Densho Digital Archive - Martha Shoaf Interview (denshovh-smartha-01-0013)

<Begin Segment 13>

JA: Well, you mentioned the books, how about how did you get crayons and stuff like that?

MS: Frankly, I bought some. I bought a lot of the crayons and things of that nature, but they were issued to us. I don't know where they, they may have been bought with government money.

JA: Alisa remembers --

MS: But the books were sent to us. Every school sent us their outdated books, and instead of getting enough for, say, a fourth grade like I had, there were four fourth grades in the camp, I was the one that was isolated. I don't know why we were isolated, but we were. And I replaced a teacher that had left, and I have no idea why they were set out there. It was in what they called the Japanese section. So I furnished a lot of things for the children and I got UCLA to send me playground equipment, and they did, so I had my own, and I wouldn't have to depend on getting it from the general area. And they were great about that, different organizations.

JA: Alisa also remembered something about schools donating crayons, other schools?

MS: I don't know about crayons, but... it could well be that they did. I know when I first got there, we didn't have enough paper. I went down and bought those five-cent tablets that had, had the great big black 5 on a red cover, and it was miserable paper, and I bought a bunch of penny pencils with the miserable erasers on 'em, and I bought crayons. And I used to write my lessons on, in crayon before all the books came. And when they came, they came by the hundreds. Then we had to burn 'em.

JA: Burn 'em?

MS: Well, what are you going to do with 'em? The states are no longer want them, these are from all over the states, and you'd get hundreds of copies of the same book. You can only use so many, and there's no storage space, so what are you going to do with 'em?

Male voice: How would, how would Martha characterize the quality of education at Manzanar in the light that she's taught all over the world?

MS: That was my first teaching job. [Laughs] Actually, they got a very good education. They had good teachers. The people that came to teach there were people that definitely had an interest in the people that they were working with, and a lot of them were, had been missionaries to Japan, and these people were teaching. And their education that they got was a good education, because you had people that cared.

JA: And you had a captive audience.

MS: Pardon?

JA: And you had a captive audience.

MS: Yes, you had a captive audience, but you do in a classroom anyway. [Laughs]

JA: That's true. Great.

[Interruption]

JA: What's your best memory of your time in camp?

MS: I had so many. I enjoyed my teaching, I enjoyed my classroom. I even went out and bought a bicycle so I can bicycle around camp with one of my little boys. [Laughs] And we did that on a Saturday. I hated to leave. I hated to have to go away and go, go down to Los Angeles where my parents were. I just didn't want to leave camp. I liked being there, and I liked the people. I even tried to have a garden, but I wasn't very successful, so I hired a gardener. [Laughs]

JA: That's good, that's great. What was your worst moment?

MS: Well, it doesn't really have anything to do with the camp, is when I wanted to leave at Christmastime and we were snowing. Everybody was, the Caucasians were leaving, and the superintendent let 'em all go, so when I asked, she said, "No." And it infuriated me. [Laughs] I don't want to remember that.