<Begin Segment 19>

RP: During your time in camp, which was not very long, did you have any opportunity to go outside of camp into Twin Falls?

SK: Oh, yeah.

RP: Uh-huh. And what was the purpose of that trip?

SK: Well, to Filer, which was outside -- well, in the beginning we used to go do different farms to pick...

RP: Sugar beets?

SK: Potatoes, mostly potatoes. Very scrawny, some farms are pretty scrawny. [Laughs] But they didn't have any workers. So they wanted employees, and somebody to work out there. And they, I guess they thought the value of us going out there to work and coming back again every night. Driving us out, bringing us back, they could do that. Concession was made, I guess. So a lot of us, of our age, went out. And we picked straw-, I mean, potatoes. And they were very nice to us, the farmers were. Of course, why wouldn't they?

RP: Well, yeah, you were saving their butts.

SK: We're picking up their crops for them. Yeah. They came after us, and they fed us very well for noon lunch. Then we'd go home and eat.

RP: Did you do just one furlough? I mean, did you work on one particular farm, or a number of different...

SK: Well, that was one particular one.

RP: And how long would one of these --

SK: And then they said there's a place called Filer that had housing for workers that used to come through there before, I guess. Labor that used to come through, helping. So we went to Filer and we had to cook for ourselves. Eat potatoes every day.

RP: Eat potatoes every day. [Laughs]

SK: And then we used to go out to the different farms.

RP: So you would be driven?

SK: By that time, then it got colder, we got sugar beets.

RP: Harvesting sugar beets?

SK: Chopping. Yeah, harvesting sugar beets.

RP: Chopping them up and throw 'em in the...

SK: That was nice experience. It was the same group that went out, the OT gang.

RP: Oh, you went out as a group.

SK: As a group, they put us...

RP: Well, that must have been a little bit of a fun thing.

SK: Yeah, it was kind of a fun thing.

RP: Have your buddies with you.

SK: Yeah, there were some girls out there that came, too.

RP: Oh, there were?

SK: Yeah, not too many. But they worked, too.

RP: So you'd go out, you'd be driven out to the farms.

SK: We went there, we were driven out there and we stayed there. We lived out there in Filer.

RP: In Filer.

SK: So, and they had showers like things. It was kind of a nice place. Not nice, but it was quite nice in the sense that we could do that, we had freedom. If we wanted, we could go to town. But we didn't have any money, so why should we go to town? [Laughs] Until we got paid.

RP: A lot of, a lot of folks from Minidoka --

SK: All of them went.

RP: Yeah.

SK: Some worked to pick as labor, daily labor.

RP: Yeah. I heard a story about one farmer who actually loaned a group of internees his vehicle to travel back and forth from camp.

SK: Yeah, there's some that had cars, they drove. So they trusted them. And they were, and Japanese work hard. Their history of the Japanese, they do work hard. They're not lazy workers. And it was kind of nice to work and to get paid for it. So it was kind of a nice interlude, is the word, I guess.

RP: Break up the monotony.

SK: Break up the humdrum life of playing cards and just hanging around, not doing a thing. I think all the men went out, unless you were on coal crew. They were a separate bunch, the dirty bunch. [Laughs]

RP: The dirty bunch.

SK: Yeah, they pick up the coal from the train that came in.

RP: That's what kept you warm.

SK: Yeah, during the winter.

<End Segment 19> - Copyright © 2007 Manzanar National Historic Site and Densho. All Rights Reserved.