<Begin Segment 13>

KL: What was school like?

MM: School, well, my fifth grade teacher was Mrs. Fox. She was a nice teacher. She was from the outside, came in, and I remember she gave us a motto to live by, and she said, "Only my best is good enough. Remember that." That's what she taught us. She had polio, so she limped a lot, but she was a good teacher. And then I had, what, Miss Banning, Elsie Banning, and she was a good teacher. I wrote to her after camp, too. She moved to Florida to take care of her mother, so I have a letter from her that I kept. And I had a pen pal while I was in camp, but I forgot her name. A tall, slender Caucasian girl, and somewhere in southern California. I forgot the name of the town, too.

KL: Was she someone you knew personally before?

MM: No, she was a pen pal.

KL: How did that relationship get started?

MM: I don't know how that came. I guess through some magazine or something, I don't know.

KL: Do you think it was through school?

MM: Could be. I don't remember that. All I know is I had a pen pal.

KL: Do you know where either of your, the teachers that you recall, were from?

MM: I don't know where Mrs. Fox was from, and Elsie Banning, her mother was in Florida and then she later moved to Tucson, Arizona, later on, many years later.

KL: So you were in touch with her for a while.

MM: Yeah, I was.

KL: Did she ever say what motivated her to teach in Poston?

MM: No, no. But I think she had a love for us, really. She cared about us. She was a Christian lady, so I think she had a love for us, had a heart for us, to teach us. I seemed to get that message.

KL: What was the classroom like? Or classrooms, I guess you were there for a couple years.

MM: Well, we didn't have much, I mean in way of books and pencils and papers. I always, I wanted, I always wanted a tablet so I could write, but nothing to write on. So I went to the canteen, and I stole a tablet.

KL: Really?

MM: Yeah. And as I was walking out the saleslady saw me, so she said, "If you give me the tablet back, I won't tell your mother." Well, that was the end of my life of crime. [Laughs] I never did it again.

KL: And you never got anything to write on?

MM: No, I never got anything to write on. So I like tablets and I don't write in it. I get tablets and I don't write in it. [Laughs] Isn't it funny? It's just funny.

KL: How many kids were in a class?

MM: I would say there was about twenty. Twenty.

KL: Did you exchange classes or teachers for different subjects or anything?

MM: You had the same teacher all day.

KL: [Laughs] Better or for worse.

MM: I mean, what teacher can teach everything? We didn't, I didn't have variety, that's for sure.

KL: Did you have favorite subjects?

MM: Well, I liked English, and I liked it when the teacher read stories to us. After lunch we would go back to class, and she would read to us for one hour, a story, keep us mesmerized. [Laughs]

KL: That'd be, I would've loved that.

MM: Yeah, yeah.

KL: What stories do you remember?

MM: By golly, I don't remember a one. I don't remember. That's terrible.

KL: That's like what you were saying last night, what, you remember the feeling sometimes and not the content. You, that reminded me that I wanted to ask you about in the library in Poston. Was there...

MM: Yeah, we had a library, and it was called the "Novel Hut," and I would go there and I would check out the books. I read the Nancy Drew mystery books, the Bobbsey Twins, I read 'em all, and I think that's as far as I got because I had to work. I had to do all the laundry and ironing for the family, and so I really didn't have much time to play, but when I did I always played with Miyoko.

KL: Where was the library located?

MM: I think it was located in 214.

KL: It was in a barrack?

MM: Yeah, a barrack.

KL: Was it one apartment?

MM: Just one long barrack, and churches sent in the books that families donated.

<End Segment 13> - Copyright © 2014 Manzanar National Historic Site and Densho. All Rights Reserved.