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AS: But we were first evacuated into the assembly center, temporary center, which is now the, which was the stockyard converted quickly into rooms. And they built rooms with just wall, no ceiling, no door, and every room looked alike. People would pop in and out, because just a small cubicle, just enough for your bed to fit in there. Well, after two weeks, the infirmary they had built for sick people was just full. Everybody was coughing and sneezing and very, getting so sick, and you could hear every word the next door neighbor was saying because just, a wall, thin wall, no ceiling. And in the meantime, the sugar beet company from Nyssa, Oregon, came, and they wanted to recruit young men to work in the sugar beet field. They were really behind in the work, and they needed people to get that sugar beet thinned down. So my husband said, "You know, this is a great opportunity to get out of here. So many people are getting sick. So shall we go?" I said, "Yes. I'll be glad to go." I was the only woman. There must have been over twenty young men.]

So we were put on the train at night. They pulled the shade down so we couldn't see where we were going. We didn't know where we were going. But we arrived at Nyssa, Oregon, the next morning, and there, they had tent camps, camps made out of tent material in hundred-degree weather. They gave us a wood stove to cook with and no place to hang our clothes. We only had two suitcases, nothing much to hang anyway. But, everything stayed in the suitcase, so, got damp. Well, they said, "You'll have to have work shoes, work clothes, a short handled hoe, a file to file your hoe and a steel lunch box and a hat." So we went to the hardware store, and work shoes, yes. So we went to the hardware store to buy all the things we needed, and by gosh, the hardware store man was so happy. He just sold everything out. Here we were all ready. And next morning, a farmer from one of the farms who had sugar beet came to get us on his pickup, so we all piled up in the back of his pickup. There was one family called the Uchiyama family; their father, mother, maybe about four or five boys, very experienced worker, and then my husband and I, so there were, what, about six, about eight of us or ten of us. And we went to the beet field, and the beet field should be about six inches high when you thinned them, they're very easy to do. They were about, oh, at least twelve inches or higher, very bushy. Well, my husband and I had never done this sort of work. Oh, that's the hardest work I ever did, so back breaking. You have to stay on your back crouched all the way from this end of the field to the other end, and you just knock this out and leave one plant, then knock another and leave one plant, and the Uchiyama family are so experienced, go boom, boom, boom. They just kept going back and forth. And here, my husband and I had never done. We'd be crawling around. And one day, here I was all ready to whack, and here, bull snake curled up right in front of me. I was ready to whack that bull snake. Oh, it scared me. I just screamed and yelled and ran out of the field as fast as I could. And I said to my husband, "I don't want to thin beets anymore. I hate bull snakes." So by that time, the other family was so quick, they finished up this field. And after this field, this farmer's field was finished, why another farmer came after us. He took us for a very long ride. We rode and rode and rode on his pickup and finally came to this, his farm. His beets were three foot high. We were just so shocked to see that, and the Uchiyama family said, "No way we could make money." It was on a piece work basis, and they were fast, so they could make money; whereas, we were so slow, we couldn't even make a living on 35 cents an hour they paid us. Anyway, we refused to do the work there because it was impossible. You had to pull it out and, couldn't do that kind of work, so he brought us back to our camp.

Then about this time, there were other men, young men doing other fields, and everybody had finished thinning of the beets, so the manager in charge said, "Well, you all behaved very well, so you are now free to do whatever you want. But do not go into town, stay in the country." So we looked around for a place to stay. And along the county road, there was an old shack. The windows were out. The door was out. It was very, very sad looking house, but at least it was built of wood, not tent, canvas tent, so we said, "Let's fix that up and live there for a while." So that's what we did. We made arrangements to rent the place, and we fixed up the windows and the door, put the door on and lived there for a while. Then, the farmer from the last farm where he had his three foot high beets came and my husband's name was Mark, he said, "Mark, you want to buy this farm? You know, I'm seven years behind in my rent, and the owner is getting very, very angry with me." So Mark was laughing. He thought that was a big joke. Then all the young men, they said, "Yeah Mark, you buy the place, and we'll work for you because we don't have anything to do." So finally, he decided to buy the farm. We had to go to a real estate. We had to go to the bank to borrow money. But in those days, the federal bank, they loaned money to the farmers to start or to help the farmers if they needed money. So after we heard about that, why, we borrowed some money to get started. And the farm where we went, it was just hills and valleys like this, you know. It was not level, and you cannot irrigate a farm that's hills and valley, so he had to hire big tractors to level the ground, and that's what he did. And when they leveled it, why, big rocks would come out, you know. The place was full of rock, and you can't plant anything where there's lot of rocks like that. And so he hired men to pick those rocks, put it in these fertilizer sack, empty sacks. And farmers around there, "Hey Mark, what's all that stuff that's standing in your field?" And my husband laughed, and those guys went to see what it was and rocks in the bag, picking rock, you crazy? They made fun of us. But we did the best we could to get rid of all these great big rocks, and we dumped it alongside the river because we were right along the Snake River, and across the river was Idaho and this side was Oregon. Anyway, we grew onions and potatoes and sugar beet like all the other farmers grew there.

<End Segment 3> - Copyright © 2005 Oregon Nikkei Endowment and Densho. All Rights Reserved.