<Begin Segment 11>

KL: When the news broke that the camp was gonna be here in the Owens Valley, do you recall any conversations with or between your parents or at school or any conversations locally about people's thinking?

KP: No, I don't recall anything like that at all.

KL: Did you ever encounter either Japanese Americans or members of the WRA or the army like in Lone Pine or anywhere outside of the camp?

KP: I remember later on a few of them coming to town, but very few.

KL: Japanese Americans?

KP: Yeah.

KL: Did you see them in town?

KP: They probably came to visit, people that came to visit them probably would be distant relatives or something, I don't know whether they were actually allowed out of the camp to come and shop in Lone Pine or not, I don't really understand who they were.

KL: But you saw them?

KP: A few.

KL: What sticks out about those memories? Do you have any sense for how others around you were responding?

KP: No, they seemed to accept them okay. But I'm not really recalling anything about it in particular.

KL: When the camp was being constructed, did you have any interaction with the construction crews?

KP: A little later on I found out different people that had helped build it, but I didn't know at the time that they were actually working up here. The Gamboa family, his brother worked here and helped build the camp.

KL: He did construction?

KP: He did construction, yes.

KL: Did he ever talk to you even later in life about...

KP: No, no.

KL: That was another question I had, who you know who was involved in the camp, and you were talking about...

KP: Well, Frank Gamboa, (descendant of Mexican Americans from and in Lone Pine), could tell you a few things. He lives in Virginia, so he's a little bit inaccessible. He would talk to you on the phone, especially about his father's relationship with the camp. That would be interesting to you, I'm sure.

KL: Are there any other local people you know who were part of the administration or did construction?

KP: No, other than (my cousin) Don Christianson delivering ice up here, my cousin, did deliver ice up here.

KL: What did he say about what it was like to come to the camp?

KP: Well, he, after that he went in the navy and he was in the Pacific, so he wasn't very friendly. [Laughs] He wasn't very friendly about any of it.

KL: Yeah, I guess I wanted to go back to that, how World War II affected your family, if people had to go into the military or if there were blackouts that you recall ever out here this far?

KP: No, not really, not really. We just went on with our lives the best we could. I had uncles that were in the war, of course, several of them were in the war. And they got to come home, fortunately, none of them died in the war, so we felt lucky about that. And my husband was a shade young to go in that. He went to Vietnam -- I mean, not Vietnam, he went to Korea. He was a jet pilot in Korea.

<End Segment 11> - Copyright © 2013 Manzanar National Historic Site and Densho. All Rights Reserved.