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MN: Okay, so let's go into Congress. Now, after the National Park Service determined Manzanar was most suitable, you contacted Congressman Mel Levine. Can you tell me why you called him?

RO: Congressman Levine happened to sit on the right committee, Natural Resources. And he, I knew him, and he actually represented the west side area.

MN: And are you the person that also contacted Congressman Bob Matsui's office?

RO: Well, the, after we began this process, the Park Service had an anthropologist study Manzanar, and they discovered that around the dump site, they found a lot of valuable artifacts. And so Ross Hopkins... actually, this is after. This after the designation.

MN: Okay. So we're getting ahead of ourselves. Let's talk about the House Committee that you testified before. And who testified, who went with you, and how that went.

RO: Yes. The, we had three of us testify before the House Committee.

MN: And who were the three?

RO: There was Sue, Hirotaka Sugawa, and myself. And when we arrived, I could see that they were running late. So I turned to Sue and Hiro, and I said, "We're not going to testify. We're just gonna submit our written testimony, and then you each have one line. So I went first and I said, "On the way up to the hearing, we passed the National Archives, and I saw 'Past is Prologue' written on the wall. And this is a lesson to us all, that if we do not do anything about the past injustices, we're bound to repeat them." Then Sue, she told the committee that she was a high school graduate when war broke out, and her life was interrupted, and she was carted off to Manzanar, and that she volunteered to make camouflage nets to support the war effort. Last, Hiro, Hiro gets up, and he says, "I want to share a little-known piece of history. That the 442 vets were also a part of the liberation of Dachau, but the U.S. Army took 'em out of the picture, because how were they going to deal with the paradoxical question where their parents and siblings are in American concentration camps?" It was all over. But we had problems on the Senate side.

MN: So on the Senate side, who prepared the companion bill to Mel Levine's bill? Which senator...

RO: The lead was gonna be Senator Cranston.

MN: Okay. So now you're in Washington to testify before the Senate, you're having breakfast with the L.A. city lobbyist. What does he tell you and what do you do about it?

RO: Mike Gauge had been fighting us not only in city council, but now within the mayor's office, and that's where the big fight shifted. And that while I was already in Washington with Sue, he sends communication to our city lobbyist that, "No, Rose cannot testify, and that you cannot use her, the mayor's written testimony." So I turned to the lobbyist, Jim Sealy, a wonderful guy who has a lot of guts, I worked with him on legislation for many years. I said to him, "Sorry. Tell 'em that the Senate testimony didn't arrive in time. So would you make forty-five copies of my House testimony, and I'll carry it up to the committee." So we just went ahead.

MN: You know, Jim Sealy could have got into a lot of trouble for doing that. Did you have to... how hard was it to convince him to get that copied?

RO: You know, at a certain point, you have to decide you don't give a damn. And even if it means your job, and it's quite liberating. But the hard part of this is, as I said, the fight was in the mayor's office. My office, my staff, was also negatively impacted. We would work on a gang conference, we have five hundred people coming, and then the new deputy mayor getting orders from the former says, "The mayor's not gonna appear." Well, that works out. I asked the City Attorney to do the keynote, and we've always been friends, and that friendship lasted. So when I came back from the Clinton administration, he appointed me on the police commission. So some good things came out of that. But we suffered in a lot of ways. I could remember the day that I buried my mother, and I came back to the mayor's office, and they said, "Go see the deputy mayor." And he said, "We're gonna move your office to Piper Tech." That's the city garage. And I said, "I buried my mother today. I don't want to talk to you." I'm not one of these people that goes to the mayor or Papa to complain, but I did go see the mayor and I said, "Man, that man did not got any kind of decent sensibilities here." But fortunately for the support of a lot of people, most of the people were intimidated when the deputy mayor or the new deputy mayor is opposed, they started backing away. And lot of people joined the deputy mayor saying, "Why you need to do that? Why can't we do something else?" And this is where I'm indebted to Jeff Matsui. Jeff is someone that hasn't gotten any kind of credit for the community, but he's always in there taking care of Little Tokyo, whether it was where East West Players sits, that was gonna become a childcare facility, widening of the north side of First Street. But he laid his body between other execs and the mayor's office. And in this case, Jeff was right there. Never stepped away. Now the new deputy mayor and the former president of DWP, were gonna do everything they could to stop the passage of this at the Senate level. And poor Cranston's office was being, you know, lobbied by DWP, a powerful, powerful entity. And then we just, everything that was moving forward came to a screeching halt.

MN: And at one point, actually, Cathy Lacey from Cranston's office was told she could no longer call you. How did you get around that?

RO: They did everything to keep us from moving the bill forward. And so Cathy was forbidden from speaking to me. So we used... what is her name?

MN: Martha Davis?

RO: Martha Davis from the Save Mono Lake Committee, and she became our go-between, and she would talk to Cathy, and then Cathy... then they would talk to Sue, Sue would talk to me or whatever. But any event, we were not got going anywhere. So I suggested that why don't we draft some neutral language? Why don't we have somebody, a professor or some expert, develop some neutral language that would, everyone can sign off on. Any event, one day, Jeff gave me some language that mayor gave her, he got that from Mike Gauge and DWP. And I looked at it, and I said, "What? This is a DWP protection act. This is ridiculous." So I called a friend of mine, his name is Bill Hing. He was my assistant on the Immigration Commission, and at that time he was a professor at Sanford Law School. And I said, "Do you have any water experts up there?" He said, "Two." "One from L.A.?" He said, "Yes." I says, "Tell him to call me." And we spoke and I said, "I'm gonna fax you some language, and I want you to tell me whether it was yours." Some time passes, and he calls and he acknowledges that it was not. So I told the mayor, and the mayor said, "Call Cranston." And the bill passed, as you know.

MN: You know, throughout this whole ordeal, I mean, you didn't get moved into Piper Tech, but you still had to move your office. Did your staff say, "Rose, let's just back away from Manzanar"?

RO: I'm always very appreciative of... it was their fight. My fight was their fight.

<End Segment 6> - Copyright © 2010 Densho. All Rights Reserved.