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Washington Women’s Heritage Project records, 1900-2000 
University of Washington Libraries Special Collections 
Delphine Bowers 
January 29, 1998 
Cassette 1, Side 2 
 
 
Delphine Bowers  00:00 
My father was, he was a distant man. He loved children, but he, he didn't understand them very 
well. And of course, he'd been the youngest, second to the youngest in his big family, so he 
wasn't, really had never lived with little kids. He used to-- All of the little children in the 
neighborhood, kids younger than I, used to come over to our garden, to our yard in the afternoon, 
after they got up from their siestas. And then they'd be all dressed up into whatever they were 
going to wear for the afternoon, 'cause you'd change a couple of times a day, it was hot. And they 
would, they'd be there with their nurses and their amahs, and he would cut them little, little 
horses made out of bamboo, because we had bamboo of all sizes, out of the thin, and they would 
play. And I would help him play with the children and at the same time, my heart would ache 
because he never played with me. And at one point I went to a psychiatrist because I was so 
depressed. 
 
Jenny Kurzweil  01:11 
When you were young?  
 
Delphine Bowers  01:12 
No, this is years later, when I had little kids myself, and he said, "Well, he was putting you in the 
role of his wife. You were taking care of little children with him," and I wanted someone to play 
with me like a daddy, and I remember that, but it was the only way I could get any attention. So 
of course, I did it. Then, when I was 11, I had finished fifth grade Calvert. 
 
Jenny Kurzweil  01:41 
With your stepmom? 
 
Delphine Bowers  01:42 
With my stepmom. And so they sent me to boarding school, and I went into the eighth grade, 
which was absolutely absurd. 
 
Jenny Kurzweil  01:52 
How old were you? 
 
Delphine Bowers  01:53 
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 11. 
 
Jenny Kurzweil  01:55 
11. 
 
Delphine Bowers  01:56 
And I was the only girl in the eighth grade. And there were about eight or 10 kids, and I was the 
only girl, and I was completely ignored all year by the boys, who were old enough not to be 
interested in an 11 year old girl. I turned 12 in that December, and I was, it was a terrible year. It 
was, it further enhanced my sense that I didn't belong, that there was no place for me, I didn't fit 
in. Well, of course, I didn't fit in. What 11 year old girl in the eighth grade class full of boys 
would fit in?  
 
Jenny Kurzweil  02:30 
Where was the boarding school?  
 
Delphine Bowers  02:33 
It was in, on the island of Luzon, the same island as Manila, up in the northern part, in the 
mountains, in Baguio. And it was a very good school, and I wasn't any more equipped to get 
along with people there than I had been any other place. I was so messy that nobody wanted to 
room with me, and-- I'm gesturing towards mess. And I, I just, I just didn't know how to be, still. 
I can remember having a really pretty dress for a dance when I was an eighth grader, first year of 
high school. It was a white eyelet embroidered, and it, you know, was a nice little dress, sort of 
with a notched collar, and it was long, and it had a black velvet ribbon for a belt, and I just 
looked lovely in it. And the boys would dance with me, but I was so clumsy that nobody would 
ever dance with me twice, and I sat in my little, pretty dress and didn't get danced with. Well, 
they tried to give me dancing lessons. They tried really hard to teach how to do-- 
 
Jenny Kurzweil  03:48 
The school did? 
 
Delphine Bowers  03:48 
Not just the school, my parents had, even at Iloilo there would be dan-- they knew that I was 
clumsy. And I think, I don't know how much of it was birth damage, because it was a very 
difficult birth, and how much of it was just the complete lack of any large muscle exercise when 
I was little. But I'm really clumsy, and I still am, I still don't dance. And people say, "Oh, you're 
self conscious," and, "that's ego." Give me a break, my feet just don't do what I want them to. 
And I'm terrible at sports. So, there's a real deficit there, and it's, it's colored my life and what I 
choose to do and the people I choose to be with. So boarding school was not a particularly happy 
time for me.  
 
