<Begin Segment 26>

RP: Joining Russell is his daughter, Sharon. And Sharon, perhaps you and Russell could share the story of how you ended up visiting Manzanar a couple of years ago?

S: Yes. Before that, my husband and I had made a trip to Las Vegas and we had driven down 395. And I called my dad to check on him, see how he was doing, and I told him where we were and he said, oh, he'd been stationed there at camp Manzanar. And so then a couple years ago we planned a trip with two of my daughters and some of my grandkids to go to the Grand Canyon, and we asked my dad if he wanted to go with us and he said, "Yeah." And so during the trip, we took everybody and went down to camp Manzanar so he could, and Lone Pine so he could see where he had been at the time. And it was a shock to him because it was so different.

RD: I didn't recognize hardly anything. Everything was gone. They took all the barracks, and everything else was all down. And like she said, I remember the ballfield, but I still, right now, just thinking about it, I don't remember it.

S: Yeah, as we drove through in there, he would tell us where, "This was here, the garden was here, and the ballfield was here." We sat in and watched the movie that was, that they show in there, which was very sad.

RP: And you met, you met a person in the interpretive center who actually had been in the camp?

S: Yes, she said when she was young, she'd been in the camp, 'cause we just got talking, and I said, "Oh, my dad was a guard here at the camp, but he didn't agree what was going on and didn't like it, and he would let 'em kind of come and go as they wanted." But as soon as I said my dad was a guard at the camp, she dropped all conversation and walked away. She wanted nothing more to do with the conversation or anything. It was a really sad thing. It must have been really hard.

RD: I imagine it was.

<End Segment 26> - Copyright © 2009 Manzanar National Historic Site and Densho. All Rights Reserved.