<Begin Segment 20>

VO: Did you have other social, you had the basketball games.

EO: We had softball, basketball, volleyball, we did a lot of sports, and they were all organized.

VO: Were there dances or other social...

EO: Oh, yeah, dances by the block. We lived in the Q section, and we'd have a dance just for the Q section.

VO: So the dances would tend to be just Japanese, or would have the Germans?

EO: It was all Japanese. And then like when we had, we would ask our teacher, I don't know which teacher it was, she would go and buy refreshments for us. She'd go out of camp and buy refreshments and bring it back for us. So the teachers were all very nice to us. But sometimes I understand that they had a bad time when they went back home because they were called "Jap lovers," since they came to teach us. So I had heard about that also. So they weren't too popular outside of camp. But as a whole, they were very nice to us. So that was the only connection with Caucasians, just the administrators and teachers. Otherwise, it was all Japanese, except for the Germans. This one German girl, she was so smart. Hey, Germans are smart. No, this one girl was really smart. Rosemary Hohenreiner. I wonder what happened to her. There was a kid named Johannes (Gouth) or something, in our class, and my girlfriend had a crush on him. [Laughs] So she had us go over to his house to visit him, so I'd tag along. But his mother was real nice, she gave us these German cookies and taught us how to make German spritz. She was the one that... so I learned how to make spritz.

VO: In Japanese family camp in Crystal City, Texas.

EO: Yeah, German. We all got along fine. There's a book about schools behind barbed wire, and it talks about all the problems the Germans had. They had more problems than the Japanese.

VO: Why is that?

EO: Something about their German school, they had all kinds of problems. They didn't get along with each other. The Japanese, I don't think they had that many problems.

[Interruption]

EO: Well, I can remember in Minidoka, one of my older, it was an older girlfriend, I remember she passed away, and that was real sad. I attended her funeral and probably played for the funeral, too. Because I used to play for the services. One time I was so embarrassed, because the minister said, "Okay, we're going to sing such and such a song." I looked at him and says, "Yeah, but I don't know how to play it." [Laughs] That was embarrassing. But no, as a whole, I have pretty good memories. We were so young that we didn't realize the seriousness of the whole thing. I think people that were older than us, if we had to stop their college education, and those that went into the military, they had a different, I think they had different feelings compared to the kids. Kids just, kids are kids. We just managed to do our own thing, have fun.

I had a kid brother that was always into problems, mischief. He's the nicest kid in the family now. [Laughs] He was so naughty, my mother used to cry. And when we were in Crystal City, he must have been about five, six. Anyway, there was an ice truck that would come around, because we didn't have refrigerators, we had these ice boxes. And they would deliver the ice. And so when they, everybody knew my kid brother, they called him Sluggo, you know the Nancy cartoon, Sluggo? He looked like that. They said, "Hey, Sluggo." And so he'd come running out and they'd put him on the truck and take him for a ride. Oh, he was such a character. He'd go next door to the neighbors' and open the refrigerator, stick his finger in and says, "What's this?" But he turned out to be the nicest kid, he turned out to be a college professor. You never know, huh? Everyone said he's going to be the minister, because he was so naughty. His name is Akira. They live up in Lethbridge, Canada. And he's retired now, but he taught at the university up there. My mother used to say, she used to say, "Junsao yobu." "I'm going to call the police." [Laughs] "Junsao yobu." She didn't know what to do with him, he was so naughty. We tease him all the time about those days. Yeah, lots of memories.

VO: That's great. Well, thank you.

EO: Yeah, thank you for doing this.

VO: Thank you so much.

<End Segment 20> - Copyright © 2013 Oregon Nikkei Endowment and Densho. All Rights Reserved.