<Begin Segment 11>

LP: Something from Richard's interview that was really striking to me was the sleds that his dad made, and it sounds like you had some things sent to the camp and your dad constructed the bike and everything like that. But what about holidays, or how, in a setting like Tule Lake, and your parents, it sounds like, are trying to be the buffer, make things normal and enjoyable. What were the holidays...

MM: Well, they used to have camp block Christmas parties. And I'll always remember, I had a pen pal from Philadelphia, I used to write to her all the time. And she sent, I think it started out with a gift, one gift. And American Friends, she was probably one of those, and we became pen pals. Wrote to each other, I lost track of her, but there are people who have kept up, there are stories like that. But my parents were not able to buy a lot, but my mother probably made things. So we did have block Christmas parties. I don't remember Thanksgiving or any other, at all.

LP: Was the party just a social gathering?

MM: I think so, yeah. Like a meal, during the meals.

LP: Was there any sort of Christmas pageanty, any performance or anything?

MM: I don't remember them at all.

LP: Was there a Santa?

MM: I'm sure there was, I'm sure. Because that's probably the person that gave you that one gift.

LP: Was the pen pal thing the result of, like, a nonprofit organization?

MM: I'm sure, yeah, American Friends.

LP: American Friends.

KL: What was your block at Tule Lake?

MM: 22-07-C. Oh, 22-07-A, or C? No, C.

LP: There was something I was gonna ask you that was holiday related. Oh. So a story that's really striking to me is, I don't know if you've seen or read Farewell to Manzanar, there was a sort of story I heard connected to that about somebody singing the national anthem or something, and it was the death of Roosevelt. Did that news at Tule Lake mean anything, were you aware of that?

MM: No, no. But my mother wrote a letter to her friend whose daughter was in the Dorothea Lange picture, because they were friends, our parents' mothers were friends from way back, we lived across the street from each other. And my girlfriend was in Topaz, and both our mothers passed away within the last five years, and they both lived at an assisted living place in San Francisco. And apparently like all Japanese they saved everything. And she found, among her mother's things, she found a letter that my mother had written to her in Topaz. My mother wrote it in Tule Lake, and it was just when the war ended, and she was -- this was all in Japanese, so I'm just having it translated now. And it said that there were a lot of people talking, a lot of rumors going on, you can't believe everything, but it sounds like the war ended, but who knows if anybody is telling the truth? And then she would talk about, I guess Helene's mother had sent gum or things like that to us, and then photographs that they were taken in camp, it was just an ordinary letter from a housewife to a housewife, which was, I thought was really great. And it was intact with an envelope, with the address on it, and my mother's address, and Topaz address. So I thought that's unique, I thought I would donate it to the museum.

LP: Yeah, that's really neat that she had that still.

<End Segment 11> - Copyright © 2014 Manzanar National Historic Site and Densho. All Rights Reserved.