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I remember when you came and talked about waiting
in line and that was what you did a lot of the day. What was that like?
Did you say you liked knitting?
Yes. My friend who was outside sent me a box of fabrics because she
thought maybe I'd be interested in quilting. Unfortunately, the first
pattern I picked was a difficult one. I never did anything with quilting
in camp. It's too bad I couldn't tell you what I did with that box
of fabrics that her mother sent me. But, I wasn't interested in that after
picking too difficult a pattern.
Lines were for everything, and when I made the image for the quilt,
I wanted to do one on lines because it was such a thing in our lives.
But it was too hard trying to get all the figures in. So, I opted
for
something else. But, there were lines. To get our meals, we had to
stand just like you do in a cafeteria line. But these are longer
because
there were 300 to a mess hall. So that would be one. If you went to
the laundry, you had to wait before a laundry tub was empty. If you
go to the shower, you had to wait until they were through. If you went
to the movies—even to get into the building—we had to wait. If
you got paid, there was a line before you ever got your check. The
post office, same thing, because there's only the one post office
for how many people was it? 10,000 in the camp? And so, this was
it.
Whatever
you
did or wherever you went, there was always a line. So, this is where
I learned to crochet.
In the mess halls, did you eat with your sister and your mother?
Yes,
or, my mother had to have special food so she didn't always...she
did go for company. I think they had special food
set aside
for her because she was diabetic.
What kind of foods did they have at the mess hall?
I talk about the bread pudding. We're not used to eating that much
bread, so there was a lot of that left over. There was a lot of,
if you ate eggs at all it was scrambled eggs, which would be made
from
powdered eggs. Potatoes? I think we got potatoes directly, so we
didn't have to eat the dehydrated potatoes. I can't remember what
kind of
meat we had, but we must have. The mess halls, what happened is, as they found out
that some of the restaurant owners could cook. They became the cooks
in the mess hall. That food would get better when they were the cooks.
I'm trying to think what else.
Do you remember what the food was like at Heart Mountain? I know it seems silly, but..
No, no, not at all, because I go to schools and talk about this, and I always take a vegetable, and I show it and ask them do they recognize it? And it looks like a turnip but it's not, it's a rutabaga. And I said, they were mashed, like turnips, mashed turnips, and it was awful. The other thing we had was a lot of bread pudding, because the Japanese like rice, and not much bread. So a lot of bread is left over, so we had bread pudding. So, I don't eat bread pudding. We also had a lot of scrambled eggs, but those were powdered eggs. They must have had powdered milk too, to add to the scrambled eggs. Then we were fortunate in that in our mess hall there was someone who had run a restaurant, so he could doctor the food, as it were, more to our palate.
Were you ever able to eat non-powdered eggs, or drink real milk?
When I went out of camp. The teacher I was working with, as an aide, her in-laws, her father in law, was the director of the hospital. So I was privileged in that they invited me out to dinner, to Cody, and so there I would get real food.
Do you remember being afforded any luxuries in camp, being brought chocolate or something that you really missed?
Only from the Morrisons, who would send me things.
What would they send you?
Chocolate chip cookies.
How well did you stay in contact with the Morrisons?
I wrote to them all time I was there. I also have a high school friend who also sent me things.
Was this high school friend Caucasian?
[gestures "yes"] And I corresponded with my teacher, my physics teacher.
How long do you think an average line would take?
I would say, twenty, twenty minutes, half an hour.
You know, I'd said to crochet one of those took like an hour.
Maybe I could get three quarters of it done.
Were there any other things besides crocheting that
you learned to do in the camps?
I
learned to dance. Social dancing. And for someone who didn't have
friends there, they did have, my younger sister was more social than
I and she had joined a social club. They would have dances, and they
would clear a mess hall. They also had a recreation building perhaps,
and there was social dancing. That's where I learned to dance. I
had never learned to jitter-bug. When the music got fast, I said, "I
don't jitter-bug" and I just sat down. But, I did learn to dance
there. I learned to ice-skate because it's cold, and they somehow were
able to make a skating pond and I remember ordering skates from Sears
or somewhere. So, that I did. What else? Social life? Oh, I went to
church. They had Christians, Catholic, Seventh-day Adventist, and the
Buddhist Temples. So, there was always something like that going on.
I think one of the most beautiful services was the Sunrise Service
at Easter because you're way out there where the sky is beautiful.
Can you talk a little about your social life at Heart Mountain?
I didn't have much of a social life. The only ones I really knew were the kids in the immediate neighborhood, and they were my sister's friends. My daughter now says to me, I just went within myself and decided not to have friends. And I think it's because I did more corresponding more with friends outside. Of course Claudia had friends outside, and I was thinking of getting out. So the other thing I was trying was correspondence classes at the University of Nebraska, Wyoming, and such. But they all cost, and I didn't have the money to take those classes. But I surely applied to all those. I got catalogues, began to see what was available. And I think I spent a lot of time that way, rather than socializing.
So you didn't go to any dances, or play sports?
No sports. I went, maybe, to watch them. I did go to dances because I say on this quilt, "dancing," and I'm often asked, "How did that go about?" And I say, "That's where I really learned to social dance." Because that was the time of—especially because my sister belonged to a social group, and I was friends with them. Whenever they had a dance or a party then I'd join them. I never learned to jitterbug, but I enjoyed social dances.
What kind of music and dancing was there?
Oldies, that you hear today. Glenn Miller, especially.
Would you have preferred to have more of a social life?
I don't think so. I think I was perfectly satisfied the way I was.
Who'd you dance with?
There were fellows. We liked to dance with the fellows who came from Washington because, I said, they took you all over the floor. The ones from Los Angeles just stayed in one spot. You just rocked. It's more fun to get all over the floor.
Did you have any boyfriends in camp?
[gestures "no"]
Did you carry that same snobbish attitude, that you said you had, into the camp?
I must have, that's why I didn't date.
Do you still have some of the things you crocheted
in camp?
Just
that bedspread. My mother crocheted, and so she crocheted an afghan
that we still have.
What was it like not having a lot of friends
at camp?
Again, I'm reading and I'm writing letters...
Were you unhappy, or were you just fine?
No, it was fine. I'm fine.
Were there places in the camp that you could
go and reflect and be alone, or was it too crowded and overpopulated?
I think one could have found a place to go. I didn't feel the need because
there were only three of us and my sister's out all the time. There's plenty
of room for me.
Another person we interviewed, Rose, said she tries to think of the positive things she took away from camp, while you said you try to block out all these memories. Can you think of any positive effects of being in camp?
See, I stayed just one year, to get out as fast as I could. So what would have been the positive?
She said it made her resilient. It made her learn how to spring back from things.
I wonder if it's just camp life that could have done that. I'll try to think—I really think—that's something I'll really have to think about. I couldn't tell you offhand.
When you say you were getting out, does that mean at the beginning of your internment you were thinking of ways..
Of ways of going off. Yeah. Of going off to school, primarily.
So you were constantly working on that?
[gestures "yes"]
How did you do that again?
How did I go off?
How did you work on getting out?
Through my friend in St. Louis.
Did you propose the idea to her, or her to you?
She proposed it to me first, yeah.
What about your family?
I left them. My sister was still in high school.
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