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TI: So you mentioned your father had to get a job in Cleveland.

RE: My father, initially, was relegated to making peck baskets, quart basket at a company called Asperin Basket Company. My sister ended up working for an optical company grinding lenses, you know, for glasses. And eventually when my sister came out with us, the other sister, Fumi, she ended up working there. But my dad, interestingly, in early 1944 when there were so many young men went to war. They were, they were lacking skilled tool and die makers, the machinists, and they needed my dad desperately. My brother Hank said, "My dad's skilled," and so they cleared him with vigilance by the FBI. My dad worked at a tank plant and became the first Japanese alien to work in a war plant in the United States of America. It was in the Cleveland Plains-Dealer, in the front page. Hit the fan right there. Lot of firsts.

TI: Wow. And when that hit the, the news, was it a...

RE: Well-accepted.

TI: So well-accepted. So it wasn't a critical article, it was like, look what...

RE: Look what this man who is an alien, you know.

TI: But you mentioned FBI, sort of, surveillance? So they had someone watching him?

RE: Oh, yeah. They even watched my sister with her not knowing it. She, being the activist that she was, recruited... well, she graduated from West High School, I remember, the first year we were there. And, but on the job, they would hire some minorities doing menial tasks, so she had them meet with her -- and we didn't know about this -- and they would talk about their civil liberties and why they needed to rise above where they were at this point. The FBI figured that she, she's a Communist sympathizer. Remember, soon after the war ended, you had hearings, the McCarthy Hearings. So she was a branded a Communist, as a Communist sympathizer, I think it was 1945, '46, thereabouts. So she was compelled to go to the federal building in Cleveland where there were a panel of men who interrogated her and accused her of being a Communist sympathizer. At which point, my sister raised the question, "What is a Communist?" She really didn't know. She said, "I can better tell you if I am a Communist or not a Communist," and that was the end of that. But she was now branded a Communist sympathizer. Many years later, when my brother graduated from college with a mechanical engineering degree from Ohio State, applied for a job with NASA, and NASA rejected him on the basis that his sister was a Communist sympathizer.

TI: So your family had a file. I mean, everyone... they were looking after you.

<End Segment 23> - Copyright © 2008 Densho. All Rights Reserved.