Densho Digital Archive - George Iseri Interview (denshovh-igeorge

<Begin Segment 11>

GI: Then when we went to Tule Lake, Pinedale was extremely hot. And when we went to Pinedale, it was still quite warm and all of this dust when we got there. But the wintertime was very cold, and the tough part of it was when my wife was pregnant with our oldest son and the night that he was born, there was, oh, about a foot of snow I guess, but I was fortunate that the packing house where I was the office manager, our field man had to, had a car, couple cars, so I didn't have to walk very often. But the hospital, well, my wife was there about seventy hours I think before she gave birth to our son. And there's other stories that entered into this. You know, the Doctor Togasaki, lady doctor, was, delivered our son. And by the way, the doctors, their top salary was nineteen dollars a month, and they did a tremendous job there, and it's a wonder that they had such good cooperation, but they did and took good care of our people no matter what was the job they needed treatment for.

But... by the way, he, it was five weeks old when we brought him out here. I think the date was about February 28, I think, from Tule Lake. We came on a, I believe it was a Greyhound bus, and we came into the icy cold. But the reason we came out just at that time, we should have waited until about springtime when there's work in the fields, but there was no work in the fields then, and I never did go, because I didn't know anything about it, and I didn't particularly wanted to go at that time anyway. We had a baby but was pruning trees at sixty-five cents an hour which wasn't bad, you know. Sixty-five cents an hour was more than we were paying people to work for us in the service station.

But we were able to... no. I want to give you this part of the story first. You've heard about the "no-no" boys in camp. People who weren't in the camp there didn't know what we were up against, and I know it's hard for them to imagine what it must have been like when those questions, one was something to do with "would you swear your allegiance to the United States of America?" and so and so was in there. Another question was "would you serve if called for the armed service of the United States?" Well, the uprising in Tule Lake at that time was, "Hell, no, we're not going. We're not going to even sign those papers." That's consensus of the group. So there's, people start agitating there. Well I don't know why, but I guess really the majority of us felt like I did after we talked amongst ourselves and that is no matter what we do, if we say we're not going to sign these affidavits, questionnaires, what are we going to gain from it? If we signed "no-no" or refuse to sign them, the government can say, "Okay. We'll put you into solitary confinement or whatever." And so I said, "I'm going to sign 'yes-yes.' I'll be a hypocrite. I'm going to get the hell out of here." So a whole bunch of us did that. And at that time, the antis were after us guys and called us dogs. Dog wasn't, maybe it's the same today, but calling us a dog wasn't a very complimentary remark. And the people were getting beat over the head and things in the camp amongst the California group. I'm very glad that it didn't happen, none of that happened among the Washington group, I don't believe at that time anyway.

So my brother was in Weiser, Idaho, and I'll make it another story, but then he was able to get us a contract here to get us out here. And so many of us came out here as well as other places to avoid violence in the Tule Lake camp which later became the segregation camp, and they took the people who affirmed their allegiance and their acceptance to serving in the military if called, and many of us left there. Those, there were still those, some caught there that maybe old folks with young kids who said, "Well, where would we go? What are we going to do? We can't take these little kids out there and go out in the farm in this kind of weather, and it's that cold time of the year." So they were kind of stuck. But at that time, there was enough agitation in the other camps, same way, that they let the group out who said "yes-yes" and shipped them to other camps like Minidoka and Wyoming, and they took the bad ones from those camps and filled up Tule Lake again. You see what I mean? They shifted us around, and that's what happened then.

Well, I came out here and lived in Weiser in a one bedroom, not a one bedroom but a one room cabin with a small kitchen, no bathroom, and my wife had two hot plates, I mean, two burner hot plates. One of them didn't work. Eventually, she got so that she was cooking for seven or eight of us because I had a contract to farm. I had workers come to camp to live, so my wife cooked for seven or eight of us. And some other people didn't, bachelors were there, so not one burner hot plate and no place to eat it. They had to eat in, I don't remember where we ate now, but that type of a deal. And then the local laundry in Weiser said, "George," he said, "Well, by golly, you know, you folks are hardworking people and how about recruiting some more help for me from Tule Lake?" And he said, "I'll drive you down there. You go with me. We'll go down there and recruit." And I said, "Well, okay." So we went down and recruited more labor to come out here to Weiser to work which panned out quite well. But these guys that were in camp that had give us trouble, enough time had elapsed, he said, he's coming on, "George, well, we heard you're having a tough time out there." "Oh yeah, it's tough," I says. "Hell, we get to go uptown and buy whiskey if we want, and we'd go to any grocery store we want, and we do this and that. Yeah, it's awful tough out there." Oh, it's like that, you know. You see, they were envious of what they had passed up. They couldn't leave now. They were all tied there.