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LT: Well, you also helped to furnish your barrack.

TT: Yeah.

LT: Can you talk about what furnishings your barrack had when you arrived, and then what you and your father did to furnish it?

TT: Well, when we got there, they were still working on it. They just had plyboards on the inside, and later on, there were Isseis or Niseis that got job as a carpenter, they went around and finished the job, and put sheetrocks inside instead of the plyboard. I remember that. To kill time, we used to make some kind of furniture. I remember he built kind of like a sofa, you know, just out of plyboard and a two-by-four, just like a big chair. Then I had a lot of time, so I built some desks, made some desks In camp. I liked to do carpentry work, so I made the desk.

LT: Sounds like your family had quite a bit of furniture then based on what you and your father contributed.

TT: Well, we just liked to do that kind of work, I guess.

LT: So where did you get the tools, and how did you make them and where did you make them?

TT: Well, what tool we have, I think the camp, they must have had a camp store or something that we used to go buy, or either that or ordered it in a catalog. Well, mainly saw and hammer and chisels and sandpaper and stuff like that. They sold a few things there, I don't remember a store there, but must have got it somewhere.

LT: And where did you get the wood?

TT: The wood is leftover wood that, when the built the barracks, they had a bunch of leftover wood. So some of them, I remember like my desk, on the two-by-four, it has nail holes, so it's just some wood that they used. Or they had a pile right close by, so we just picked what you wanted.

LT: And where did you build your furniture?

TT: Outside, right in front of your door, in between the two barracks there, there's some room there, so that's where we built it.

LT: Do you still have any of the furniture that you built in camp?

TT: I don't have it here, but in Odell I had a desk, I just left it there when I moved out. And then a couple of desks I made, I gave it to a couple of my friends. One of them was my cousin, I think, in Portland, I gave it to her. And the other one, I gave it to somebody else.

LT: It would be interesting to see what they looked like.

<End Segment 12> - Copyright © 2014 Oregon Nikkei Endowment and Densho. All Rights Reserved.