<Begin Segment 20>

RP: Tell us about attending school in, at Rohwer, what that was like.

YW: Okay, I attended grammar school from the third grade through the sixth grade. And we had, the majority of the teachers I had were Caucasians that were brought in from the Arkansas school district. I remember the names of two of 'em. Fourth grade teacher was Miss Hayes and the sixth grade teacher was Mrs. Rutherford. She had a teenage daughter that would come in and help her once in a while, grade papers and things. So we had a single lady and a married lady. And then the fifth grade teacher was an older Caucasian lady, but I can't place, I could see her face almost, but I can't remember her name. But they're all competent, did their job, and were accepting of us in our situation. And Mrs. Rutherford did something interesting for the class. She said, "We're gonna have an election this year 'cause Roosevelt's running for office and so is Dewey. And so you guys," she said, "you guys can campaign for each one and I'm gonna give you time to do that. Then at the end of the week we will take a vote." And so we made up little booths to vote in and she made up ballots and gave us a firsthand experience of how democracy is run. And I can't remember who won, but I voted for Dewey because I wasn't gonna vote for the man that put me in jail. But that was an interesting experience. She used the opportunity to teach us something, see? It was good.

RP: What kind of student were you? Were you...

YW: Being sick all the time, I was probably a C-plus, B-minus student. Yeah.

RP: When you weren't sick you were dedicated?

YW: I was fine. Turns out I was, I was pretty good at math. That's one subject I didn't flunk. But, in fact, it was kind of interesting. Once I got out of camp I ended up in a school in Long Beach, and one of the classes I took was metal shop as a junior high student, and the instructor I had was a Jewish teacher and he was very knowledgeable about my situation, about where I was incarcerated and all that. And periodically he would give exams on how you're supposed to compute the layout of your patterns so you can cut it out and make boxes and things like that. And he would teach us how to do this, then he'd give exams to see how well the students learned anything. Unfortunately for me, I was the only student that got an A on those exams. All the other kids couldn't seem to get the hang of it. He finally stopped the class one day, he says, "I got to tell you something. You guys surprise me." He says, "This guy has been in jail for the last three and a half years and he's getting an A on this, and you guys have been out here all this time. What've you been learning? You haven't learned much. I guess I'm not a very good teacher," he says. Mr. Lehman was his name. And from then on the other kids looked at me with, suspicious. [Laughs] It's like, "He's smart." I was good in math and stuff he taught us was easy. And as a result, I was not very good in English. I was poor in English. I was a good science student. I was a good math student, so it was like liberal arts was not for me, but science courses were, so that's what I was. I became a decent student and by the time I graduated from high school I was in the top two and a half percent of my class. So I did well, and that afforded me the opportunity to go to UCLA then, 'cause I had the grades.

RP: Grammar school in Rohwer, do you remember having to recite the Pledge of Allegiance every day at school?

YW: Yes. Daily.

RP: And was that some, did you have a sense of irony about that?

YW: Yes. I thought this was strange. Mrs. Rutherford was good in music. She like to teach music. She says, so she said, "We're gonna put on a Christmas program." We, we. [Laughs]

RP: We, you.

YW: So then she had all her friends, teachers and stuff, this is for the adults to listen to, so some of those songs are patriotic songs and in hindsight I think it was kind of strange. I just say, what are we doing singing patriotic songs? But she, she liked it. We performed well for her. Yeah, she says, "My friends enjoyed the program." That was good, right? But she liked to give us different experiences like that, so I thought that way she was a very well rounded teacher and gave us interesting things to do, like the election and this kind of thing. It was good. It was not part of the curriculum. It was, she took extra time to do this.

<End Segment 20> - Copyright © 2010 Manzanar National Historic Site and Densho. All Rights Reserved.