We were planting these little onion bulbs, and Dad had made
an implement where, makes a bunch of little holes at one time, and we would take these
onions, little onion bulbs and stick 'em in the hole, push 'em down in the hole.
And we were working, and my brother Tom had been up to Evergreen, our other farm, and
he drove down in the pickup truck and as he, we could always tell, because he always had
the radio going so loud that we said, well, "Here comes Tom."
But he rolled the window down, and he says Japan had bombed Pearl Harbor.
So, of course, I told my dad right away, and Dad says, "Oh, not, not Pearl Harbor.
Not the Hawaiian islands."
He said, "You mean the Philippines."
And he just kept on working nonchalantly, and I said, "Oh, we got to go find out.
Let's go and find out if that's true."
So we dropped everything, went to the house, and Tom already had the radio on in the house.
And, of course, when they said, "War," and all Japanese were going to be rounded up,
well, it really scared us then, because here we had the three farms, and the horses and
the trucks and everything we owned, and we didn't know what was going to happen.
He had talked about they were gonna deport us or they were gonna put us in prison, or
we didn't know what was gonna happen.
It was really upsetting then.
Of course, the onions started growing, and we had planted lettuce, and the lettuce was
just about heading by, just about the time war, or about the time that we were going
to be interned.
And when they said that we couldn't go any further than eight miles -- within the radius
of eight miles -- of course, our farms weren't that far apart so we could work on the farms,
but it was very, very trying because we had no idea what was going to happen.
And Hank wanted to get married and go to a "free zone," 'cause he didn't want to go to
camp.
He says, "I'm not going to camp."
So he and Martie got married, and they left for Wenatchee.
But my mother was very disappointed in him because he's the first son, and she thought,
well, he'd be the one that would say, "Well, the family's got to stay together," and everything,
and here, he just got married and took off and left us.
He just left everything up to Emily, my youngest sister, she and I were trying to keep the
main farm together, get everything together, and of course, the important thing was to
have money.
We had to have money to survive, so we were trying to sell everything, and sell for whatever
we could get.
We were selling plants and flowers and trees and everything we can sell.
And it was a horrible time because each day, it just seemed like we were being squeezed.
And since we'd never been in a war before, in our lives, it was just absolutely panic.
We, I still have nightmares.
I have nightmares quite often, trying to decide, "What am I going to take?
What am I gonna do with everything?" and, "What's going to happen to us?"
It was just a horrible, horrible time.