<Begin Segment 15>

RP: Was there a particular sight, sound, or smell about Tanforan that sticks in your mind?

KO: Yeah. We were, I was lucky. My family and I were lucky that we got stuck in the barracks type thing they built in the infield in Tanforan. So we got relatively new, new buildings. But the majority of people got stuck in the converted stables. And some of those stables weren't quite converted, you might call them. But they had, they had, they all had plumbing more or less in the stable area, so that was all right. We had more of an army camp type setup in our area, so we had a common, common mess hall and stuff like that, and bathroom and things of that sort. And I guess as far as I can remember, all the eating facilities and stuff like that were in the mid infield on the Tanforan area. So everybody that was left in, living in the stable area had to walk a block or two, quite a few, quite a ways to get to the mess, dining areas. And I think at the, yeah, fortunately, we had family accommodation. The single people and stuff, they got, got quartered in the area where they have the, used to have the whatchamacallit, under the grandstands with that, all that betting rooms and stuff are, normal racetrack. So they got a great big barracks type operation there that they had to live in. That wasn't too good, no privacy, no nothing. We at least had privacy. Of course, our privacy, two families in a room about half of this room in area. And we were fortunate in that they had issued us old army cots, and so we had enough people and we got enough leftover lumber and made us a bunk bed double deck bunk beds for half the family. And I lucked out in that I wound up with a bed of my own. [Laughs] But my cousins had to double up on the bunkbeds.

RP: How many of there, how many of there were you in your barrack room, the two families? It was you and your dad and...

KO: Well, let's see. I think... one, two, three, I think we had, I think we had four kids on my aunt's side, my aunt. My uncle, unfortunately, was in the hospital with TB, so he was, I don't know where he was, I think on the East Bay side. He was there most of the war. He couldn't travel.

RP: Oh, so he stayed there?

KO: He had to stay there. Then there was my father and me, so there was five, five, six, seven of us in that little room. And my usual scheme, I had taken my radio, phonograph apart, and I brought the chassis for the radio part with me, so we had a radio. We were one of the few people in, in the area that had a radio. I didn't have a phonograph, but I had a radio. [Laughs] And the only problem was, I originally made a portable radio out of it with batteries, but the batteries didn't last more than two weeks. But fortunately, it was one of these AC-DC things, so once the batteries ran out, I just ran it as a regular AC radio.

RP: What would you listen to in camp? What were some of the programs that you liked?

KO: Well, all we can get was the network programs. In the Topaz area, about all we could get during the day was the KSL or whatever it was in Salt Lake City. And if we were lucky, we were able to pick up some of the San Francisco stations. This was at night when we could pick up that kind of stuff, that was about it. But the Utah station was the only thing we could get during the day.

RP: Pretty loud station.

KO: The one station. And at that time, there wasn't much to listen to anyway except soap operas. And the news was all cobbled up, like all the wartime news always were, so about all we could do was follow the course of the war and that was about it. Beyond that, we were on our own. And let's see. We didn't... during the day, we didn't have much to do. So we, we had the schools, they had schools for the kids that were still in school, so we would essentially go watch their baseball games and football games and stuff they had going in the afternoon. In the mornings, most of us slept late anyway. [Laughs]

RP: Did you have anybody visit you from outside the camp?

KO: No. Almost nobody. There was nobody to visit us. When we were in Tanforan, I had some of the people I had associated with in Menlo Park visit us a couple of times. For the simple reason that we had asked them to bring us some books and stuff. Well, I had asked them. So they visited us, but that was about it.

RP: So were you able to keep yourself sort of academically stimulated by reading?

KO: Oh, yeah. We had, I guess it was that I was able to, with a few bucks, I was able to get the little jobs I had, that I was able to subscribe to a magazine, couple of magazines.

RP: Which were those?

KO: I think, I forget which one that was. I think... I think it was the Amateur Radio magazine, for one. And one other, I don't remember which one it was. And then we had, I subscribed to -- no, I didn't. I thought I subscribed to a, the newspaper, but we didn't. But on the other hand, I wandered over to the local library and read whatever they had available. And I had a few books of my own that I was able to bring in, so... but nothing, nothing serious.

RP: Did you or your dad store any personal belongings or items with families in Menlo Park?

KO: Well, we, there was a, sort of a Buddhist church type thing in Palo Alto which had a building of their own. So we, my dad stored a couple of trunks full of stuff, which was mostly papers and some old clothes and stuff. And that was about it. We stored that in their basement, came back, after the war we came back and we had found that that kind of stuff, somebody had broken into it and just broken everything out. But we had no valuables in there, so it didn't matter. We just had a busted lock on the trunk. And most people didn't have much of anything beyond that, and things we owned, like furniture and stuff, we essentially lost. The old Model T, Model A Ford at that time, we sold for twenty-five bucks or something to somebody, and hopefully, hoped to get it back after the war but we never did. They had gotten rid of it during the war. So we lost most of our property except the clothes and some of the books and papers. And I still had my high school papers stored in the trunks and stuff, but that was about it. And we accumulated a little bit of stuff during the, in the camp period, but there again, like I say, I had one or two magazines, one fiction magazine, and science fiction magazine, and I think something else, Radio, Amateur Radio magazine. But in those days, magazines and stuff were pretty cheap, so to subscribe a whole year's worth of magazines, couple, three magazines, for less than what we got for income for a month, so that wasn't too bad. And then we spent a lot of time reading newspapers and stuff at the camp library we had. Those of us that were interested in that kind of stuff. The other guys, I guess, people, they could care less. So the library wasn't too frequented. [Laughs]

RP: Do you remember much about the train ride to Topaz, Kinge?

KO: Oh, yeah, yeah. We were, going there, we got one of those old train, a long train full of, I think... I think they had exhumed a train, cars from, that had been essentially put on a permanent siding, you might call it. We had, the train, the car I was in was a coach, sixty-passenger or more coach, and we had a wood burning stove in one end, a coal burning stove. And, of course, they kept the one end of the train, the car, red hot, and the other, the rest of the train was freezing cold. And the old fashioned john in the train, and the plumbing facilities were almost non-existent. These were essentially 1910 vintage cars, I think. The only thing that's different about the car was they were all steel cars, they weren't wooden cars, but that was pretty close to it. But as far as I can remember, the train was, the vintage, they were probably the first steel cars they made after they got rid of the wooden ones. And we rode that to, I guess to, all the way to Salt Lake and to Delta, where we got on buses, the old army type buses, and they hauled us out to the camp area. And coming back, it was almost the same way except that the cars were newer.

RP: You got the new cars.

KO: Yeah, it was regular passenger train cars. But at that time, it was the wartime vintage cars, so there was nothing fancy about it, just plain old passenger cars. I suspect that the SP cars and the commuter cars on the peninsula and stuff were probably better cars than we rode in. We never did get anything like Pullman cars or anything like that, 'cause those were being used for the first class trains.

<End Segment 15> - Copyright © 2008 Manzanar National Historic Site and Densho. All Rights Reserved.