<Begin Segment 11>

TI: Now, I'm curious, and this may, may go more to your newspaper memories, but in the months right after the bombing of Pearl Harbor, there was talk of, of the camps. And I was curious what people in Boise thought when sort of news started coming up that there would be a camp of Japanese in the state.

RM: Oh, they, they really resisted that. I think if you read the Capital News and Statesman editorials, they were very opposed to putting the Japanese in Idaho. And there was a hope, originally, that they could come voluntary -- in fact, I don't know how many families did -- there was an open period before internment where you could move inland, and there were families that moved to Boise and Nampa and Caldwell from the coast. I don't think very many, but some of them did and were successful. They, and they lived out the war there. I didn't know any of those people, but I knew that they were there, I'd read the paper.

TI: Do you recall any of the news stories about this "voluntary evacuation" of people?

RM: Yeah, I remember that the newspapers opposed it. That they didn't want the "Pacific Coast trouble," that was how it was worded.

TI: So they opposed the voluntary, and then later on, news came out that they were, there were gonna be these camps, and a lot more would be in Idaho. So how, how newsworthy was this? Was this like front-page information --

RM: No.

TI: -- or was this buried someplace?

RM: Front page was very local news-oriented, not given to discussing the Japanese on the Pacific Coast. That was rare a discussion. When the federal government decided to overrule the state, and this was after the Salt Lake conference, there was no... "Okay, we'll accept it, but they can't stay here after the war." I remember that was the newspaper point of view. And, and they wanted guards around the camps, and they wanted the jobs for Caucasian unemployed. I remember that was a big end point that they made.

TI: So it, it was perceived that, that the Japanese would be in camps, guarded --

RM: Yes.

TI: -- so more like, almost like a prison environment.

RM: That's right.

TI: And then possibly jobs for the community associated.

RM: Uh-huh, that's right.

<End Segment 11> - Copyright © 2004 Densho. All Rights Reserved.