Densho Digital Archive - Russell Demo Interview (denshovh-drussell-01-0005)

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RP: How did you travel down to Camp Florence? By train?

RD: Yeah. We went, we landed, stopped at a little town of Coolidge, and it was a mile, and we walked from there to where the train station was to Florence, Arizona. I remember while I was there, we got some of the first Italian prisoners of war came there.

RP: Italian.

RD: And they, they were doing, working in the laundry and different things around there, I don't know what all we did. We never had any contact with them, we never had to do much of that. All I know is that the outfit I got was 319th MPG Company was that everybody in there had at least three years or more in service and at least one court martial. There were a bunch of 8-balls in the service. They organized this one outfit, and naturally I got stuck in it. So it was quite a wild group there, and they always went to town and got advice from the other MPs and everything else.

RP: Were you part of that, too?

RD: Oh, no, not really. Not there in Arizona.

RP: You were waiting for Manzanar to come along.

RD: [Laughs] Well, outside of taking off and doing what I wasn't supposed to do, I mean, I didn't get in too many fights or anything. Well, maybe one or two, I guess.

RP: So when you were inducted in Fort Ord, is that where you met up with Bobby Villa and Johnny?

RD: Yeah, yeah. Yeah. When we got, when I got to Camp Manzanar, yeah.

RP: So you went, you went to camp Florence with them?

RD: I don't think, no, I don't remember them being in Florence with me. I just remember catching up with them at Manzanar there, at Manzanar. Where they came from, I don't remember.

RP: You had these aspirations to be in the Air Force, but you ended up in the Army. You said you were put into the limited service unit because of your weight.

RD: Yeah.

RP: How much did you weigh at that time?

RD: I weighed, like I said, I weighed... when I went in the service I stood 6'1-1/2" and I weighed 135 pounds.

RP: What was the...

RD: Well, I didn't find out until afterward, but about six months later I put on ten pounds and got to 145 pounds, and they told me I was in general service then. And then after they broke up the outfit there in, what is it, May, I think, of '44, and they shipped part of down to the medical unit, and about sixty-nine of us were sent down to Camp Haan. And we were there about a week or two, and there was a stockade there, we were guarding prisoners there for a while.

RP: Before you went to Camp Florence to get your basic training, had you had any experience at all with guns?

RD: No, not really.

RP: Never handled one?

RD: Nope, there was nobody in my family that did any hunting or anything. I did a little fishing on my own, I went, walked down to the pier or something like that. Little old rod of some type. But outside of that...