<Begin Segment 20>

RP: So what motivated you to decide to leave? You were one of the people who left early.

MS: Oh, yes. I could have left I think, before camp, since I had another, Mary was in Washington D.C. as a nurse.

RP: Oh, before the war?

MS: Before the war, yes. She worked for a Dr. Fleisher who ran the Japan Times or something in Japan. And his wife was having a baby or something and need a nurse and they had to come back on the last ship from Japan to... and so Mary was that nurse. So she went over on a ship, the last ship over, I guess, taking care of whatever. And then came back with Dr. Fleisher and his wife. And then they were in Washington D.C. so she was there, yes. And I could have gone out probably at that time, but I felt that, that was interesting, I felt that that, well, this was an experience that my family would be going through and the whole Japanese community that I had just gotten to know would be going through and so I thought that it would be good for me to experience that, too. But, when I got in, [Laughs] I decided that I wanted to get out. And so I did petition to get out, and I went through the security clearance. And it was later that, when I met Helen Ealy and of course knew her, that she got me in contact, I guess, with the Quaker hostel in Chicago. And so that's where I did leave. I left very early, in just one year from camp. So, I had only the experience of the very early camp, which was very primitive, and became increasingly less so as time went on. Yes. And Helen Ealy was, was a very wonderful person. One of, I think only three that I knew who lived, Caucasians that lived inside the barbed wire. And she, I can remember her standing in that hot sun in the mess hall line and sometimes half an hour, and she was always very upbeat and, very pleasant. She was always.... I think it was important to feel that we were not rejected by everybody. She and Louis Frizzel, the music teacher, and the, oh dear, what's his name with the blind, the blind man with the dog?

RP: Mr. Greenly? Mr. Greenly?

MS: Yes. Yes.

RP: With the dog.

MS: Yes, with the dog. They were the three that I knew and especially Helen Ealy and Louis Frizzel.

RP: And so they made a little more effort to reach out to folks in the camp?

MS: Well, just the fact that anyone would even come in and live with us and share exactly what we were going through. That was very significant. And, well, just to know that there was some, some people who felt the injustice of this and recognized that we really were not what we were portrayed to be in the newspapers.

RP: The enemy.

MS: Uh-huh, yeah.

RP: What do you remember about the day that you actually left camp? What was that like?

MS: Well, that was, again, it was going into an unknown, so a lot of this was going into the unknown. And I do remember, now a small group of us, one, two, three, four, that I can remember, went out together and there was, oh, and there were soldiers on the train going as we went to Chicago. And I can remember one young lady from camp, and I can't remember her name now, I didn't know her well, but, and she was younger than I, and apparently was going to attend a college or something. But I think that, I felt that the soldiers were kind of hitting on her as it were. [Laughs] And that she was being affected by that kind of negatively. And so I asked her if she wanted to sit in, you know, toward the window side and so we did that. But, I didn't know. I think the whole trip back, it was just, it was preparation for entering a new, kind of like a new life. 'Cause I was going to somewhere I'd never been before and knew I would have to make a living there.

<End Segment 20> - Copyright © 2009 Manzanar National Historic Site and Densho. All Rights Reserved.