<Begin Segment 13>

RP: What was school like at Heart Mountain, Ted?

TH: You asked me that question and I'll tell you that I was sort of like an A student when I was a freshman at Covina High School, and I studied to make that grade but when I went to camp and we had no textbooks, the teacher lectured. And the hardest part about how I experienced geometry, without a book, you have to learn the axioms and the prepositions and stuff like this and I'm a slow learner, but once I catch on it's okay. But I had a real tough time being a geometry student. You gotta have a book and read it once, and then you don't understand, you read it a second time you some more meaning, and the third time you sort of start to understand it. You didn't get that when you're a student at Heart Mountain. The teacher had the book and you had to learn from what she tells you and that didn't work too keen. Same thing in, I took chemistry, too, to try to go to college and stuff, college prep stuff, and I flunked chemistry. I remember not wetting the tube to shove through the cork, you're supposed to wet it so it'll be lubricated and here I'm pushing it in dry and that tube broke so the teacher, Japanese teacher, he had to come and clean it up and tape it up, it bled pretty good.

RP: Were your teachers primarily Caucasian?

TH: They were mostly Caucasians but there were a sprinkling of Japanese teachers also.

RP: Was there any particular teacher that stood out in your mind that made a little more of an effort to reach the kids and make learning interesting?

TH: There was one. Her name was Mary Pagano, and she was, I guess, she got along with the female group real well although I think she got along with pretty much everybody. I met her one time at reunion but I didn't open my mouth. She was my English teacher and I was a poor student. I did pretty good, I knew what a valedictorian and a salutatorian was before I went to high school because a good friend of our family, we went to a commencement exercise about 1939 and he was the salutatorian. And so because I knew these two words, I even told my kids while they were going to grammar school that at least they knew what these words meant. And so I tried to be a scholar but when you compete against other Japanese kids, you just don't make the grades because of what you can make, maybe in outside schools is poor grade like a D or a C. The competition is terrific.

RP: Did you attend school in barracks?

TH: Yes, yes. The first two winters I think we were still going to, while the new high school was being built, we were going to barracks, and the benches, instead of chairs, no backrest. It was sort of hard to concentrate when you have no book and you try to do homework and then your friends say to you, "Come on, let's go shoot some baskets." You're not disciplined like you would in the regular school. Our favorite place to hang out was in the boiler area where this big steel tank was covered in asbestos. The sides of the buildings where the flames were the hottest had asbestos nailed onto the walls. We used to stand against the asbestos and then if you happened to squat down your pea coat got all, or what you were wearing got full of asbestos then us kids used to brush off, and then the asbestos was flying around we must have got some into our nostrils and stuff like this. They talk about asbestos being poisonous but even in our barrack where the coal burning stove was, it was all asbestos, that loose flaky stuff. If my mom went to get a broom and knock some of the cobwebs down that were there that asbestos would be flying around. They advertise over television today that if you're ever around asbestos, like a mechanic blowing brake drums and brake lining, that you could be entitled to some money. That's a bunch of baloney when we were exposed to all this asbestos. It was warm there, snow could be on the ground, but that boiler room was a favorite spot of the young people.

RP: Talk about the winters that you experienced there and just the cold and you're coming from a relatively mild climate in Southern California, then you're dealing with pretty harsh winters. How did, you mentioned the pea coats --

TH: That was World War I navy, I think, pea coats, I guess they had it in storage and they're made out of wool. They handed those out to whoever needed them. The clever people, they retailored them and then they put the stitches in the collars and marked the names on it. They all looked the same. They became a fad to fix, some tailored it, so it wouldn't be so long. But it was good for us, we just took the sleeves and just turned it inside in, turned them inside the sleeves and we wore it that way.

RP: How did you heat your rooms at Heart Mountain?

TH: Coal. If you didn't get out early enough, get up when the coal truck came and carried some coal, you'd have to go and get the crumbs, the crumbs of the coal, it's all loose and it's real hard to put in.

RP: First come, first served. Did you have to go out and get coal?

TH: Yeah, if I didn't then my mother would have to do it, so I helped as much as I could. My mother had, my kid brother was just about one years old when he went into camp and so she had to spend a lot of time with him.

<End Segment 13> - Copyright © 2010 Manzanar National Historic Site and Densho. All Rights Reserved.