<Begin Segment 24>

TN: Mr. Collins died, you know.

TI: And when did Mr. Collins die?

TN: I don't know, I can't recall now. He was seventy-eight or something like that.

TI: And in thinking about when he died, I think more recently a lot more information has come out about all the work that he did. At the time of his death, did people understand how much he had done with the renunciants and things like that?

TN: I don't know whether they understood or not. But the work he did was tremendous.

TI: Now, do you have any regrets working with Mr. Collins?

TN: No, no. But I just, I didn't realize I would be stuck with it this long. It was very interesting. But once we started it, anything like that, I didn't want to be labeled as though I was a quitter, you know. I got these people involved and let them put their money out, and I figured, gee, we have to finish this thing, you know. So I give a lot of these committeemen a lot of credit for going around all over the United States to convince them of what we're doing. It takes so long.

TI: So they had to be patient, you guys had to keep working.

TN: Yeah.

BT: Yeah, we didn't have a chance to talk about this in this interview, but when you graduated from Cal in '39, then you told me before that you had taken a job with a strawberry co-op. What were you doing there?

TN: Oh, I was sort of taking care of the books and managing everything.

BT: Was the co-op, was there a lot of organizing work going on with the co-op?

TN: It was set up already. So they asked me... I wanted to go through law school, but, you know, we had a hard time financially those days. And my brother was going to Berkeley at that time, so it was hard for my father to finance that.

BT: Well, it struck me that your first job was with a co-op, which is, you know, it's all about organizing. And then you were involved with the Tule Lake Defense Committee, which was also an organizing task, and then redevelopment was a huge organizing task. So...

TN: You know, when I was asked to help the church, so I had the background in raising funds, so I helped these people. We helped a lot.

BT: The background in raising funds was from your experience with the Tule Lake Defense Committee?

TN: Yeah. Naturally you get pro and cons, you know. There'd be a lot of people talking bad about me, too. You got to expect those things.

TI: And what were those bad things, those criticisms of you?

TN: I was not doing anything to help them at all, you know. It took so long, you know, they want action right away. So you could see a human nature. And the camps, they said, "We don't want our citizenship back, we just want to get out of the camps." But once they get out, they want their citizenship back. They want everything. Take an inch, you give a mile. [Laughs]

TI: Well, Tex, thank you so much for doing this interview. This was an incredible history lesson for me. Thank you so much.

TN: Well, thank you. I hope a lot of people get some lesson from this.

TI: No, I think this is an incredibly important story.

TN: Well, yeah, you have to have a historical background in American history, what your Bill of Rights are. Because I had that background in Berkeley. I took courses in city government, state government, American history. And so it helped me a lot. I had to teach a lot of kids in Tule Lake what your rights are, you know. And although if we helped, one of these, if you have your citizenship, you have a right to fight back with your citizenship. Without your citizenship, you won't be able to fight back. A lot of people don't realize that until they lose it.

TI: Very good. So thank you. Thank you, Barbara.

<End Segment 24> - Copyright © 2009 Densho. All Rights Reserved.