Jenny Kurzweil  04:41 
How long were you there for?  
 
Delphine Bowers  04:43 
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Well, I was when I was 14. In 1941, I'd just turned 14, the war started, and then the Japanese 
came and interned us all. 
 
Jenny Kurzweil  04:57 
What's that mean, interned?  
 
Delphine Bowers  04:59 
We were in an-- civilian internment camp, and I was in camp for three and a half years. 
 
Jenny Kurzweil  05:08 
Wow. 
 
Delphine Bowers  05:10 
I actually, it was a very good experience for me. I'm not supposed to say that. I'm supposed to 
say, "Oh, my, they were so cruel and how we suffered." We did suffer, and sometimes they were 
cruel. But I was in the Baguio camp for the first two years of that time, and my parents, of 
course, were not there. They were on the other island, and I could not get back to them because 
the waters were mined. So, I was up there, and the school did not pay any attention to us, the 
teachers were busy trying to survive themselves. And so I got to be me. I was not somebody's 
daughter. Nobody was going to send a report to my parents on what I was doing. I had been a 
very poor student, and I became a very good student because I was interested in schoolwork 
myself. I did take Latin because I knew my father would want me to continue my Latin and so I 
went to the Latin teacher and said, "Will you teach me?"  
 
Jenny Kurzweil  06:04 
During the time of the camp?  
 
Delphine Bowers  06:05 
Yes. "Will you teach me?" And he said, "Yes." And so I had Latin every day. I had Caesar every 
day for Mr. Schaefer, and I was the only one in the class. So I had to do it all, I had to translate. I 
couldn't hope somebody else would get the hard parts. And I realize now that he did, he-- I can't 
imagine he did this. When I got back to this country, I found out that in Caesar, people got 
maybe 10 or 12 lines a night, as an assignment. I would get 80. So, I was getting up at four 
o'clock in the morning to do my Latin, and then I would be so sleep deprived by last period, 
when I had English, that I would start giggling and not be able to stop. Well, fortunately, the 
English teacher, who was also the principal of the school, asked me how much sleep I was 
getting, and I told him and he said, "Why?" And I said, "Well, I've got to get up at four to do the 
Latin." He had Mr. Schaefer cut down on the assignment a little bit, so I wouldn't giggle so much 
in--  
 
Jenny Kurzweil  07:14 
So, they had an organized school in the camp?  
 
Delphine Bowers  07:14 
Very much so. And it was a very good school. There were only four or five in a class, because it 
was a little camp. There were 500 of us. 
Page 4 of 14 
 
 
Jenny Kurzweil  07:22 
500. 
 
Delphine Bowers  07:24 
And yes, we were hungry and we did camp work.  
 
Jenny Kurzweil  07:30 
Like what?  
 
Delphine Bowers  07:31 
Well, it was all different. Some people, one of the things I did was to sweep sidewalks. And then 
I got pretty bored with that. And I, I liked scrubbing the showers, to keep the mold from growing 
and then that was, I liked that because we see what you were doing. [?Pebble?], I just spoke to a 
cat. I would clean vegetables. The corn we got was pretty much swept up off the warehouse 
floor, and had a lot of weevils in it. So you pick it, pick the corn out of the weevils. 
 
Jenny Kurzweil  08:10 
It was the other way around. 
 
Delphine Bowers  08:12 
Yeah, and it was, I, I did, you know, I did several camp jobs. We all had to do camp jobs. And I 
think we had to do an hour a day.  
 
Jenny Kurzweil  08:25 
What was the camp, where was-- I mean, what was the structure of the camp? Was it, was it a 
part of the city that had been overturned?  
 
Delphine Bowers  08:33 
No, it was out in an old army camp. So we were in barracks. And I think probably the first, well, 
of course, Martha Hill was, was important to me as a nurturing person. But, I mean, I was just 
one kid in a school full of kids in [?10 or 12?]. It wasn't a one to one relationship when-- Oh, I 
forgot something, it was really important. Between the ages of seven and 11, when I was in Iloilo 
with my stepmother and my father and my, two of those years, my stepmother was teaching me. 
I had a Spanish governess who was just a wonderful woman.  
 
