<Begin Segment 19>

RP: Just a few more questions, Celeste. We're gonna, then we'll wrap up things. Going back to the Children's Village time in your life, did you have any, I know you had a lot of freedom, did you have any responsibilities at all associated with the Village in terms of chores or things that you were assigned to do?

CT: Well, we had to make our own bed and we had to keep our crate neat and clean, and that's the only thing I can think of that we had to do. Otherwise, I can't think of any chores or things like that that I had to do.

RP: How about toys? Were toys important to you at that time in your life and did you have any?

CT: I had the rubber doll that the kindergarten class gave me, so I kept that for a while until probably I got tired of it. No, toys were not important to me. What was important was sports, and I liked the teeter totter and swings and the playhouse. I liked that, and running around with my friends. I guess the toys didn't matter, but I did like my goodies at Christmas time. I really liked that because, see, we hardly had candy. There was no such thing as candy, that I can remember, okay. And as a matter of fact, when, when I got out of camp and went to public school this one girl, she could get a hold of bubble gum, Dubble Bubble gum and she's the only one that had it and we would all chew it and blow bubbles. Can you imagine? I would just be dead by now. [Laughs] Those little things, you think about things like that, but I don't remember toys to speak of.

RP: Do you remember any special occasions at the Children's Village? Like you just mentioned Christmas, do you recall what you did at Christmastime in camp?

CT: Yes. I remember this one, well this is when I stopped believing in Santa Claus because they had a woman, a woman portraying Santa Claus. Can you imagine that? They had a woman portraying Santa Claus and I went up there and I says, "You're a woman. You're not Santa Claus." I says, I was so devastated and so disappointed that, that I, I stopped believing in Santa Claus after that. I didn't trust him. I said, I don't trust this. But now birthdays, I remember birthdays. Everybody, somebody would have a birthday where they have a little cake and as little kids we look up there and says, and we ask the caregivers, "Is this our birthday? Is this my birthday?" 'Cause you're so egocentric as a little kid that you think that it's your birthday and not anybody else's birthday, but I remember those days, about the cake, the birthday cake. They would have just a little cake and just a, I guess, a few people got to eat it. They would not have a big cake.

RP: You get a gift, too? Do you remember getting a gift?

CT: No, no gift.

RP: Just the cake.

CT: No, just the cake. The cake was good enough. That was great. That was a big treat in those days.

RP: Cake full, with candles, too?

CT: Yeah, yeah. I remember that. I don't know if anyone else remembers, but I remember.

RP: That's very special.

CT: It was very special.

RP: Yeah.

CT: But you know little things like that are very special. You didn't have to have a closet full of toys to be impressed with anything. It was anything simple. A pear, one of those pears was, finally unwrapped the little pear, those, it's ripe, say, "It's ripe." We'd get so excited that it was ripe, we could eat it.

RP: How'd it taste?

CT: Delicious. It was good. To this very day I wrap my pears in newspaper, you know that? And that's from childhood.

RP: Are there any other sights, sounds or smells associated with camps that will always stick in your mind?

CT: Well, sights or smells, sights, sight is the, the whole camp itself, the walking around it. That's what I remember more than anything. I remember the barbed wire, but I was not afraid of it. My friend Annie says that she used to be so scared to death of the searchlights, but that never scared me. I was older, I guess, that's why. She was younger.

RP: Do you remember any blackouts that occurred, where the lights were deliberately blacked out?

CT: Yeah.

RP: You do?

CT: Yeah, I remember that they'd say, "Blackout. This will be a blackout. We can't have any lights on," or something like that. I never questioned why. I just said okay, "Everybody turn out the lights," that type of thing. But I don't remember how often or anything that occurred. And of course I was not old enough for the politics of the camp either.

RP: Right. Is there anything about, about camp that frightened you or scared you? You said the barbed wire, the lights didn't affect you, but was there anything else that did?

CT: Not really, because I even visited the hospital. Yeah, and, 'cause I had to have physiotherapy. They told me I had polio of my feet and my ankles were weak, so I remember that I would go up there, physiotherapy several times a week and they were all very nice. I was never scared of anything. I can't remember anything that I would be scared of, so I'm sorry I'm not a frightened little child where it's affected my adulthood.

MH: I have a question. What, how did you obtain your clothes at Children's Village? Did they have, did you order clothes? Did they provide you clothes? Did you have your own choice of clothes?

CT: No, we didn't have a choice. They just gave us clothes. And in those days I never paid attention to what I wore, just like today. I don't pay attention to what I wear today. I was never interested in clothes. I never, I don't know, they just didn't, I can see in the orphanage picture that they're, everybody was dressed quite nicely, I thought, and yet one of the former orphans -- I won't say who -- said that the orphanage sent her, her people a bag of clothes and they says, "Oh my gosh, these are just terrible, these clothes." I myself? So I told her, I said, "Well, it's 'cause you had nice clothes. You were well-loved and everything and then you were thrown into the orphanage because of circumstances, and that was gonna be a traumatic thing to you, from clothes on down. And, and then you moved out with your family and when they sent the package of clothes up there from the orphanage then they were just appalled at what you were wearing because you were used to nicer things, where I wasn't used to nicer things. I just wore them to wear them." But I've never been conscious of... and also your environment and the school environment, they did not point us out, "Oh, you've got a dress from the orphanage," or, "You look like a shabby little orphan." Now, if they had said that to me, then naturally this will work on your mind, but none of that was ever said to me about the clothes that we wore or anything like that. And since I was raised even in high school, see, you're getting post Depression and post World War II babies, children like me, and these things weren't important to them, so the outside environment did not make you aware that you were not rich because we were all "poor" in money.

<End Segment 19> - Copyright © 2009 Manzanar National Historic Site and Densho. All Rights Reserved.