<Begin Segment 19>

TI: Okay, so before we go there, because I want to talk about that more, we started this whole sequence talking about your father and how the government or state police, somebody came to talk to you about your father, and then you wanted to talk about this first. Why don't we go back to that, so we finish that up.

VW: Okay.

TI: So what happened?

VW: Well, I was flying in acrobatic flying at the time, and I got a call from the state police who were near, probably about two miles from my dad's farm. And he, he said he wanted to talk to me. And so I drove all the way from South Bend up to White Pigeon. At the post there, they had a state police post right there, was one mile west of White Pigeon, and two miles from the farm. And so I went in there and I talked to him about it and he says, "Virgil," he says, "why don't you, you're gonna have to take the radio away from your dad. But," he said, "you can give him an AM radio, just a little AM radio." The one that I had for him was a kind of a nice, oh, you could get real shortwave a little bit on it and so on and so forth. But he said, "Just take that radio out." And I said, "Well, can he have a radio?" and he said, "Sure. You can get him a small AM radio," which I did. But... and I said, "Well, why?" And he said, "Well, it's because they're clamping down on the Japanese Americans." And so he said, "Some of the people in town, a few of 'em, wondering why I wouldn't go out and get Fred and take him to the internment camp." And he told 'em, he said, "I'm not gonna go out there and get Fred and put him in a concentration camp." He says, "I know Fred," and he used to go out and buy things from him like eggs and watermelons and muskmelons and potatoes and things like that. So, and he knew Pop pretty well, so he wasn't gonna do that. He said he wouldn't do that. And so I took the radio away and I gave him an AM radio. And then they were satisfied, and that's all that happened to my dad.

TI: What was your dad's reaction when you had to take away his radio?

VW: Well, he kind of expected something to happen. I told him, I said the state police wanted me to do that. But he, and, but I said, "I'll get you an AM radio that you can listen to." 'Cause he used to listen to the White Sox a lot, and the Detroit Tigers.

TI: How about other things that he had on the farm? I'm guessing that he might have, like, dynamite to blow up stumps and things like that?

VW: No, we didn't. We didn't have that. I used to buy dynamite, though, in order to haul marl. I had a trucking business when I was sixteen years old, and I used to haul marl for farmers, which is like lime, similar to that. And then we used to buy sticks of dynamite to blow up the, some of the materials out of the hills. But that was all.

TI: So normally you wouldn't have that.

VW: No, no we didn't.

TI: Okay. So let's go back to your life now. So you talked about how the CAA gave you back your license after five months.

VW: Yes. And I don't remember how I got it, but it was probably in the mail.

TI: And do you know why they, they changed their minds and gave it back to you?

VW: Yes. I found out years later, it was in my records at the FAA. And it said that I was investigated by the FBI. I was also investigated by the Navy Intelligence, and I was also investigated by the War Relocation Authority. And none of 'em found anything of interest, and so there wasn't any reason why they should hold my license back. So they did give it back to me.

TI: But you didn't really know, this was years later that you found out all this.

VW: Yes, that's right.

TI: And so this paperwork confirmed that they took away the license because you were half Japanese, they investigated you, and then when they found nothing wrong, they gave it back to you.

VW: They did give it back until later, and then things happened, you might say, worse than that. But that's some time later.

<End Segment 19> - Copyright © 2010 Densho. All Rights Reserved.