Jenny Kurzweil  08:33 
Is that what an amah is?  
 
Delphine Bowers  09:19 
No, an amah is someone, usually an amah is, amahs were usually Chinese. And they were really 
just nurses to watch little children and keep them safe and make sure they took their naps and 
they, they, some of the kids learned Chinese from their amahs, so that was nice. But no, she was 
convent educated in Spain. She was supposed to teach me how to sew and embroider, but I 
couldn't learn it. I was too awkward. I just simply couldn't, it was really a disastrous experiment. 
She, she literally taught she, I, she never learned English. I had to speak Spanish and I, of course, 
Page 5 of 14 
 
learned to speak it really well. I learned to speak it to the point that Spanish people thought I was 
a little Spanish girl.  
 
Jenny Kurzweil  10:11 
Wow.  
 
Delphine Bowers  10:13 
And I think my Aunt Rosa and cousin Claire spoke French to me when I was little. I think I had 
those neural pathways formed for having learned a second language, or having been raised 
bilingual, and I forgot my French, but when it came to Spanish, it was a cinch. It just, I had no 
problems with it. And it was, and I had a very good ear for intonation and inflection and those 
things. And I, and she and I could talk, and she was my confidant, where my parents really didn't 
know what was going on between us. 
 
Jenny Kurzweil  10:53 
Because they didn't know Spanish?  
 
Delphine Bowers  10:55 
Well, they knew Spanish, but they didn't know it as well as I did, and they couldn't be with us 24 
hours a day. She had a room right off mine. She had her own little room and bath, but she had to 
go through my room to get to the rest of the house.  
 
Jenny Kurzweil  11:08 
What was her name? 
 
Delphine Bowers  11:09 
Felisa. 
 
Jenny Kurzweil  11:09 
Felisa. 
 
Delphine Bowers  11:10 
And she was not a servant. She ate with the family, and when my mother had a party, she always 
came out for a little while, got dressed up, came out and met, met people, which was nice, and 
then she'd come back to be with me. My parents ate later in the evening, because people did. 
They took long siestas and then had late dinners, and she, she would eat with me. So, it was nice 
that I didn't have to eat by myself. Until she came, I had to eat by myself every evening, and that 
was very awful, didn't like that. And she was very important to me, and she was very 
affectionate, very dear and very warm and, but she did, you know, if she overstepped herself, my 
parents would, would tell her. She tried to make a Catholic out of me, and they found my little 
box with the crucifix and the little religious cards and those things, and they disappeared. But she 
told me all the stories of the saints and, I mean, it was a very broadening experience. And it's 
interesting, I'm very certain that Aunt Rosa, you see, had been instructed not to raise to be Jewish 
because my father wanted me to choose for myself when I got old enough. But I don't know what 
he thought I was going to choose between if I didn't know about any of it.  
 
Page 6 of 14 
 
Jenny Kurzweil  12:30 
Right. 
 
Delphine Bowers  12:31 
But they don't think about that. 
 
Jenny Kurzweil  12:33 
Did, did Felicia-- Felisa? 
 
Delphine Bowers  12:36 
Mm-hmm. 
 
Jenny Kurzweil  12:36 
Did she hold you? I mean, did she, were-- 
 
Delphine Bowers  12:38 
Yes. 
 
Jenny Kurzweil  12:38 
--Did you have physical contact with her?  
 
