shots and everything else.

RP: And you got those at Santa Anita?

MK: Yeah.

RP: Okay.

MK: But it's a wonder we didn't have more illnesses running through the camp. But we didn't. I can just remember one, it was either scarlet fever or whooping cough and it was just one barrack. And they were isolated.

RP: Can you, you spent some time at Santa Anita working?

MK: Yeah. 'Cause I was sixteen. You're allowed to work. And they had these little structures they put up and called 'em milk stations and we provided the mothers with baby food and formula. And then as the, they shut down... as they moved the people out to the Midwest or what have you, Colorado and so forth, I went to work in the mess hall.

RP: Oh, the orange mess hall?

MK: Yeah. But we didn't, I mean you went through the line to get your food so we didn't have to serve the food. We just had to pick up after people. But you're young, you can do it.

RP: You also were a pretty avid reader too, weren't you?

MK: What?

RP: You were a pretty avid reader. You said you kind of parked in the library.

MK: Because there was nothing else to do. There was no school in Santa Anita. And then by the time we got to Topaz they were setting up school already there. And we had some very good teachers. We had some that weren't so good. Anybody who had some college education was... like my husband, he taught history and math.

RP: And that was after camp?

MK: At camp.

RP: At camp?

MK: At camp.

RP: Oh, in Topaz. No not... where was it?

MK: I mean, not everybody had teacher credential but if they were capable they, they taught. Well, just like, oh, I can't remember his name right off, Obata or something like that, out of Berkeley, he taught art, he taught art in camp while he was there. And we had at our church we had a man who was a very good tailor. And he taught sewing. And our choir leader was somebody who was a music major. He was very good at the job too. And we had, I think it was pretty good. There were a lot of subjects covered.

RP: Now your husband's experience was a little different. He went to Tanforan, didn't he?

MK: He went to camp later, toward the end of April I think. But he went to Tanforan. By that time they were using the horse stalls at Tanforan. And then, and most of the Bay Area people went straight to Topaz, Utah, from there. It was like forty barracks. We had school. There was a hospital set up. They had separate barracks for the people who came into, the Caucasians who came in to work. But I give them credit for going to the camps though. Because it was isolated and I'm sure their food was better but outside of that they had to put up with all the winter, hard winters and snow and dust storms and everything else that we did.

RP: The San Francisco group really had some serious adaptations to make coming from the Bay Area.

MK: We never saw snow until we went to Utah. And I didn't know what a dust storm was until it blew there. Yeah. But you know, being young you learn to cope with a lot of things and adapt to it all. It was much easier for say my age group and the schoolchildren more than the older ones.

RP: The older people.

<End Segment 8> - Copyright &copy; 2011 Manzanar National Historic Site and Densho. All Rights Reserved.