<Begin Segment 4>

KL: The way that you did for the ranch, would you give us just a sense of the Caruthers community, what the dynamics were, what you remember about it?

SM: Repeat that again, please?

KL: The way that you did for the ranch, you gave us just kind of a sense of the landscape and what it was like, I wonder if you would do the same for the community of Caruthers. Just important institutions or people, or kind of what its character was, what you remember about it.

SM: Well, only thing I remember, or the people we knew... well, there's a difference between before and after the camp days.

KL: This is before, yeah.

SM: Okay, before, it was a little town. There were twenty-seven churches, but I don't recall ever seeing a single one of those. I didn't know what a church even looked like. I didn't know what a church was. So we just knew, I knew just individuals in the community and just a few of the stores that we went to shop at. But it was a farming community, and there was no, I don't recall ever coming across any prejudice or discrimination.

KL: Were people pretty close to their neighbors, or private?

SM: Not in my age, but those that we knew were friends. But the houses were like half a mile apart or, not too, not very close. So we went, it was like we'd go over and play with our friends across, in the backyard. Mostly we didn't have time, anybody, to do that. We worked a lot.

KL: Were there big milestones in your life before...

SM: Camp?

KL: Yeah.

SM: I think school, I really enjoyed school, had wonderful classmates who were real tight, who were very close friends, classmate-wise. And in our original home we had to walk to school; that was about, maybe almost two miles, and we walked every day, rain or shine. And I remember some of my friends rode bicycles and I wished I could do that. A few times my classmates' mother would pick us up as we were walking and take us, and give us a ride, but that didn't happen very often. And I remember on a rainy day, by the time I got home I was sopping wet and I remember crying, crying and my family trying to console me. I was sopping wet. But I just remember that happening once. And we were taught which side of the road to walk on, which was the same direction the car was going. Seems like we should be, walk facing the cars arriving, but we always walked along with the cars. I don't know what the rules are today, or if even they have rules on country roads.

[Interruption]

SM: But walking to school, there used to be one grocery store where we shopped and got our gas -- those days you'd crank the gas pump and the gas goes up and it comes out -- and we used to buy our candy or bread and our grocery for sandwiches. And I don't know if my sister mentioned, but we all talk about how poor we were. Our sandwich would be, like canned milk with sugar sprinkled on it and that was our sandwich. My classmates, they would baloney or they had banana as extra, and I used to always envy the fact that we never had that kind of sandwich. I can't even remember even having peanut butter and jam, which would have been a treat. But it was... and for some reason we didn't take rice balls, although I think maybe in the cities the kids were free to take rice balls because maybe there were more of them. We were like the only one or two or three Japanese students and so we were probably too embarrassed to take rice balls for lunch.

KL: Did you have a sense of being different? Was a Japanese or Japanese American identity part of your childhood?

SM: Well, let's see... if you took rice balls that would've really set us apart. We'd have been self-conscious of that. But I know that because my parents couldn't speak English, when they had parents come to the school, probably parent-teachers day or whatever, my classmates' parents were always there, but of course my mother and father was never there, and I was aware of that. While they had their parents coming to the programs or parent-teachers meeting, our parents weren't there. That's about it. We had one black classmate, one family and one was my classmate, and a few Hispanics, of course some Italians. But we all got along. We were close friends. There was no mention of, "You're a Jap," or, "You're a nigger," or anything like that. So that's, it's a farming community. We all knew each other. So it's no competition. We were no threat to each other, economic threat I mean.

<End Segment 4> - Copyright © 2014 Manzanar National Historic Site and Densho. All Rights Reserved.