Delphine Bowers  12:40 
Yes. She would sit in a chair and I'd curl up on her lap. And I was a big, long legged, gangly 
seven year old, but she still knew, she knew what I needed. Yeah, she would hold me, and I 
needed it desperately, because I don't think anybody did the first seven years of my life. I can't 
remember anybody holding me in that household. I'm sure that English nurse didn't because she 
was starch, and I don't think anybody did. So it was, it was really, I just lapped that up. And-- 
But I think Aunt Rosa, although she never talked about being Jewish, I believe she taught me the 
Torah stories, I believe I learned all of that from her, and I learned about God. And I've never, in 
all of my life, doubted for a minute that there was a God and that He was there for me. I have 
turned from him or her, but I've never experienced my god turning from me. And then later on, 
when I went to Brent school, I wanted to become a Christian. I wanted to be an Episcopalian 
because it was an Episcopal School.  
 
Jenny Kurzweil  12:40 
Which school? The boarding school?  
 
Delphine Bowers  12:40 
The boarding school. And because I was not baptized or confirmed, there were things I couldn't 
do. I joined the little junior daughters of the King, which was a little altar guild, because I didn't 
belong, I wanted to join things. But I couldn't touch the communion vessels because I hadn't 
been baptized or confirmed. And so there was more left out, don't belong. I had to poli-- do the, 
polish the brass. I polished the little brass things the flowers were in, and I polished the brass 
cross. I couldn't touch the communion vessels because they were sacred and I wasn't. 
 
Jenny Kurzweil  13:39 
Page 7 of 14 
 
What a message to get.  
 
Delphine Bowers  14:35 
Yeah, it, you see, and my parents were really too stupid. They'd had cutted themselves off, so, 
from that part of themselves. They'd say, "You're going to a good school, you have nice clothes, 
you have good teachers, you have nice friends. What more do you want?"  
 
Jenny Kurzweil  14:49 
Right?  
 
Delphine Bowers  14:50 
And that's all there was to it. 
 
Jenny Kurzweil  14:52 
So you were, you were in the school when the war started, and then-- 
 
Delphine Bowers  14:57 
Yeah, and I wanted to become an Episcopalian at my father said, "No, you wait until you're 21 
because you just want to do this for social reasons, and that's not the reason to do it." 
 
Jenny Kurzweil  15:08 
How did you feel about that? 
 
Delphine Bowers  15:14 
Again, that there was no way of belonging. And then later on, when I did, decide to become an 
Episcopalian, when I was 21, I found that I really couldn't believe that stuff, and I suspect that 
Aunt Rosa had done some real nefarious work in there.  
 
Jenny Kurzweil  15:33 
By telling you the Torah stories?  
 
Delphine Bowers  15:36 
By, by, by-- I mean, I had never heard that I was Jewish until I was like 11, but I, somehow or 
other, I knew that I wasn't a Christian, or maybe it just more of I don't belong. You asked a 
question, what was it? 
 
Jenny Kurzweil  15:53 
Well, I was, I was so intrigued by the camps the and I wanted to know more about, you were in 
school and and then the war started, and then everyone in your school got interned, out by the 
camps? 
 
Delphine Bowers  16:07 
Yeah, also, and all the townspeople and all the missionaries that have been in school, and all of 
the mining people from up in the hills. I mean, there were 500 of us.  
 
Jenny Kurzweil  16:15 
Page 8 of 14 
 
Right. 
 
Delphine Bowers  16:15 
And those were the, the major divisions were the missionaries, the miners, the, having to do with 
the school. And then there were, of course, that means, some retired people, and some, some 
towns people, people who had service businesses. 
 
Jenny Kurzweil  16:35 
So, and you were cut off from your parents for two years?  
 
Delphine Bowers  16:38 
Yes.  
 
Jenny Kurzweil  16:38 
You didn't hear anything about, from them?  
 
Delphine Bowers  16:40 
At one point, I had heard that there was a list down at the guard house of people in other camps. 
So I took myself down there and asked to see it. I discovered my parents names on that list, so I 
knew they were alive. And once they got some money to me. A kid went out, one of the, the high 
school boys, went out to give blood to an old woman who was sick in her house, an old, old 
American woman who needed blood. He went out to give her blood and came back with a 
package for me. And my parents had tried many times to get money and letters to me, and you 
know, it just never got to me, this is on a completely different island, a day or two journeys by, 
by steamship. And they, you know, gave it to a priest who was going to be going to Manila, who 
gave it to someone who was going to be going to Baguio, who gave it to a white woman who 
was outside of the camp, who gave it to this kid that came to get their blood, and it got to me.  
 
