<Begin Segment 16>

[Ed. note: This transcript has been extensively edited by the narrator]

MN: You know another, I thought, really unique thing, was that you had undergraduate students . . . is it David Bertagnoli.

AH: Yeah.

MN: And Sherry Turner, they were interviewing townspeople who had lived around the Manzanar and Tule Lake camps. Did they pick that subject because they were Caucasians and they had better access to the townspeople? And also, how did you fund interviews in Tule Lake, which was so far from Cal State Fullerton?

AH: Well, that's kind of interesting. See, one of the things that I did a lot was to scratch and do everything I could to get money for the students. There were very modest grants at Cal State Fullerton that you as a faculty member could apply for on behalf of student research projects. And most faculty members didn't waste their time doing it, so I could get those grants all the time. It would be like three or four hundred dollars, but it was enough to get the students transportation and lodging at some motel in, say, Tulelake, California, for a week, which is what Sherry Turner did as part of a summer course I taught in the early 1970s. And these two people, Sherry Turner and David Bertagnoli, got so turned on by this class that they wanted to do more than just one interview. They were only required to do one interview, but they'd say, "I want to do more." Bertagnoli said, "I'd like to go up to Manzanar and interview," because the Manzanar Committee was claiming this and that about other things. He said, "I want to go find out for myself." So he went up, and then the next year, I went to the Owens Valley with him, and I also started doing interviews about Manzanar. I didn't do that in Tulelake until years later. Sherry Turner went up there by herself, and did all those interviews. She really showed a lot more courage than I could imagine, because the people were so racist in the Tulelake area, and she did a pretty good job on those interviews.

And years later, another student of mine, Reagan Bell, did interviews about the military police at Tule Lake. I went up to Tulelake with him, and both of us were doing interviews while we were up there. But he'd already gone up there by himself and ran down MPs who had married locals and interviewed them. But Reagan was a perfect example of the kind of student you get at a place like Cal State Fullerton. When I taught at Cal Poly, San Luis Obispo, in both 1979-1980 and in 2008-2009, I found that the age of the overwhelming number of students there ranged from seventeen to twenty-two, and they would all pretty much go through college in four years. At Fullerton, my student Betty Mitson taught me how to interview and got me interested in oral history. She was older than me by ten or twelve years, and I learned a lot from her. She pushed me into starting the Japanese American Project. She said, "Let's get this project going." And she recorded all these lectures when we had the lecture series. She was really dedicated. I'd come to work in the morning and she had slept in the chair in our office. She was working all night transcribing and editing and indexing and proofing interviews. She was really turned on to this stuff. But you know, these students that I had, they were a mixed bag of ages and everything, and so their life experiences were really kind of interesting. I think that's what I was able to take advantage of. And Reagan Bell was a classic example. He graduated from high school in 1944, from Tustin Union High School, the very same high school that, in effect, fired me in 1963. [Laughs] But Reagan Bell, when he was in high school, a lot of the Japanese Americans, ones who lived in the Irvine area and whose families worked on the Irvine Ranch, went to Tustin High School. He showed me his high school yearbook, and he said: "Look at this yearbook. All these Japanese American faces are in there, and the next year, none of them are there." So he saw his school friends going off to camp. But then when he later got into the military service, one of his first jobs was in the military police. So when he was a graduate student, I said, "This is a natural thesis topic for you. You can see both perspectives. So that's what he ended up doing for his master's thesis, the interaction between the military police and the confined Japanese American population at the Tule Lake Relocation/Segregation Center. He only lived about three or four years after he wrote his thesis and then he died. But he'd gotten this piece of historical work accomplished, which was a nice thing.

So it was students writing these class research papers and then sometimes converting them into master's theses . . . well, that's how the Twice Orphaned book came into existence. Lisa Nobe did her class project on the Children's Village orphanage at Manzanar. Then I got her a job as a consultant with the National Park Service. But later, after getting divorced, she moved on to other things. She dropped out of graduate school and then, first, got into the Los Angeles Police Department and then went over to Japan to learn Japanese and be a minister. Although she did write a great article for the Journal of the West about the Children's Village, the book she and I were to do on the same topic never materialized. So, after many years had passed, I found this other person, Dr. Cathy Irwin, who in 2008 produced a fine book, Twice Orphaned, on this topic by building on the work that Lisa had earlier done. But it was just one of those things. We didn't have anything at Cal State Fullerton, not until quite recently, like and Asian American studies program or anything else like that. It was just a handful of people doing related research projects.

JG: But you had this collection of individuals working together for a common cause.

AH: Yeah. A lot of it had to do with my involvement. I was the advisor for the History Department's honor society and then also was head of the Oral History Program and its Japanese American Project, so I had access to little kinds of funds and I had office space where the students could congregate. Also, I was separated from my first wife for three years, and so I was free to be able to go on field trips and things like this. It just was one of those things. You have a research grant or something, then pretty soon you have different people that are academic groupies in the sense that they're working on these sorts of things, and then they find their own field, and you can get them into graduate schools because you know their work real well and you can write good letters of recommendation for them. Lots of them went on to other things of importance.

<End Segment 16> - Copyright © 2010 Densho. All Rights Reserved.