<Begin Segment 6>

MH: What happened when the order came to evacuate?

EF: What happened to what?

MH: What happened? What happened when the order came to evacuate? You said your father got someone to take care of the farm. How did you get to wherever you were going to go?

EF: Well, my father had a so-called friend who kind of turned against us after we came back who said that he'd take us to the fairground which was right here in Gresham, so it was just a matter of five-mile ride, so he took all of us to the fairground and where the bus had picked us up to go to Portland Center.

MH: What did you think of the Portland Assembly Center?

EF: I thought it was terrible, but I didn't know how we were going to survive a place like that. But as I said, I personally wasn't there that long because I went out to work with the harvest out in Nyssa, Oregon. So I think we were there about two weeks and then we got out to go to Nyssa, Oregon, to help with the sugar beet thinning. So my brother, Jack, Jim and myself and a lot of the other people all went, you know, we all went out there to help because got out of camp, got on the train and went out there. And we were supposed to be there for two weeks, that was the contract. So we worked for the first two weeks, and I got to come home.

MH: What kind of job did you do during that two weeks? Tell me about that.

EF: We thinned sugar beets. The sugar beets had to be thinned. We drove about fifty miles to the farm from where we were stationed in Nyssa. We went to a town by the name of Jameson, Oregon, so it was about an hour and a half ride one way, so there was a lot of time on the road.

MH: What were you paid for doing that?

EF: Well, we weren't too familiar with the pay when we... but anyway, after doing, working one day, we found out we're not going to make it on this pay scale. So we had people from Yakima, Washington, in this crew too, and here I was just an eighteen-year-old kid, and I says, "Hey, you guys going to work under these wages?" And I really think that if I didn't mention anything about, "Hey, we're not going to make it on this wages," I think they would have worked for that cheap wage. But the second day out, we all agreed to, hey, we all agreed to see if they are going to upscale the wages. Well, I know we were not in the right position for that, but we held our, we held our own and sat on the ditch bank for two hours and didn't do anything. We seen about six cars come into the farm, and I'm saying to myself, "I guess we're going back to Portland Center." But they doubled our wages, so we all went to work about three hours later, and that ended the labor negotiation on the wage scale.

MH: What kind of place did you live when you went to these labor camps, I think they called them that?

EF: Well, this was all tents, tent with a, they had a platform, bought it for us, you know, so we don't have to sit on the ground. But canvas tents and five people in a tent.

MH: You sleep on the floor or --

EF: No, no. We had cots, canvas cots. And it was pretty cold up there then still, so we kind of froze a little bit, but we all survived it.

MH: Did they feed you?

EF: They fed us, yeah. We had to pay for it, but you know, they fed us. They had a mess hall there. It was good enough food, good enough food. I never complained about it. The only thing we had to pack a lunch and go out to fields when we had the, you know, since we were away, sixty miles away, so we can't come back for lunch, so we all packed our lunch. We had no refrigeration or anything back in those days, so some of the items got spoiled and people got sick, so we had a little problem there. Anyway, we all came back intact at the end.

MH: So then after two weeks, you went back to Portland Assembly Center. What happened then?

EF: We got back, my folks wanted to go to, go out there, so we turned right around went back out again which a lot of families that had people that went out the first time they all followed suit, so it was just like all the people went out on that first two weeks all went back out to stay for good.

MH: Did your family go with you, your dad, your mom?

EF: Yes. My whole family went with us, yes.

MH: And you lived in those tents?

EF: We lived in those tents 'til fall, 'til late fall. 'Til about October, we finally moved into a CCC camp that had regular housing. They converted it for these workers, and that was ample shelter for us during the winter.

MH: And where was that?

EF: That was in Adrian, Oregon, which was up the road about twelve miles south.

MH: And what kind of farm work did you do back there?

EF: We were very diversified. We did all kinds of work, took care of sheep and helped with the baled hay that they moved around the, somebody ordered a load and we'd move baled hay and those kind of items. That was the winter jobs which were not very plentiful, but there was enough there for us to survive on, so that's how we got by in the winter.

MH: Did your mother go out and work on the farm too?

EF: Not during the winter. They didn't have to during the winter. But they worked all the time otherwise. That was practically mandatory. I don't, not very many people were able to stay without working. They all had to work.

MH: Who were you paid by?

EF: By the farmer.

MH: And who ran these farm labor camps?

EF: It's federally funded, so Farm Security Administration I think it was that ran that, yeah, and we didn't have any problem with that. They did a good job for us.

MH: So this was about --

EF: And the housing was adequate. You know the housing they made for us was adequate.

MH: So this was in 1942, '43?

EF: Right.

<End Segment 6> - Copyright © 2003 Oregon Nikkei Endowment and Densho. All Rights Reserved.