Densho Digital Archive - George Matsumoto Interview (denshovh-mgeorge

<Begin Segment 22>

KP: One other note about trying, this connection that you kept with Ocean Park and your friends and teachers, a name that comes up is Wayne Severy?

GM: Severy.

KP: And who is, what's his name?

GM: Wayne. He was one of my best friends and when I went to camp and I told him we only have apple crates and orange crates to sit on that I got from the mess hall, he sent me a saw and nails and hammer and stuff. And I said, yeah, there's scrap lumber around, so I made things. Clogs, we call 'em getas. I got a couple of 'em here. Maybe I'll donate 'em to your museum.

KP: Oh, we'd appreciate that if you'd like to do that. The other thing was, so you made furniture?

GM: Uh-huh.

KP: What kind of things did you make?

GM: We made, like, mostly it was like closet and real simple things. Some people made elaborate chests and things. I didn't have, I didn't bother.

KP: Did you take up any other art while you were studying?

GM: I had snuck in a piccolo. I tried to learn that, but I wasn't too good at it. But I practiced on the harmonica. I still have that harmonica. I'll give it to one of my kids one of these days.

KP: Can you still play it?

GM: I haven't tried for years.

KP: And you also mentioned something in your memoirs about the trains in the valley.

GM: Along the Inyo Mountain, there was a narrow gauge train that used to take couple of ore laden cars out every afternoon, this was during the war, and they're doing, they had some expensive ores comin' out, and I used to see that chuggin' along and it looked like a little miniature trains from the distance. It was steam engine, so you could see the engine puffing away. And it was real slow because it was carrying a lot of cars. It was narrow gauge, chugging along, so I used to say here comes the Toonerville trolley. I don't know if kids nowadays understand Toonerville trolley. Used to be a comic strip.

KP: And you also mentioned that you got out once to visit the sewage treatment plant at Manzanar.

GM: Yeah. It was, a friend of mine, he started as a dishwasher and a porter in our mess hall. He was a Kibei, but he had majored in chemistry, so he got a job as a (sanitary engineer) purifying the sewage and he took me out one time to show me what he was workin' on. And all the toilet stuff, everything from the bath and all the kitchen sinks, they all came to this settling tank and he put in the chlorine, and after a while the chlorine would kill the bacteria and then it went to a settling tank. It was just a concrete slab there and it would evaporate and sink into the ground. But that was kind of a brackish lookin' thing. He took a cup one time, he says, "Here, drink it." He said, "It's potable." I said no thanks, after you know what went in there. [Laughs]

KP: Do you have anything more for that section of the camp?

RP: George, was there any effort to recover some of the grease or fats that you produced in the kitchen?

GM: Oh, yes. The sink had a settling tank. It was about like so, and we had a guy that was, first we used to do it ourselves, but then there was one guy who was, he had a strong constitution 'cause when you took the cover off, oh, it just smelled and you would scoop the top, the residue off of it. And then the fat he poured into a can and put lye in there, and the fat turned into soap, so it was kind of a brown, soft soap and we used to use that quite a bit to wash pots and pans. But oh, it was smelly, but this one guy, he did it. He went around to the different mess halls. He came around every two, three days, scooped up that mess and...