<Begin Segment 27>

RP: I think some of those photos are, yeah, from Santa Anita, Stockton.

YW: You can find my mother in that picture somewhere, probably putting up camp nets. Can you imagine that? "We're gonna jail you, but you want to help us build camouflages?" Right. This is an irony. They had Boy Scout camps and they interacted with us, Boy Scouts outside of camp. That must've been a strange feeling.

RP: Yeah, you were a little too young for Boy Scouts, weren't you?

YW: Yeah. One of my friends had an older son that was in this. He was about fifteen, sixteen at the time.

RP: And he got to go out to the jamboree?

YW: Yeah. Oh, let's see [looking through pictures]...

RP: That's some of the cypress wood you were talking about?

YW: This is the cypress, cypress roots. [Points to a picture, shows RP] Remember?

RP: Right. Oh yeah, there's even a picture of it.

YW: That's what they're carving. Right. Let's see, oh my... played marbles, yeah. Oh, let's see here. Where was it? [Still looking through pictures]

RP: I don't think --

YW: You know, with ten thousand, eight to ten thousand people, it's a small city. We became one of the biggest cities in Arkansas all of a sudden. Oh my. [Holds up a picture] That's what a typical classroom looked like.

RP: That was it?

YW: Yeah. Can't find what I'm lookin' for. I thought they'd have another picture.

RP: Of the other memorial?

YW: Of the monument.

RP: With the tank on it.

YW: Yeah. I'm surprised. That was one of the original things built.

RP: And I think, yeah, you mentioned that was at the, at the cemetery?

YW: At the cemetery, right. They also put up an obelisk and they put the names of, not, it was more like a "rest in peace" kind of thing, in Japanese calligraphy.

RP: Oh. We have our cemetery monument in Manzanar and it's [inaudible], I believe it's the same characters.

YW: Similar, similar kind of thing, yeah.

RP: Did you, did you try to locate where Block 16 would've been?

YW: Oh yeah, I knew where that was. I could look across from there, I said, it's about right over here. Yeah, it's one block in. They says, "How do you remember that?" I said, "Well, we were next to the corner near the railroad tracks."

RP: Railroad tracks still there?

YW: The railroad tracks still there. That still operates.

RP: So what kind of, did you have any emotional response to being, being back there?

YW: No. No, it was just an, something that happened. I could just picture faces of kids I played with, but they're now old, right? Yeah.

RP: One final question --

YW: Oh, I visited the water hole to go see where we used to go fish.

RP: The bayou?

YW: The bayou. I drove, I had a camper that we drove around over there. The bayou's still there.

RP: You throw a line in?

YW: I didn't see anybody fishing at the time. But it's a wonder the people that lived across the bayou didn't, didn't call the police or something, wonder what these people are doin' out here.

RP: One final question, Rohwer was a, kind of a combination of people from Stockton, California --

YW: I remember that.

RP: -- and the group from Santa Anita, Los Angeles.

YW: L.A.

RP: You mentioned the rivalries that were expressed in sports between the different communities.

YW: Yeah, they had one football team and we had another, and so they competed.

RP: How did, how did those two distinct communities get along, L.A. people and Stockton?

YW: I guess okay, as far as I know. I don't know how, whether there was any animosity or anything like that, except that they were a different group of people.

<End Segment 27> - Copyright © 2010 Manzanar National Historic Site and Densho. All Rights Reserved.