<Begin Segment 19>

MA: Yeah, well, thank you so much for sharing that because I think it's a very important story.

CT: Well, yeah, and then again, it helped shape what I do now.

MA: Right, right.

CT: And why I think I keep wanting the communities to emphasize the Executive Order 9066 in February, on the anniversary, and really work towards that. And then also, I'm helping with the Heart Mountain Wyoming Foundation, even though we didn't, my husband was in Gila, in Arizona, and I was in Poston, they don't have a lot of Japanese Americans in the state of Wyoming, and so, but there's a lot of support for it from former internees. But they are in the process of building a learning center, or an interpretive center on what's left of the camp site. And they're fortunate that the local people, the Caucasians there, are really working actively on it. So we're in a fundraising process right now, and going to build a interpretative center on the land. Heart Mountain, Wyoming, the internees donated money and made it possible for us to buy some of the land back that was the camp, because after the war, the, I think probably every camp, the land was put up in a lottery for returning veterans. And like the Homesteader Act, and they were able to get land, and they got a certain number of acres, and then some camp barracks. But in that Wyoming area, a lot of the barracks were saved and people were able to buy them. I don't remember, it was very minimal. And they rebuilt them, or remodeled them and lived in them. And so there are a lot of camp barracks, out of Heart Mountain, that are still existing in the Powell/Cody area.

MA: Or that people just sort of live in now.

CT: Convert. And they lived in it, uh-huh, and converted it. Most of them though, I think they don't all qualify as being historic because people built things on it or they changed it, or they took new wood. But we're also fortunate to have some actual barracks. And my husband worked on, with the Japanese American National Museum, he went up to Powell, Wyoming, and helped dismantle two of the barracks and then they were shipped down to Los Angeles. And then, part of it is still inside the building. But the others, I think they put that together and sent it to Ellis Island, so that it was on exhibit there.

MA: Right, right.

CT: But that was an important project personally for him to be involved in. So, but again, it was because of the dry climate and the fact that people, I mean they didn't look into preserving it, but they retained those and used it for storage. So some of those that were used as storage weren't, they didn't add on new wood or anything like that. They weren't remodeled in any way. So that's, I work towards that, and that was our passion also to preserve the story of what happened.

MA: Yeah, well, thank you so much for sharing. I mean, it's really been such a fantastic interview.

Yeah, thanks for sharing. I really appreciate it.

CT: Okay.

<End Segment 19> - Copyright © 2008 Densho. All Rights Reserved.