<Begin Segment 42>

AI: So, so tell me, tell me about how you got this opportunity to, the permission to leave camp. Was this because you had met a professor who came to camp?

EH: (Yes), (yes). I mean, he, you almost had to have a sanctioned job or school, or... you had to have someplace to live. And, and that was typical of college students. They got onto the campus and, and the school was going to be at least a sponsor of a kind, then you could leave. And people started to leave, probably even before the questionnaire came out. I think it's Henry Tanaka that I met, and Bill Murayama. I think they left in December of, early. College scholarships and enrollment became possible. But I think once, once we were out it was, it was all right. Despite being college students, a lot of us had to get jobs anyway. But, in Tule Lake's case, we had a great camp director by the name of Elmer Shirrell. And Harry Mayeda, who was my recreation department boss, was able to, to develop good relationships with anybody and everybody, including Elmer Shirrell. And when they decided to open the first relocation office outside camps, to set up employment and housing facilities and that kind -- and Seattle got the first, I mean, Chicago got the first one, and Harry Mayeda and I think Elmer Shirrell, (yes), both ended up opening that office, or establishing that office. It, it was a sizeable office, and it didn't take long before there probably were fifty people interviewing and... but Elmer Shirrell was just a rare kind of person. His wife, they didn't have any children, but his wife... (Eleanor)? Anyway, they worked hard and Mrs. Shirrell kept, I remember her telling me that she was scheduled to make talks all over Chicago, but she wasn't always that welcome. And she said even in the YWCA, when she made the presentation on behalf of evacuees and the situation, she would invariably be asked, "Who's paying you to say this?" And she was, she was above that; she was able to cope with it. But my mother often quoted that, talking to other people (in) Chicago, one of the things that happened was Curtis Candy Company opened up their factory.

AI: Oh, yes.

EH: Because they were desperate for factory workers. Everybody was gone to, to the war front and so here was, here was a whole potential mass. And they came into camp. That, Elmer Shirrell and Harry Mayeda both met the Curtis Candy people, I think, in camp. And gained the confidence and for a lot of us, that was the first meager job we could get if, when we needed a job.

AI: Well, now, excuse me, but did you say that it was a, an anthropology professor who had come to Tule Lake and who you met and, and then what happened? How did you get the permission to leave?

EH: Robert, Robert Redfield was a well-known, internationally known anthropology prof at the University of Chicago. And I think he was basically interested in the social machinery of camp, and how it was working. And when I met him, I probably met him in Recreation. He was kind of in a desperate situation looking for help for his wife, and that might have been a mission that she put him on. So he asked me if, if I'd like to leave camp under his sponsorship, or at least knowing that I had a job that he would vouch for, that I could spend the summer in Des Plaines, Illinois. Now, right behind that, his wife's parents were Robert Park and his wife, R.E. Park was kind of a pioneer in urban sociology, and was at that time retired, but teaching at Fisk University. And being in their eighties, they needed help, household help, probably more than the Redfields did. Redfields were on a summer -- not a resort area. They had a farm, a five-acre farm in Des Plaines, that's where they spent their summer. And, and Robert Redfield was commuting from University of Chicago on a suburban train. But after the wedding, after Lisa's wedding, I went to Petoskey, Michigan, with Robert E. Park and his wife -- I can't remember what his wife's name is. But they were both in their eighties, and they had kind of a compound of, I think the Redfields had four kids, it seems to me. And two or three of them had sizeable houses, but resort houses. Petoskey is pretty much a, I think a resort kind of town on Lake Michigan. I could be wrong, but, but anyway --

<End Segment 42> - Copyright © 2004 Densho. All Rights Reserved.