<Begin Segment 14>

TR: And then you said people from Minidoka came out here to work on the farms.

AN: Uh-huh.

TR: Can you tell me about that?

AN: Well, I can imagine that they were uneasy about coming out here whether they would be discriminated against or what. And then at first, they stayed in a little tent camp as I said three miles south of Nyssa on the curve there near the railroad track, and it was just amazing. They were just little tent camps. But I know one lady was such a good housekeeper, at home, and she came out here in this tent camp, and it was so neat and pretty. I can remember the blue bedspread out there, and it was so neat and clean, and I thought, "My goodness sakes. Here she is keeping house in a tent and doing a wonderful job. I could not never do that." And then Miss Peet then had Sunday school there, and where has she got it. She had a piano, an old clunker piano out there. I played it for her every Sunday and here, I wonder how she ever found a piano to take out to the tent camp? Imagine. And then afterwards, after it got a little colder to live in tents, they went out to the old, it used to be the old CCC Camp. You know what CCC Camp, Civilian Conservation Corps?

TR: The Roosevelt Program.

AN: Yes, uh-huh, for the people who were out, nothing to do for the young boys and you know. And so then they went and stayed out there.

TR: Were they here year round?

AN: Yes, uh-huh, out in the camps.

TR: No. I mean people from the camps came here to work.

AN: Uh-huh.

TR: Was that just summertime farm labor or were they here year round?

AN: Yeah. They were here year round. That is after they came out to the CCC Camp. Yeah.

TR: So did the people who came to work from Minidoka, were they on some kind of temporary leave or were they what I would think of as out of camp? Were they finished with camp when they came here? Did they get permanent releases to come here?

AN: Oh, I don't know how it worked when they left, but then they stayed. You know, the Japanese, they're very ambitious, and they started farming on their own. I remember they had the, they had some German, some of the Germans came out here, and they had them working out in the fields. And we had heard that they weren't getting enough to eat, so we brought some food and took it, when they came out to our place to work, well then, we took some food out there, and they wouldn't let us give it to them. Isn't that a shame?

TR: Were these Germans who had been interned or were they prisoners-of-war?

AN: I would say they're prisoners-of-war. I think so. So I don't think they were here very long though because we never heard anything about them anymore.

TR: Can you describe Miss Peet?

AN: Miss Peet?

TR: Yes.

AN: Oh, she was a lovely lady.

TR: What was her, why was she here and under what capacity and what did she do while she was here?

AN: Oh, she wasn't, she had gone to Japan as a missionary, and since that wasn't feasible anymore, she came out here. Alice Finley was here too and so was Miss Peet. And Miss Peet lived out here in the tent camp and had the Sunday school. And then she went out to the CCC Camp and she was out there, and I'd visit her over there. And she wrote about the time they had the Japanese picnics out here on our lawn. She'd tell about that. And that, let's see, that place, CCC Camp is quite a ways from town, and so in order to do her work, she needed a car. Well here she was past retirement and had to learn to drive a car, so she chose a little old, used to be a fancy little roadster.

TR: What kind of roadster?

AN: Oh, I don't know, Ford or whatever, little gray one, and so she learned to drive very cautiously. And then one time, she went to visit a friend over here out in Nyssa about a quarter mile out of town, and this lady asked her to stay for lunch. She had some fried chicken for lunch, so oh that sounded good, so she sat down to wait for lunch. And this lady went out to the yard, and she caught a chicken. And that's the way you did it around here in those days, I guess, and I never did. But she caught the chicken, and she chopped his head off, and she put hot water on it and took all the feathers off, slit it open and cleaned it out, washed it and cut it up and had fried chicken for lunch. You had, I haven't had prayer and fried chicken.

TR: So the people who were living in the CCC Camp then were able to go out and farm on their own eventually?

AN: No. They just disappeared. I don't remember. I don't know what happened to them. I knew the, Mr. Clonigger used to be in the army, and so then he took over the head of, he was head of the CCC Camp. And I remember him because his daughter went to school in Nyssa, and I remember her particularly because she was so attractive, and they lived in Hawaii, and she had learned to, she was a dancer, so she learned the hula. So I don't know what happened to him, what happened to the CCC boys. That didn't last I guess. The CCC, I don't remember what happened to them. They did a little work around, I guess, probably on the farms. I don't know where else.

TR: I think the CCC was active in the '30s. Then in the late '30s, it was slowly --

AN: Getting dwindled away.

<End Segment 14> - Copyright © 2004 Oregon Nikkei Endowment and Densho. All Rights Reserved.