Jenny Kurzweil  17:49 
Wow.  
 
Delphine Bowers  17:51 
So I knew they were alive, at least when they sent it. But who knew when they sent it, it could 
have been a year before.  
 
Jenny Kurzweil  17:58 
Did you have any idea of the magnitude of the war outside of the Philippines?  
 
Delphine Bowers  18:02 
Yeah. 
 
Jenny Kurzweil  18:03 
I mean, you were, you had access to the news? 
 
Delphine Bowers  18:05 
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No, we didn't have access to it, but there were ways of finding out, and there were rumors, and 
we'd hear what was going on. We didn't know, I didn't know what was going on, for instance, in, 
in Europe, but we had an idea of when the fighting was going from island to island and that kind 
of thing. In the Manila camp, there was a radio hidden. They would disassemble it and hide the 
parts all over camp, and then put it together again and get the news, and then take it apart. And 
somebody would have been shot if the Japanese found it. 
 
Jenny Kurzweil  18:42 
Was there any discrimination against Jewish people in the camps?  
 
Delphine Bowers  18:45 
I don't know.  
 
Jenny Kurzweil  18:46 
Because of-- 
 
Delphine Bowers  18:47 
Not that I know of. There might have been in Manila, because it was big enough that that could 
have happened, but not that I know of. There certainly wasn't in the Baguio-- Well, there may 
have been.  
 
Jenny Kurzweil  18:58 
When you say, Baguio, is that B-A-G-G-I-O? 
 
Delphine Bowers  19:04 
B-A-G-U-I-O. 
 
Jenny Kurzweil  19:05 
I was doing the Italian version [she jokes] Baggio. Were you scared? 
 
Delphine Bowers  19:11 
No, and I don't know why. I think part of it was because that I was, basically, really depressed, 
and I didn't care what happened.  
 
Jenny Kurzweil  19:24 
This is when you were a teenager?  
 
Delphine Bowers  19:26 
Yeah. And earlier, I think I was probably a depressed, depressed kid, because that initial loss of 
your mother is, is a breeding ground for depression and loss and emptiness, and then all of the 
don't belongs. I mean, if I could have been reared in a family-- Now, Marguerite Fischer, 
Marguerite and her husband wanted me, and they had four kids, and I've always had the illusion, 
gee, if I just could have been brought up with brothers and sisters. But they're all crazy and so I 
don't think I would have been any better off with that family. 
 
Jenny Kurzweil  20:03 
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And Marguerite was on your mother's side?  
 
Delphine Bowers  20:05 
Yeah. And she was a sister to Claire, who was one of the women who reared me, but neither 
Claire nor Rosa had ever had anything to do with children. But Aunt Rosa had been my mother's, 
of course, her aunt, not her great aunt, and had been very much in loco parentis to her when her 
own mother died, so. But she was a young woman then, she was not a little kid. So in the camp, I 
was pretty happy. 
 
Jenny Kurzweil  20:45 
Because you had your school, and it was-- 
 
Delphine Bowers  20:47 
I had school, and I did well in school, it was the first time I'd ever done well in school. But I 
didn't have my parents nagging me, and they weren't sending my report cards to my parents, and 
I wasn't hearing about how I wasn't fulfilling my potential. I just did my schoolwork because I 
liked it and it was fun. And I took care of myself and anyone that was my friend was my friend 
because I was me, not because they knew my parents, who thought they should be. And, but the 
thing that was the big influence on me, the women. We have, first we had Martha Hill, and then 
we had Felisa, Martha Hill and Felisa were at the same time. And then in boarding school, there 
really wasn't anybody. 
 
Jenny Kurzweil  21:45 
How long were you there before it was in the camps?  
 
Delphine Bowers  21:48 
About three years. 
 
