Densho Digital Archive
Oregon Nikkei Endowment Collection
Title: Mika Hiuga Interview
Narrator: Mika Hiuga
Interviewer: Alton Chung
Location: Ontario, Oregon
Date: December 4, 2004
Densho ID: denshovh-hmika-01-0013

<Begin Segment 13>

AC: And in Heart Mountain, how was it there?

MH: Okay. It was okay. It was near Yellowstone Park. We thought, "Oh boy, we're getting to the Yellowstone Park." But anyway, it was cold, real cold. And of course, with ten camps and 120,000, each camp would have had between 11 and 12,000 people. When the "no-nos" came to Tule Lake, there was more. Heart Mountain was cold and everything, but you know, when you were in camp, you could take leave, and a lot of the people took leave to go to college in the East or go for a maybe housekeeping job or some kind of job. So when I was in Heart Mountain, I thought I just want to go out of camp, and so my friend and I thought we'd go to Salt Lake City. It was... I tell you my life has, when I think of it, I was very lucky that I decided to do that because Dad didn't have any money, but he was getting an allotment from my brother who was killed in the accident, five or ten dollars. I can't remember now, but he said, "I'll give you that and you can go to Salt Lake," so I had that check every month. And then I went to, I registered at LES Business School because I liked to do that kind of thing. They gave us a choice of families where we could stay with, and of course Salt Lake is a Mormon town, so I stayed with this Mormon family. She had three boys. Her husband was in the navy, so I stayed with her, and she treated me very nicely. She gave me board and room, and she gave me three dollars a week. I helped her on Saturdays with different things. And then of course, Wednesday night when she went to her church class, I stayed with the boys. And so everything turned out okay because I got a degree or whatever from the business school. I started, can I go on with my life here? When I came here, I, you've heard of Oreida Foods which is Heinz now. I applied for a job over there. And first, they put me in the processing plant for three years, so I worked specking potatoes and different things. Then an office job came open, and so I applied, and so he said, "Go to the employment office and take a typing test," and I passed with honors, so he hired me. And so when I think of it now, I worked twenty-five years in the personnel office and administrative assistant, and if I hadn't gone out of camp and got that education, I probably would have never got this job. So I just think everything falls in place in your life, and I worked there twenty-five years, and I retired before I was sixty-five.

AC: So you had mentioned when you were in camp that you went to movies, I mean, they had movies in the mess hall for ten cents. Were these just popular movies?

MH: Well, I can't remember now, but whatever we could see is entertaining, because we didn't have TV or we couldn't bring radios. So with the outside world was some of that newspaper we could get, but not very often. So it was good, gave us something to do, you know.

AC: You also had dances?

MH: Uh-huh.

AC: And so how was that? I mean you were a young girl --

MH: Oh, it was fun.

AC: -- and you had all these boys.

MH: Yeah, we had fun. [Laughs] Yeah, it was good.

AC: Now here it was, you had a very strong strict family and all of a sudden, you're in this camp now where all these other young kids --

MH: Okay. I'm glad you brought that out. It was hard for the parents to be strict with their children. We lived in an apartment, and as you can see, the wall hit the ceiling. But the wall just didn't come up that high, and so there was a space between the apartments, so you couldn't scold your kids very much or talk too loud or you know. Privacy was taken away from us. Although the kids, I suppose the little kids, they had a good time because they didn't have any responsibilities. You know, they became friends. And then my parents, I would say that they were their age that they were just about to retire and hand over the orchard to the boys, but that gave them a rest. But it wasn't just that. It was just to have to leave home, you know.

<End Segment 13> - Copyright © 2004 Oregon Nikkei Endowment and Densho. All Rights Reserved.