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RP: What was your initial reactions or impressions of the Bambauers when you first got to meet them? You know, maybe the first meeting that you had with them as a, as a kid.

DB: Well, first of all, there was a pretty long period of time in which visitations were taking place. And they never involved me physically or, they probably involved me emotionally because if, if it's true it's gonna change things. But, but I don't think we ever got to that point. I think it happened more like come up and put me in a car and took me off. Now what was the second part of your question?

RP: Your initial impressions of them?

DB: So my first initial impression was just here comes some people to visit the camp and, and so... my second impression occurred... remember I said that I had this little tweak of... you know, well... the military police, it took two patrolmen and two other officers and I don't know what they were, and I was placed in the backseat between the two officers for the drive to Bishop. So it took three officers to get me from Manzanar to Bishop. When we got to Bishop they delivered me. Sent me... and remember I said that my father was a doctor. He, he had preserved that afternoon to take me home and introduce me to the new family. And that was my first encounter. Now, it was punctuated by the fact that we drove up to what we called the ranch, it was a little, it was a little ranch, where Mother and the other three kids were. And my father got out of the car and said, "Just a minute." And I don't know why he said, "Just a minute." But he said, "Do not touch anything on the dash." Now, what do you think that means? So he goes in and I say to my fellow sisters and brothers, "I wonder what this switch is for?" "You'd better not touch it, oh yeah." I touch it and I don't get 'em all back in the same place. That was my second. And he was, the family, were Quakers. And the Quakers have a very high esteem of personal worth and so forth and so forth. And he let me be known that that wasn't acceptable behavior. And I've attributed that to his Quakerism. And that Quakerism, like any other religion, engrosses your entire thinking process and so forth. So that was my... and he didn't holler, he didn't scream, he didn't beat anybody on the head or... he just said, "We don't do things like that." And we went on and got to introduce the family together and we, the ranch was twenty acres so we just played. We had a donkey and we played with donkey and...

RP: Was this located just outside of Bishop or...

DB: Well it's just, Bishop, then there's Round Valley, and this was the northern end of Round Valley. It was a Forest Service lease. We had like a ten or twelve year lease. And, do you know the area?

RP: Very well. In fact, I used to live there.

DB: Well, if you go out to Round Valley and you make a sweeping turn kind of to the east you make a turn back and there's a strawberry patch on the side of the hill here, a big strawberry patch, and there's this road going up, and you can see it all there, that takes you right through this bright green spot, surrounded. and that was our ranch. And we rented that for a number of years. And being a doctor, he needed a location to rest because the, the other house was twenty-two miles away. So, he had a place to go when he was on call.

RP: Before we talk a little bit more about that, what was it like for you leaving Manzanar, leaving the Children's Village? While be it you had some, there were some issues in how you were treated by other kids, but again, like you said, you had this sense of cohesion with that group. And now you're driving up to Bishop with, you know, strange, strange new family.

DB: It was a very difficult transition. I don't know if it was the age, the culpability of my, my life, but it was a very difficult transition. It was not only a difficult transition within the family, but it was a difficult transition in the community. The transition in the family, I'm not a psychiatrist or a psychologist, I can only tell you that the effect in my opinion was a lot of a lot of dysfunctional characteristics. I think you could say that, well, I could say, I don't know that you could say, but I think I could say that it was a extremely difficult transition and it lasted a long time. Normally we would have thought that within a year's time things would have leveled out and so forth. Well, I wasn't... the plan was to place me or finish the adoption procedure in a year. Well, I was finally adopted at the age of eleven. It took a lot longer. And what I was told was -- and it was primarily by my mother -- I was told that I just wasn't fitting in. And that could have been true. But, that's, that side of the family, there were same kind of signals with the other kids except they'd already been adopted. So they couldn't send 'em back. That was one of the things my mother threatened. You know, "If you don't straighten up we'll send you back." Well we, we got through it finally and adoption took place when I was about the eighth grade, seventh grade maybe. And then the transition from that grade level to a teenager was difficult for me and I might guess it might have been difficult to my mother and father. Yeah, it was. So I think, I think we never really had a meaningful family relationship. I mean, we were, we were there. But, for instance, I ran away from home probably six or eight times, between the time that I was a freshman in high school and in fifth grade in elementary school.

RP: Where would you go?

DB: Well, remember I said that there were two houses? And we always kept a key because my father believed that it was a religious duty for us to assist people in need. So he would give the key to the preacher man who when somebody needed a place overnight, he'd give him the key until they trashed the place. But... we were trying to focus in on my runaway capabilities. So we had this second, second place which I could go to. The problem was that was thirteen miles, and seven miles of it was a dirt road. And maybe a car a day. Now you see, you wonder about my intelligence. Well, so do I.

RP: You mentioned that you had some, the transition was difficult in the community as well. How, how did that play out?

DB: Well, it was a very long ongoing process. not exactly caused by local townspeople. But I thought that when I was going to live there, that it was going to be nice, peaceful... that was my expectation. But my expectation was cut very short in that I would say within the first month, school aged kids, you know, sixth, seventh grade, were picking on me, addressing me as "Hey, Jap." "Hey Tojo, get over here." I mean, just same kind of taunting that we had at the relocation, incarceration camp called Manzanar. It just wasn't any different. As a matter of fact, I shouldn't say that it wasn't different. Remember we talked about occasionally you get surrounded by the wagons? Well, as a... in camp, sometimes I would be surrounded. I think if I had, if those same people had been in camp, the relationship would have been different. But they weren't. They were outside so it was the world against Dennis. And, Dennis had a violent temper and that just fed into the campaign of the other side and it became more frequent and ultimately I think caused my parents to move me out of Bishop Elementary School District and take me to Round Valley School District. And I don't recall having the same problems in the different environment. The first environment, it was just, it was a matter of vindictive meanness. I had a lot of things happening.

<End Segment 8> - Copyright © 2009 Manzanar National Historic Site and Densho. All Rights Reserved.