Jenny Kurzweil  21:51 
So you were about 14?  
 
Delphine Bowers  21:52 
Yeah, I was. Just turned 14 when the Bag-- when the camp started. And then in camp, there was 
a woman named Myrtice Liggett, and I wrote about her the first quarter, I don't know whether 
you were there. 
 
Jenny Kurzweil  22:09 
I wasn't. 
 
Delphine Bowers  22:07 
Because she has, we were asked to write about women who'd been an influence on us. And she 
was a fascinating woman. We had-- was in the barracks, and there were, I think 200, over 200 
people, 200 women in the barracks that was meant to house 80. And so the way we did it was to-
-  
 
Jenny Kurzweil  22:34 
Page 11 of 14 
 
Half of the population of the camp.  
 
Delphine Bowers  22:37 
Yeah. There was a men's barracks and a women's barracks, and then there was something they 
called the baby house, which was a little house, and it had probably been officers’ quarters, and it 
was where all the mothers and babies were, so that we didn't have to have babies crying all night 
in the-- It would have been wild.  
 
Jenny Kurzweil  23:27 
Yeah.  
 
Delphine Bowers  23:01 
So, and they can trade babysitting, and they, you know, the place was full of diapers and this 
kind of stuff. It was, I didn't have much to do with the baby house. And we push, we, they 
pushed four double bunks together so that you would have someone at your feet and above you 
and beside you. Can you imagine that?  
 
Jenny Kurzweil  23:28 
No. 
 
Delphine Bowers  23:29 
You'd have four people on one layer, and then four people, and that, this next layer.  
 
Jenny Kurzweil  23:33 
Wow. 
 
Delphine Bowers  23:33 
And we're each in our own bed. It's not that there were four people sharing a bed, because you 
had the footboard between you and the next person. 
 
Jenny Kurzweil  23:42 
And the headboard.  
 
Delphine Bowers  23:43 
Well, the headboard, it depended on which, which way you put your head. But there were four 
double bunks put together, so there were eight people, and that made more aisle space. 
 
Jenny Kurzweil  23:53 
So, you had to climb over people if you had to-- 
 
Delphine Bowers  23:57 
No, you still had one, you still had one side free.  
 
Jenny Kurzweil  24:00 
Oh, okay. Oh, I see, okay. 
 
Page 12 of 14 
 
Delphine Bowers  24:05 
And beside me, I had Miss Liggett, and she was a theosophist, and she was a wonderful woman. 
She was absolutely fascinating. She was a southern woman. She came from Mississippi, and she 
was part of the Liggett-- It was Liggett, I called her Leg-it, but it was Liggett, and she was part of 
the Liggett and Myers Tobacco people. She was a woman who had some independent means. 
What she was doing in the Philippines, I don't know. But she used to go into trance, and she used 
to meditate, and she told me all about astrology, and numerology, and theosophy, and 
reincarnation, and a lot of things that are very much a part of my basic belief system. And I think 
of how fortunate I am because I had Aunt Rosa teaching me how to be Jewish without telling me 
I was Jewish, we had Felisa telling me all-- we had all of the Greek and Roman mythology, we 
had Felisa telling me how to be Catholic, going to an Episcopal boarding school and having 
Bible study, which was really just Bible history. It was very tame, it was not big conversion 
stuff, and-- because the Episcopalians are not known for their proselytizing. And then we had 
Miss Liggett, with all of this sort of what now would be considered New Age, absolutely 
fascinating woman. And I mean, of course, I just ate it up. And she would be in, at her bunk, I'd 
come sit on her bed with her every day after school. And I would, you know, tell her about what 
happens in school, and read her poems and stories I had written, and I got the kind of attention, 
really, I had never gotten before. This is what mothers are supposed to do. So, she filled a big 
place in my life, and she-- So, they were the foundation for being really open.  
 
Jenny Kurzweil  26:20 
The huge spiritual foundation.  
 
Delphine Bowers  26:23 
Enormous. 
 
