<Begin Segment 22>

RP: What brought you and Gloria to the, to this conference?

AI: Oh, we... the main thing I think that attracted us to it was the trip to Amache. Because with our visit to Amache meant that we completed a visit to all ten camps. We've been to every, all ten. We've gone on motor home trips and... Tule Lake was our first one.

RP: And when did that start?

AI: Oh gosh, thirty years ago maybe... twenty years, yeah. We went... Tule Lake was the first. And they had a little museum there. And they had sort of a museum curator, and one of the things he mentioned is he says, "Oh yeah, you see all those nine pane windows you see out in the, a lot of the homes out here?" I said, "Yeah." He said, "Well we call those Jap windows, we got them from the camp." So they, when Tule Lake closed they took 'em. When we visited Gila, that was the second one. We visited that in, oh gosh, seventy-something. We went, we went to... looked all over in Phoenix because it was near Phoenix, right, National Archives and, and some of the people even said, "Well, what do you want to go there for? That's all passed." She said, "Oh, I just want to go look." And she recalled that a friend of hers said that she remembers the camp being on an Indian reservation. It was called the Sacaton Indian Reservation. So we drove down there to, to the camp, or to the, to the reservation and we... Gloria says, "Oh look. That's one of the barracks. This must be the place." And so we asked the reservation cop. We said, "Do you know where the camps are?" And he says, "Oh, yeah, you're talking about Jap camp, that's over that way." And so, and we asked him about that structure. It was the hospital and we said, "Isn't that one of the barracks?" He says, "Yeah. When you folks left, we brought those here and used them on our, for our building, for our own use." And a lot of 'em, I think a lot of 'em they cut and made, made structures out of... individual houses out of 'em. And when we went back a second time they were all gone and they said a flash flood came and wiped everything out. And so they had the concrete block type buildings there. But then we went, when we went... yeah, when we went there about, Gloria remembers her camp was the Canal Camp. And the Canal Camp had what they called the buttes. There was two flat mountains on it and one of 'em had an amphitheater and the other one had a water tower. Water tower, of course, was gone but the piers were still there. And you can stand up there and look down and, and recognize the outline of the hospital and all that. We took my, my in-laws there also. And they recalled that. And we saw places where the barracks were and we saw where they had tried to make a little garden, a pond of their own. And we saw wagons, rusty old wagons in the, in the sewer drains and that sort of thing. But then, yeah, we, so we were able to visit all the camps and Manzanar was the next to the last, right. That's when we came to this...

RP: Oh, so that was your first visit to Manzanar?

AI: Yeah. That was, that was our next to the last.

RP: So, where did you go after Gila? What was the next camp?

AI: Oh, Gila then... Gila, oh we went on a trip to Yellowstone and got Minidoka. Then we went on a motor home trip to Branson and we went through Denver, went to Branson, and then we hit Rohwer and Jerome. And then coming back, we went up to Delta and saw Delta. And then we were gonna go to Amache and we were caravanning together with another motor home and he said, "Isn't that gonna be kinda high?" and there were a lotta hills. We said, "Yeah, probably but your..." his motor home didn't have a enough power so it really struggled going up the hill. So anyway, we bypassed Amache because, because it was so high. So then that was the last there.

[Interruption]

AI: Was that it? I think so.

RP: I think we got 'em all. Yeah.

AI: Minidoka.

RP: Minidoka... now, you know what you have to do? You have to start visiting all the assembly centers.

AI: Yeah. And the DOJs.

RP: And the DOJ camps.

AI: That's what I was thinking. 'Cause Gloria mentioned we, we drove past Turlock. That's where they were. They went there.

RP: Yeah. You've got eighteen of those sites in California.

AI: Yeah.

RP: And DOJ camps and after that the US Army facilities.

AI: We have a, we have a friend in Los Angeles and at the time they were starting all this thing about the camps... they were concentrating on the ten camps. And he went to Crystal City and he'd confront these people and he'd say, "Why are you just saying the ten camps? There was more than that." And I guess finally they realized. He's gonna be happy. Excuse me. I've got somebody keeps calling me. Can I...

RP: Sure. Yeah, Art, we just want to personally and professionally thank you on behalf of the Park Service...

AI: Oh, thank you.

RP: ...Kirk, and myself, thank you for sharing.

AI: I appreciate you doing that.

<End Segment 22> - Copyright © 2008 Manzanar National Historic Site and Densho. All Rights Reserved.