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RP: Now, your mother worked in the mess hall.

MN: My mother, yes.

RP: She was a cook.

MN: She worked as a junior cook, right. And she was, she's always, she was a good cook anyway. She did all the cooking. In fact, she used to, to try to save pennies and to make ends meet, she would every year, even at home, make a whole year's supply of strawberry jam and orange marmalade, and we'd have this cooler, ice cooler, I mean a cooler place, and she would just, every year she had to do that. She went to work as a junior cook and get up early in the morning, crack of dawn, when it's just very cold, and walk down in the snow, down to the mess hall. Bundled up, you know. She did.

RP: We haven't heard of too many women cooks in the camp.

MN: She did, and what she did was, she got along with the cook, apparently, but she had to also, some of the boys that were delivering food --

RP: Like Fred Nagai?

MN: Yeah. [Laughs] And my brother-in-law, he would, later became my brother-in-law, Bob Uragami -- he's a Terminal Island fellow -- they were on the food crew. And they would just take a sack of whatever and just throw it into the, on the floor. And from the truck, the truck was open, and I know that they would, so then my mother thought, well this is terrible, because sometimes the bags would break and things would be all over. You have to haul 'em and put 'em where they're supposed to be. So she said, the cook, he didn't know what to do, the main cook, so she says, "I'll go talk to them." And she did. She didn't go after them, but she did talk to them, had a good talking. Well, they, and she offered 'em, she says, "You treat us good, I'll treat you good too. I'll feed you." [Laughs] And so it wasn't gonna cost her anything for the food, but she made sure that they got to eat something good, so they got really, really treated well. Instead of throwing things, they brought things, put 'em where they wanted it. She said no, she wasn't afraid of them San Pedro. They later found out, after we got settled over here, "That was your mother?" And I says yes. [Laughs] "Oh." But living in the, I mean, being in the same camp, you never know where you're gonna end up later.

RP: Where you're gonna end up.

MN: It's a small world. But she worked there, then she went to, some of her -- I don't know if it was her day off or what -- she'd go to knitting class. She always liked, she used to sew. She sewed a lot of our clothes and things. But she went to knitting class, and that was her, irony of that is she is the daughter of, the daughter is now married to Frank Kageyama, the guayule...

RP: Guayule guy.

MN: That's, it was Keiko's mother that was, had the knitting classes. She made how many sweaters for us. It was cold, so she got, we ordered some flannel and so she made robes for us, my mother, and then she knitted, I think, two sweaters each for us, nice boxy sweaters. I still have the sweater that she knit for us. She did.

RP: So was a sewing machine available to...

MN: No, it wasn't available. She, I don't know if we had a sewing machine or not, brought up to us. I think we did, a little tiny one. But she did a lot of hand sewing. And the knitting, well, the yarn, she was able to get it through one of our friends that would, we'd tell her what she needed and then she would send it up to us. So she kept herself busy, 'cause this was her life. She never, she didn't like to just stay put. Even when she came back down here, worked in the fields again and then opened up a flower shop up here on Los Feliz again. But she did meet the San Pedro boys, and she said, "I'm not afraid of them." [Laughs]

RP: Did the, did the appearance of guard towers and barbed wire fence affect you at all emotionally in camp?

MN: Well, you feel kind of closed in or caged in like. We're restricted, in other words. Here, there isn't anything like it. We didn't even have fences between neighbors. But then you see the guards, and as long as we didn't bother them, I mean, they just kind of didn't say anything to us, you know?

<End Segment 15> - Copyright &copy; 2011 Manzanar National Historic Site and Densho. All Rights Reserved.