<Begin Segment 13>

LP: Did you recall the time period of moving from Pinedale to Tule Lake? Was that by train?

EY: Yeah, we went by train. Talk about the train, when we left Washington to go down to California, we had a regular dining car, believe it or not. And then when we transferred from Tule Lake to Jerome, Arkansas, we had a troop train. And the troop train is where you faced the wall, and they have this wooden barrier so that when a train rocked back and forth and your food doesn't slide toward you, so it stopped the plate from coming to your lap. So we had that, and then from Jerome to Gila, we also had to go on the troop train, because that's how I went. Tule Lake to Jerome, Jerome to Gila. But dining, yeah, coming, we had a dining car. I don't talk about it because I feel kind of... not ashamed, but maybe those other people who had to go from California to, well, say, Heart Mountain or California to some other... they didn't have the luxury of a dining car, so I don't say too much about that. But yeah, believe it or not, we did have a dining car from Washington to going to Fresno.

LP: Wow. And then from Fresno to Tule Lake did you have a dining car, too?

EY: No, not a dining car. See, what did we have then? Maybe it was a troop train, too, that's where we were first exposed to it. I think so, 'cause all I remember is that the dining car... because four days, yeah, I think the troop train Fresno to Tule Lake.

LP: And how was it conveyed to you and your family that you would be going to Tule Lake?

EY: I sure don't remember that. All I know is we were going to be moved again. I didn't know where, I didn't know where. And the fact that we were still in California, that was interesting.

LP: Did you go to school while you were in Pinedale or that was just, you said it was four or five months, or five months of just sort of being there, right? There was no school or anything. In Pinedale?

EY: Pinedale? There was nothing.

LP: Right.

EY: We were left on our own.

LP: So then you took the train up to Tule lake, and what was your first impression of seeing that landscape?

EY: Big, hot, barren. And what are we gonna do there? Because at that time there was no crafts or language school. I don't know if even churches were established when we first got there. I'm sure there was a Catholic one, there was a Christian one, there was a Buddhist church, so they established that eventually. Of course, the school... I lived in 52, the school was over in 71 or something. So then we had two firebreaks to go through, to go to school every day.

LP: And what apartment were you... like if you were to describe your barrack and all of that, where were you living?

EY: I think our particular barrack, we always had the end room. I don't know why, but we were lucky in that way. Although not lucky when the sandstorm started coming up, and hit our door, and then the windows were... and it went up, and so then of course the floor, the slats were still about quarter of an inch apart so then the sand would come up here, our beds would be full of sand before we got in bed, so we made sure that we shook our blankets off and got rid of the sand before we hopped in bed. But usually there's a family of five, I don't know about six, but five, we were all assigned end barracks. And so this one... there was us, two, three, I think there was four families to a barrack. And I think you've heard them say that the walls were only up to... how should I say it? Midway so that you could hear the conversation, someone speaking loud enough from here to the end of the barrack, or someone who had an electric -- Jimi tells the story, I don't know about it, but he tells the story about this one family who had lots of money so that they never ate at the mess hall, that they were able to go to the canteen, buy the meat or whatever, and cook in their barrack. And that smell would permeate from their end room all the way to the other end. So then the kids asked their parents, "How come those people get to eat the nice-smelling food, and we have to go to the barrack and eat that crummy food?" kind of a thing. I never had that, so I didn't know that until Jimi started talking about it. And I know that in our particular barrack, this one family had two boys and they were playing instruments, so every so often they'd get together and they played the melodies of some of the familiar tunes that I was familiar with, and I could hear them, and that was kind of neat. But in Tule Lake, the doors faced this way so that the next barrack, the doors faced the solid side, so you had a little bit of privacy. Although this top part was open all the way, until, like he says, they finally put a top on for it, some of them. But I wasn't there that long, because when they sent us to Jerome, then things changed. He came in from Heart Mountain to Tule Lake. Then he was in the construction crew, so he knows what he did. Because when I left, there was nothing like that.

LP: The landscape and all of the mountains and the buttes and all of this stuff, there's quite a bit today like Castle Rock and Abalone Mountain and all this. But is there anything... when you have visited that site today and you look at it, you probably see through a different lens than I would looking at it.

EY: Because you know, when we were there, we still were able to leave camp and climb Castle Rock without any kind of a, signing or anything. And when Jimi moved in there, that's when all the security and all that added, the guard towers went into effect. So my time was more free time than when he went in there. So when he tells his story, it's hard for me to really understand that. But slowly I'm getting to that point where, yeah, I guess so, because they made that a segregation center, so they had to put more security around that. When I was there, yeah, I climbed Castle Rock. People can't believe that. "You mean you were able to get out of the camp and do that?" I said, "Yeah, I didn't have any trouble." But things changed.

LP: Going up there -- because I know that was a popular place to hike, and sometimes people had religious services and whatever up there, there's graffiti and writing and whatnot. Do you recall seeing anyone write anything, or do you anyone by chance that had written a name or done any...

EY: No, I can't recall. And I don't even remember when the cross was placed on Castle Rock. It might have been after I left, because I was there just about a full year. Because I finished my junior year and then full senior year there, so about a year and a half at Tule Lake. And then after that, when they made that into a segregation center, then things changed, so whether the cross was placed after I left or it was there when I was there, I can't remember that. I don't remember seeing the cross when I went to climb that. So I would not be the person to say so. And the landscaping... all I know was dry. [Laughs]

LP: Did you ever encounter any rattlesnakes or scorpions or anything like that?

EY: No, fortunately, no, thank goodness.

LP: What about the birds? Because it's a migratory bird area, right?

EY: Yes.

LP: Do you recall seeing any wildlife? Coyotes, bobcats, birds?

EY: No.

LP: What about something that's really common is the collecting shells or finding projectile points, did you ever find anything like that while you were there?

EY: You know what? There were a lot of shells, but I was too involved going back and forth. My life was very, very boring. I would get up and do what I had to do, then I'd go to school, I'd go to school, and then from there, when school was over, I went to the hospital and I worked as a tray girl making sure that the patients who were there got the proper diet that was assigned to them. And then my father worked as a cook over at the hospital, but I made twelve dollars a month. And so that few twelve dollars went toward the family coffer. I didn't even know there was a beauty shop, there's a barber shop. I knew there was a canteen, but I wasn't sure. And then they had dances, they had band, they had an orchestra. But I knew that they had stage shows where classical Japanese dancing and stuff, and musicals that they placed, and I remember taking a chair over there out in the firebreak, that's where they had that. And so I would go there when they had it, when I could get away. But other than that, very naive. Like a teenager, we didn't know what was going on.

LP: Do you recall the night sky at all?

EY: Pardon?

LP: The night sky?

EY: Yeah, I remember it was really beautiful, really nice. Stars, it was so clear.

<End Segment 13> - Copyright © 2015 Manzanar National Historic Site and Densho. All Rights Reserved.