Densho Digital Archive - George Maeda Interview (denshovh-mgeorge

<Begin Segment 11>

KL: It's amazing to me how many people do.

GM: There were fifteen... sixteen buildings, I think. And the last building was a mess hall. In between the two rows there was a communal men's bath and toilet, and the women's, and a separate washroom. And the first building, the first apartment of the first building, each block was either assigned or picked a block manager who attended meetings and he would come back and tell the whole block what was going on.

KL: Who was Block 15s, do you remember?

GM: Who?

KL: Who was the block manager in Block 15?

GM: I don't recall.

KL: Do you remember any kind of feeling that you had toward him or what his reputation was among other people?

GM: No, except that he must have been important to be selected as a block manager. My cousin, for instance, Stanford grad medical school and so forth, he went to Heart Mountain, Wyoming, and he was one of the block managers. So I imagine their selection process was... according to education, background, and so forth.

KL: This person that I talked to this morning was in Minidoka and she said that her block was kind of defined as having the most kids in it. And I know Manzanar blocks kind of had reputations, this one was loud, this one was where the bachelors lived, this was Venice, this was Terminal Island.

GM: Yeah, right.

KL: What defined Block 15?

GM: Sort of an in between. They weren't the ones picked on, but you're right, without naming where they came from, there were blocks that ran the camp. You never messed with those people who lived there, and there were blocks that got picked on. We sort of seemed to be in the middle. Oh, the Venice Barbell Club, they were pretty famous in those days. They were in our block, maybe that's why we didn't get picked on. But there were some world records made, and some of those people that were in our block, I think at one time or another held those records. But very serious barbell club. And we kids, we formed an unofficial club, and we used to lift weights and so forth with the supervision of the Venice Barbell Club.

KL: It was mostly kids from Block 15 who weightlifted with you?

GM: Yes, that's what we were. There were, let's see, one, two, three, four, five, six. There were six of us in our block that sort of hung out together.

KL: That's neat that they would mentor you, kind of, those older people.

GM: Yeah.

KL: Where did you gather for that? Where was that headquartered?

GM: Well, we lived in the fourth barrack. The first row was Building 1 through Building... I think it's 8, and then 9 through 16 on the other side. And they were around the twelfth, thirteenth, in that area, which really was just a few feet from us because it was separated by this little open space that had the communal.

KL: So the Barbell Club had kind of a headquarters, it was in a barrack building?

GM: Right.

KL: Was this a living space, too?

GM: Not in the building. What they did, I think they might have been one of the first group to build the cellar. I remember the cellar that they built, but most of the lifting were done outside, I remember that.

KL: Can you describe the cellar?

GM: A lot of people did dig cellars because it was very hot in the summertime, and that made the atmosphere a little cooler. We didn't have one because we didn't have the manpower to make one. But we kids were, got these empty cans, and we were digging, trying to dig one. And one of the boys dug this piece of dirt, and it was the home of a scorpion. By the way, there were a lot of scorpions in Manzanar. And anyway, he was bit by a baby scorpion. I remember his arm swelling up twice the size, and had to be rushed to the hospital. It wasn't lethal, but he got sick. There were a lot of scorpions when we first got there. It was nothing to... we were running around barefoot, and we'd run across the firebreak and then put on the brakes and let the scorpion go through. They were pretty fast. So there were a lot of scorpions caught and put on a little, like a trophy or mantle, a pin.

KL: Just in people's homes, or was there like a scorpion display?

GM: No, people... well, not inside the homes, probably outside. Another thing was within the first year, everyone became creative because other than Sears Roebuck and Montgomery Ward, we had no place to buy things. And they were the only two places we ordered things from. So people used to get orange peelings and dry them, and then burn them at night to repel the mosquitoes, and that was a very common thing to burn the dried orange peels. And also bought fans from Sears Roebuck, and they made, most families, including ours, made little, like a container with sacks on the outside, with water dripping down, and then we had the fan in front, shot the air to the inside, sort of as a cooler. We had to do that because it was very hot in the summer.

KL: Did you have it plumbed from the faucet outside?

GM: You know, I'm trying to remember, it had to be.

KL: It was automatic, it wasn't like you would wet it and hang it?

GM: No, no, it was (not) automatic, but I think it had to be plumbed, and then they turned the faucet on.

KL: Did burning the orange peels work to repel mosquitoes?

GM: Oh, yeah.

KL: I'm going to try it, because they're still bad.

GM: [Laughs] Haven't you heard of that before at Manzanar? Oh my god, every family. Nineteen out of twenty families, you'd walk by and then a piece of paper with all these orange peels dried.

KL: I've heard about the tomatillo man from people who lived in Block 8, kids, some guy would come with a sack of tomatillos, and you can inflate them and make sounds with them.

GM: Oh, I've never heard of that one.