<Begin Segment 26>

KL: This is tape three, our last tape of a continuing interview with the Johnston family. We were gonna talk a little bit about some of the exhibits and stuff that have happened about Rohwer and about Jerome, and I want to start off by asking you to tell us about Rosalie Gould and your connection to her.

DW: I actually know Rosalie through her sister-in-law, Barbara Gould. Barbara and I were contemporaries in age and friends because she lived in Rohwer and I was there in the camp and our parents knew each other and all of that connection. Rosalie was Barbara's older brother.

WJ: Wife.

DW: Huh?

WJ: She was the wife of Barbara's older brother.

DW: What did I say?

WJ: You said she was her older brother.

DW: [Laughs] Wife of the older brother, yes. And there was probably a ten-year gap. I remember, my memory of Rosalie was she was Italian, and tall and slim and just gorgeous and sophisticated, and I thought she was the... I'd like to grow up to be like Rosalie. And so that's really all I knew about her since she was Joe Jr's wife. And they didn't have any children at the time I knew her, but I would go back and see Barbara. But anyway, when Barbara sent me, Barbara and I... well, you want the story? We told you the story of how we found, how Barbara and I found each other again. Didn't we tell that already?

WJ: Not on tape, I don't think.

DW: Oh, that might not have been on tape. Jim is on the (Board of Directors of the Arkansas) Delta Dental Association. It turns out -- this is hindsight coming forward. Her son, Barbara Gould's son's (wife), is on the board with Jim, but his name is Smith, last name. So one time they're talking, and something comes up, maybe McGehee was mentioned.

JJ: He was going back to McGehee to their farm to do some, they'd had a tornado, had some damage, and he was going back. And so he mentioned McGehee, I just, Barbara Gould came to mind because I knew, and Joe Stroud, and I just asked him if he happened to know Barbara Gould or Joe Stroud. And he looked at me really strange and said, "Barbara Gould is my mother." [Laughs] So it was a small world.

DW: Yeah, because this, we're going back to her visiting with these two friends, we stopped when we were junior high, high school, something, you know. And so we haven't seen each other in all these years. Anyway, this gets back to Barbara, and she gets in touch with me, and then she sent me this book that she picked up at the Butler Center. And inside, she couldn't remember, but she just wrote a note, "Do you recognize anyone?" And Rosalie, of course, is in the room with the organizers and getting all this stuff together, and then the art teacher. But I don't recognize her because she worked with the high school, and so I don't have any...

KL: Uh-huh, and her name was Jamie Vogel.

DW: Jamie Vogel, and she left all her collection to Rosalie. And I just know that when I left, Rosalie was still living out on the plantation there at Rohwer, there were two houses they lived in. One had been Barbara and Joe's grandmother's house, right next door, but they were young married --

KL: What was the name of that plantation again? I don't know if you said it earlier or not.

DW: You know, I don't know whether it...

WJ: I don't remember the name other than Gould.

DW: Gould, I think. Yeah, their last name was Gould and I think it was the Gould Plantation. But I saw something just recently, and maybe in some of this stuff, they had a name of a plantation.

KL: Yeah, there was farm...

DW: What was that? Yeah, it was something that we had that you read. It didn't ring a bell.

KL: Your dad writes about Kelso Farms, close to eight thousand acres of the Rohwer site. And a lot of the rest of it was Farm Security Administration.

WJ: Kelso Farms, of course, that's the town where we went...

DW: That's where we went to school. It was north of Joe Gould's property, and so it would not have been the same. I think it was just the Gould Plantation.

JJ: And there was a little town of Gould.

DW: No, that was Rohwer.

WJ: That was the same thing.

JJ: I thought there was --

WJ: There is a Gould, Arkansas, but that's not it.

DW: No, that little store and a little gas station and the post office, that's Rohwer.

JJ: I thought that was Gould and then Rohwer was just...

WJ: Just the camp.

JJ: The relocation camp.

DW: Well, you know, one or two times I thought that, too, it's just because Joe owned all of it.

KL: Yeah, maybe they just called it Gould store or something.

DW: They might have, because he owned all the stuff. But that was, they didn't even have a post office there, that was Rohwer.

WJ: Yeah, that's where the train would stop in Rohwer at the camp. But if you were on the train riding by, there wasn't anything saying Rohwer, until you got to the little town of Rohwer, and then there was a little...

JJ: Well, my memory was bad there. I don't know why...

DW: Well, when I went to see Barbara and you went to see Joe, did we have to get off the train...

WJ: The train had ceased to stop at Rohwer at that time. You got off at McGehee --

DW: I think we got off at Rohwer at one time.

WJ: We got off at Kelso. The train still stopped Kelso.

DW: Kelso, and they wouldn't meet us there.

WJ: It didn't stop at McArthur --

DW: No, it didn't.

WJ: -- or Rohwer.

DW: Or Rohwer.

WJ: And I'd ride on to McGehee and get out and then Joe Stroud --

DW: Oh, you got out at McGehee then.

WJ: Yeah. Now, that was the list couple trips when was older. When I was younger we would both get off together.

DW: And somebody would come get us.

WJ: Stroud would have just have to drive and come get us in Kelso.

DW: But yeah, I remember getting off this train out in the middle of nowhere. I mean, there's fields, and you're getting off the train.

KL: What stop was that? What it was called?

DW: That was called Kelso. The same, the farms, and the little school.

WJ: I think it was, there was a little store or something, it was always closed, boarded up.

DW: Well, probably they kept one stop in that whole area to change passengers or whatever.

WJ: Well, there were no change passengers.

DW: I mean to get on. Somebody might get on.

WJ: Yeah, somebody might get on, somebody might get off. The little school we went to was back... Nita and I tried to find the school, I could not find the school. I'm sure it's not there. But I thought I could just drive on this road, and I remember coming up on a hill...

DW: I wouldn't have that ambition.

WJ: Because I wanted to go locate where it was, we couldn't do it.

<End Segment 26> - Copyright © 2012 Manzanar National Historic Site and Densho. All Rights Reserved.