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HH: And did you go to another camp after Rohwer, or did you leave camp altogether?

GU: Well, I left once because the Midwest opened up first. The two coasts were still closed, and as soon as it was possible to go out, I went to St. Cloud teachers college because my major at the College of the Pacific was in piano, and we had very limited opportunities for Japanese Americans. And so anyone planning for work had to plan that they were going to do something within the Japanese American community, and I was going to become a piano teacher. Knowing that we didn't know when the West Coast would open up, I decided that I had to get education credits to go into public education. So I went to St. Cloud State teacher's college. The program did not compare with the private college that I had attended, the Methodist-backed College of the Pacific. So I only went for the one semester, but during that time, I learned how to operate a lathe, because everybody was into supporting the war effort. I went back to camp in July, and I worked again in camp. This time, I worked in the medical program. Before I went to Minnesota, I was a junior high school music teacher. Then I decided, when the East Coast opened up, someone from the Southern Baptist came to visit, and she offered me housing and said that there would be a position for me to be an editorial secretary with the Southern Baptist Foreign Mission Society. Anything to get out. So I got out that fall again, and I was in Richmond, Virginia.

In Richmond, Virginia, a tall lieutenant was assigned to keep track of me, because Richmond was too close to Norfolk. And he was really embarrassed when he saw that here was this woman who was less than five feet tall, and he had to follow me around Richmond and keep track of me. So these two women -- and they were women in their thirties with whom I lived -- they said, "Let's prepare a sukiyaki dinner for him and invite him to dinner." And I think he eventually convinced him that it was ridiculous for him to be keeping track of me, so they stopped that.

But in the meantime, my brother, Ben, who is number three among the boys in our family, decided to come to Temple University. And he found out how the Quakers were really interested in helping the Japanese Americans to come out of camp, and wrote to me in Richmond. And again, I was the only one who had graduated from college so far that, "Come up and see what we can do about getting the parents and the other two siblings out of the Rohwer camp." And so I came here in the late spring of 1944 to Philadelphia from Richmond, Virginia. But my War Relocation Authority information about me has me out of camp. When I went to Richmond, Virginia, they called that the "final departure." By then, I guess they were, all of the other departures were considered temporary when people went out to harvest crops, et cetera.

HH: I see.

<End Segment 6> - Copyright © 1994 JACL Philadelphia. All Rights Reserved.