<Begin Segment 11>

AC: And so you worked at first as a waiter in the mess hall. What did a waiter do? What was your responsibilities?

IK: Well, we had to put the food out, and then, well, we had to get the plates and everything out for 'em, and all they did was come in and eat. So we had to put the rice out there in a bowl, so that they could take what they wanted, and then we had okazu or whatever we had. Mutton, mostly, like I say, and we put that out in bowls, and they took what they wanted. And there was a... if we can get salad, we made salad. We just ate what they gave us.

AC: So you'd show up before mealtime and lay out the meal. Did you have to clean up after the meal?

IK: Oh, yeah. That's a waiter's job. And then we had dishwashers. So we'd clean off the table and then they'd do everything a waiter's supposed to do.

AC: For how many people in this barracks mess hall did you service every mealtime?

IK: You're making me think back. About sixty people, I would say.

AC: In just that one block.

IK: Yeah. Well, it was maybe more than that. I really don't know. Yeah, there must have been more than that. There must have been close to eighty people we had to service.

AC: Then you said you graduated and you became a cook.

IK: Well, see, as a waiter, you only get sixteen dollars a month. A cook you get nineteen dollars a month. And so they wanted to know if I'd be a cook, but what I didn't like about it was you had to get up four-thirty in the morning to cook rice. And when you're seventeen years old, four-thirty in the morning is pretty early, especially when we used to go to dances and things like that, well, you get home late. And so I quit, and that's when I started driving the grader. That was a nineteen dollar job, too.

AC: So making rice, did you do it over, like, a wood burning stove, make rice that way?

IK: Oh, yeah. Then that chef, he told me how to do it, we have to wash the rice, and then we had a big pan like this that you cooked it in. He told me how much to put in, how much water to use. And then, but on a wooden stove, it don't cook evenly. So I had to stand there and turn that thing, and then check on it, see how long. But the chef knew when the rice would be ready, so he'd tell me when it was ready and I'd have to take it off. But I had to stand there and turn it until the rice was done.

AC: What other things did you have to do as a cook?

IK: Oh, we had to cut the meat, cut the salad if we had any, we had to do all that. And then we had to dish it out. But that chef, I heard that he was in Salinas, had a restaurant now. [Laughs] But he had a bunch of boys, and he's probably passed away by now. But his boys took over that restaurant, I hear. I wanted to go there, but I never did get there.

AC: So you said you had dances. Did they have a rec center or something like that?

IK: Yeah. They had kind of a small, on barrack was for kind of a rec center. I used to be the disc jockey because I didn't care to dance. Well, I didn't know how to dance, let's put it that way. So I used to be the disc jockey. Well, me and a couple other guys, Joe [inaudible], and another kid, we used to do that. And they were dancing out there quite a bit. But they want certain kind of music, swing dances, and then they wanted slow dances once in a while, and so we had to pick all the tunes out. Of course, in them days we had records, you know, and not discs like now. And we had a turntable, and these people brought these records from home, so we had those to play.

AC: So did you ever go on any dates with any women in camp?

IK: I never did, but there were some people that were on dates, yeah.

AC: Did they ever go and sneak out under the fence and get privacy someplace?

IK: No, they just went together is all. You ain't going to find any privacy in there, in camp. There used to be a water tower, sometimes they'd go underneath the water tower and talk or something, that's about it.

AC: So driving a grader, how did you get a job doing that? I know it's about the same pay as a cook, but...

IK: Well, I had some friends that were doing it. In fact, he lives in Mountain View right now in California. But him and his brother and cousin, they were driving graders, and they needed another driver, so they asked me. Because I worked with them on a tractor over there in Cozad, Nebraska, and they knew I could drive equipment. So they asked me, so I said, "Okay, just show me how." And the grader's got a whole mess of handles up on top here, and one to lower, one to lift, and I learned all that. But it was no problem.

AC: So you just drove the grader between camps and through camps just to make the road flat?

IK: Uh-huh. And then we'd grade clear up to Parker, we had to grade the whole road, and so we'd be going all day on that road. It's all gravel road.

<End Segment 11> - Copyright © 2004 Oregon Nikkei Endowment and Densho. All Rights Reserved.