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KP: Can I just ask you a quick question about, again, getting back to the railroad and the firing. You said that you were, people of Japanese ancestry were forbidden from railroad property. But I know in your father's [inaudible] and your uncle, they did not live on railroad property. But people who lived and worked for the railroad, and lived in railroad housing, they would have been evicted.

FS: They were all evicted. The Nishiguchi family, the father was a section foreman, and he lived in a section house and he was evicted from there. And so he, somebody loaned them a trailer to live in the desert. And...

RP: So he was evicted from Gerlach.

FS: Right, from the town.

KP: So was this, this happened nationwide?

FS: It just happened on the West Coast. I don't know if the, the railroaders from, I know, Nebraska and different, Utah, were all fired. But I don't know if they were fired on the East Coast or not, but they were all fired in the Midwest.

KP: And I also heard a story from a Laguna Indian who said that there was a Japanese community in Gallup that had worked on the railroad, and they were picked up, lock stock and barrel, and sent to Poston.

FS: Uh-huh, yeah. They were all -- and it's ironic, because they were all to be fired on the same day. My uncle was ill the day of the firing. The boss from the next shift came to the house and fired him in his sickbed. So it had to be a government firing because all the railroads happened to fire on the same day. And they denied this, that the FBI were all over Nevada. So I think this is partly what gave us the edge.

RP: Right. And your father's firing took place in February, '42?

FS: February 19, 1942.

RP: Before that time, there was tragic consequences of the firings at McGill and Ruth.

FS: Right.

RP: Dealing with the mine workers.

FS: And those were private railroad companies. They were mining railroad companies that were fired there. They were afraid of the Japanese doing sabotage on the railroad tracks. Because at the time, a lot of military, military people and also equipment were being shipped by the railroad, and they didn't want the Japanese to sabotage the rail lines. They didn't want them working in the mines because they would handle dynamite, and the white workers were afraid that the Japanese would set the mines off on them. So that's why the railroad and mining worked together. But it was the Nevada Railway that Andy Russell found the paperwork for. And the attorney had gone to the meeting with the FBI agents present, and got the information, and documented it in a letter to the president of the railroad company. And these are the papers that were found in the museum.

RP: And many of those mine workers from Ruth, I guess, were interned eventually, too, many of the Isseis were sent to internment camps in other parts of the country?

FS: Gee, I really don't know about that.

<End Segment 6> - Copyright © 2008 Manzanar National Historic Site and Densho. All Rights Reserved.