<Begin Segment 9>

RP: Mary, I want to just backtrack a little bit back to Manzanar.

MS: Okay.

RP: That's great. So you come in in September, and the camp's pretty much all set up. And there was a little bit of an issue about, that you were expected to stay with the Caucasians in the...

MS: Well, we did, we stayed with them. They were all down here at the corner, and so we lived there. But we didn't like it. And so we said, "We'd like to live out with Japanese." And so, of course, when you say "Japanese," it's Americans of Japanese descent, but I don't say that all the time. Well, there was a Mrs. D'ille...

RP: Oh, Margaret D'ille.

MS: Yeah. And she was a social worker or something. Well, anyway, she found out about this bunch of Kibei boys, Kibei men, young men, and they were in this last block. And somehow, they wanted somebody to kind of be a house parent there. So she got us permission to... we had this whole barrack. And you know, those boys had, they had a better living situation than lot of the families. 'Cause what they did, the end of the barrack, they blocked it off and that's where our house was, our room, we just had a room. And then they had a hall down the middle of the barrack, and these boys had little spaces down there. Well, you know, we lived in Block 36, yeah. We had to go out to the middle of the block where they had a restroom, they had one for men, one for women, and they had a place you could wash your clothes and you could iron. They had an ironing room, I couldn't believe it, an ironing room. [Laughs] But we just used this facility with the rest of 'em. And then next to our barrack was the mess hall. And we still ate with the Caucasians, but every Saturday night, we ate with them in this mess hall next to our barrack. And you know, we ran around, we were about a mile, pretty near a mile, from our place to where we taught. And we had this Model A Ford, and we just ran around in that Ford. Went back and forth to teach, and...

RP: Were you teaching high school or elementary school?

MS: Yeah, we both taught high school.

RP: High school. So it was quite a ways, yeah.

MS: Yeah. And, well, I don't remember if they had a barrack here for the grammar school, and then a barrack over here for the high school or just how that was.

RP: Yeah, they had a whole block for the high school.

MS: Yeah, we did, I guess.

RP: Yeah.

<End Segment 9> - Copyright © 2008 Manzanar National Historic Site and Densho. All Rights Reserved.