<Begin Segment 9>

RP: Your relationship with Ruth at Manzanar continued to be a very strong, nurturing situation, or was she busy with other kids and couldn't give you...

CT: Oh no, she, she was, it was still very strong until she left, but she left a year before I did. And I begged her to take me to New York with her, but she couldn't. And so she went to New York and then eventually got her life and married her husband and had her own children. And I was able... I did not know where she had gone because the first foster mother's, Annie's foster mother, she took all my addresses and threw 'em away. Why she didn't want me to have contact with my past life, I'll never know. 'Cause she's crazy. She threw 'em away, so I lost all contact with everybody until 1991 when they had the Children's Village reunion, which I couldn't attend because I was in Turkey at the time. And that made me sick, but Annie got all the information. She got Ruth's number and from there I was able to write to her and communicate with her until she died two years ago.

RP: So up until 1991 you had lost complete track of Ruth?

CT: Yeah, I did, because Annie's foster mother, Wilma Stewart -- I was there, I think, just a year -- she just threw all my belongings away, personal stuff, and at that time if you're only nine years old you can't do much except cuss and that's it.

RP: What was that like meeting up with Ruth again?

CT: I never did meet up with her, but we, we communicated by letters. You know how you get so busy with your life and everything and you just don't have the chance to, and I regret that, that I never was able to see her. And then the last ten years of her life she was in full blown Alzheimer's, so I knew it was just impossible, so I used to communicate with her daughter and her, and Ruth's husband, because she didn't know anything of the Children's Village or anything, which was a shame. But she gave her husband a good history of it.

RP: Were, was there anybody else on the staff that touched you in the way that Ruth touched you?

CT: No.

RP: At Manzanar?

CT: Not that I can remember, no. She's the only one.

<End Segment 9> - Copyright © 2009 Manzanar National Historic Site and Densho. All Rights Reserved.