Jenny Kurzweil  26:24 
Whereas it was maybe lacking in emotional-- 
 
Delphine Bowers  26:27 
Yeah. 
 
Jenny Kurzweil  26:28 
--and physical contact, you had such a huge spiritual foundation, that's so interesting. 
 
Delphine Bowers  26:34 
Well, she was, her bunk was next to mine, and I realize now that every night I slept in her 
energy. We never touched each other, we each had our own beds with our own covers, tucked in, 
but I was in her energy every night. And then [she laughs] I got diarrhea, and it was pretty bad, 
and I was, there was a lot of mucus in my school, so I took it to Dr. Howard, who was the 
pathologist. Later on, when I was a microbiology major, he has published, he'd had published a 
lot on parasitology, long before the war. And he was-- 
 
Jenny Kurzweil  27:15 
Did you get famous from, from his studies?  
 
Page 13 of 14 
 
Delphine Bowers  27:18 
No, no. He was, no, he was an established researcher. But of course, none of us knew that. He 
was just Dr. Howard, who had a wooden leg and was a pathologist and looked at our stools. And 
so he said, "No, you don't have dysentery," because I was sure I had the dysentery. He said, "You 
have a vitamin deficiency, and you are sloughing off the mucus lining of your intestines. And if 
this continues, they will ulcerate, and the ulcers will penetrate, and you'll die." 
 
Jenny Kurzweil  27:54 
Oh, my goodness. 
 
Delphine Bowers  27:56 
 "Are you eating your yeast?" No. Every morning at breakfast, we were to have a different bowl 
of yeast, which was grown with bananas and sugar, by one of the men, in a cabinet with lights. 
And I didn't eat it because it made me hungry. I was so hungry by noon that I couldn't stand it 
when I ate my yeast. So, the way he cured me was to give instructions to the kitchen crew that I 
was to have two dippers of yeast in the morning, and they were to put it on my rice, just put it 
right on my rice, so that I had to eat it. Because I wasn't going to go without my rice, because I, 
that would be awful. So Miss Liggett would steal for me, every day, a sweet potato, from the 
vegetable tables, because her job was peeling vegetables. Well, I was very honest. I loved getting 
the sweet potato, but I wouldn't eat my sweet potatoes at night because I felt like I'd already 
gotten my ration at noon. And she would roast it in the coals for me and put something on it, I 
never knew what it was, I'll tell you the story about that later, and wrap it in a towel and put it 
under my pillow. Because all we got for lunch was a Daikon, a white radish, and the water that 
the vegetables had been boiled in, they called it clear soup. And I was still growing a little bit.  
 
Jenny Kurzweil  29:25 
Yeah.  
 
Delphine Bowers  29:25 
I grew two inches in camp. And so that really wasn't enough, with two dippers of yeast. 
 
Jenny Kurzweil  29:33 
And there's no protein either. 
 
Delphine Bowers  29:36 
Wasn't any protein in the rice either.  
 
Jenny Kurzweil  29:38 
No. 
 
Delphine Bowers  29:39 
And-- there were a few weevils. So, she would steal this camote and put some grease on it and 
put it, and bake it in the coals, and stick it under my pillow. And I ate it with great relish, and it 
was wonderful, and it was very good for me. And then I could stand the two dippers of yeast, 
then I stopped having any symptoms, and I was fine. And at night, we usually got a little, little 
meat or little something, and-- stewed vegetables and more rice, and, you know, whatever. So 
Page 14 of 14 
 
she, here was this marvelous, marvelous spiritual base. Now, I'm gonna jump way, way ahead 
and talk about something. But I didn't realize how poor it was, I was telling David about it, my 
cousin, that when I left my groups, you know, my evening groups and my Sunday retirement, 
one of the individuals in that group was very involved in Pagan religions. He was a, was 
involved in Wicca, and he, we did a lot of closure kinds of things. Both me and them took quite a 
lot of time over it. And what he said to me was that he found me amazing because-- [recording 
ends]. 
 