Densho Digital Archive
Densho Visual History Collection
Title: Robert Coombs Interview
Narrator: Robert Coombs Andrews
Interviewer: Alice Ito
Location: SeaTac, Washington
Date: August 2, 2003
Densho ID: denshovh-crobert-01-0018

<Begin Segment 18>

AI: Well, through some of these assignments, you must have heard some difficult stories of things that some of the students had gone through.

RC: Not many wanted to talk about it. There were children that had to be taken out of the project. And there was a Methodist minister who had his office right next to my classroom, which was rather interesting. And there were several of my students that needed care. And he worked with their families. And then there was a Catholic priest, Father Tibbesart. The Methodist minister, I think was Machado. I can't remember, but I think that's what his name was. And then a very famous, he became a professor at the University of Chicago, Father...

AI: Oh, Kitagawa?

RC: Kitagawa. Wonderful human being. They were there to help, and they helped. I had one other boy who was very angry. So angry that it was dangerous to him mentally and physically. And they worked well to get him into a home in the Midwest, which apparently it got him away from that environment and put him into a situation where he wanted to live. One of the nice things, too, were the missionary teachers that came from the Orient. They were saved by the last ship that left the Far East. They came across the southern part of the world. I can't remember the name of that ship now. And it's too bad because it was an historic voyage that they took. They're all gone now. And they were wonderful ladies. And you see, their background was wonderful to someone like me. They were elderly, really, they were in their sixties. And here I was in my twenties. And I learned a lot from them. And where they came from, they, I think two or three of them spoke Japanese. One of them, afterwards, became secretary to a man who was to become Senator Church of Idaho. (...) He wanted her to go back to Washington when he was elected senator and here she was pushing seventy-something and she says, "Oh, no. You don't want me." [Laughs] So she, she stayed in Boise. But he went to back to Washington as Senator Church.

AI: Well, it must have been very helpful for some of the teachers who did speak Japanese to communicate with some of the parents.

RC: Yes.

AI: I'm wondering, did you have much contact with parents of your students?

RC: No, no. One of the things that we started right at the very beginning, the teachers who had come from Japan and spoke Japanese decided that two or three evenings a week, we'd get together for an hour (to learn some Japanese). Well, that was fine before school started. But once school started, it was a long day for us. And we had work to do at night (and we had to give up our language lessons).

<End Segment 18> - Copyright © 2003 Densho. All Rights Reserved.