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BN: And I want to switch gears now, and one of the standard stories you hear from Sansei is that their parents didn't talk about camp or all of that stuff. Did you talk to that about your kids?

MT: No.

BN: Or, I mean, to your kids?

MT: No. They asked once in a while and they were curious. Two years ago, Fourth of July, for my birthday, they took me on a reunion to camp. They hadn't been there, we were going to go one time.

BN: This is the Amache reunion?

MT: Amache, yeah. And they had a mini reunion there, too. So I said, "Could we take Cookie?" because she wants to go. They said, "Oh, yeah, we'll take Cookie." So my three kids, they were good kids, they paid for the airfare, the hotel and everything, car rental. They took the two of us and we all went there for four days, and it was nice. And I think that might have answered a lot of questions for them because they were, we had little seminars here and there.

BN: Is this a reunion or is this one of the pilgrimages?

MT: It was...

BN: I mean, did you go to the site?

MT: Yeah, we went to the site. We went right to the site there, we flew into Denver and then we drove down. And we spent four days in camp, we stayed in a motel in Lamar.

BN: Had you been back before?

MT: Yes, I had been before, like eight years, ten years before. And it was unusual. We were standing there and it was free time. And the professors from the University of Denver, they're doing all of this preservation of Amache and all this they're doing, they're doing the archaeology. They said, "Why don't you go down and see those two ladies down there? It's a plain field, and they're digging around something, they found a lot of stuff. So we got in the car, we went down there, and there were two ladies and they're working for their PhD. One already had her PhD, and the other one was working for her PhD from Cal. So anyway, they were digging around, and we got to talking, and they said, "We found a lot of artifacts here in this block." He said, "Do you know what block you were in?" I said, "Yeah, we were in Block 9-D, 7-A and -B." She looked at me, "You're kidding. This is 9-E, right here." I said, "What barrack?" "7-A. 7-A and B." She's got the GPS thing going, she's wandering around, and she says, "Come here, Mas, come here. Stand right there. This is the threshold to your barrack, to your building." I said, "You're kidding." And I said, "You know anything about... my father put in a brick, he put in a lawn, and he lined it with bricks like this to make it look nice." And they put in a tree, and he put wood around that. So they were looking around and digging around and they found the bricks right there. And the wood was there but it was all torn up, you couldn't even tell it was wood. But it's right here, I said, "Yeah." Anyway, it was amazing.

BN: How long ago was this?

MT: Huh?

BN: How long ago was this?

MT: Two years ago.

BN: Oh, recent.

MT: Three years ago.

BN: Oh, probably the last pilgrimage before the pandemic.

MT: Oh, yeah, just before the pandemic, just before the pandemic.

BN: Yeah, they're having another one next month.

MT: Amache?

BN: Yeah.

MT: They have it quite often, yeah.

BN: Yeah, because Amache just got national park status.

MT: Yeah, got NPS, yeah. We were working with them and we got it. Do you know this Christen Leone? She's kind of spearheading this thing. She's in Hawaii now, she used to be in Berkeley, so I think she's in Hawaii now, I think. I've never met her, but lot of correspondence back and forth.

BN: I don't think I have either. But these days, with Zoom and so on, you work with a lot of people you never meet before.

MT: Yeah.

<End Segment 20> - Copyright © 2022 Densho. All Rights Reserved.