Densho Digital Archive
Manzanar National Historic Site Collection
Title: Victor Ikeda Interview
Narrator: Victor Ikeda
Interviewer: Richard Potashin
Location: Las Vegas, Nevada
Date: November 6, 2007
Densho ID: denshovh-ivictor-01-0037

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RP: In your life before camp, you mentioned how important fishing was, and you shared some experiences about going down to the waterfront. Did you have the opportunity to fish at all at Minidoka like in the canal there?

VI: No, no. We used to go swimming in the canal all the time, not fishing, 'cause I don't think fish could have lived in the canal. But there might have been some fish. Minidoka had a swimming hole that you could swim in, but we used to go to the canal to swim. And we used to, in Seattle, we lived by the lake, so we were pretty good at swimming. So we'd go up the canal and we'd go all the way up to Block 39 which was the other end of the... and we'd hop in the canal and we'd drift down, all the way down to Block 8. So, and then in the canal, you'd have little island where sometimes, you know, you'd skirt this side or that side. So you half swim and you half float all the way down until you got down by the swimming pool or swimming beach, and we'd dock. The river was, the canal was pretty swift, and I remember at one time, one of my friends that didn't know how to swim were at the edge of the thing, and he got in there and he got into a little current where he couldn't get back to shore. So we had to kind of go in there and pull him out, but it was swift enough so if you didn't know how to swim, it was kind of a dangerous place. But we'd hike all the way, or hitch a ride all the way up to the other end of camp, and we'd just kind of float and swim all the way down. And it was quite, it was very neat. Things like, you really went with the canal, so you really had to just kind of float and knowing how not to get in trouble. But being young, you didn't know what trouble was.

RP: Yeah, no definition of that. Yeah, I remember when I visited Minidoka, it was very fast-moving water.

VI: It is fast-moving water, right.

RP: Did you swim in the small pools as well?

VI: Not too much, 'cause we tried to hit the...

RP: You were more adventurous.

VI: Yeah. 'Cause like when we were in Seattle, they were building the floating bridge across Lake Washington, so they'd have pontoons. So we'd swim from pontoon to pontoon across the lake and back. So we were swimming from an early age, so it was not, we thought it was not as dangerous as it turned out to be.

<End Segment 37> - Copyright © 2007 Manzanar National Historic Site and Densho. All Rights Reserved.