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TI: I want to shift gears a little bit. Earlier you talked about your, your technical abilities. You took these programming classes, so you knew something about computers. I guess I want you to talk about how your knowledge of computers have helped in various campaigns. I mean, you were probably viewed as someone who was good with computers that could help, whether it's a campaign for fundraising or something else. Can you talk about some of those, those various projects?

BS: Well, I think in any organization or in any event, the computer is the most valuable thing. Chairpersons, you could find them, but the computer person is the most important person, in my opinion, because they could do so much. And so I remember when I first got my PC there were hardly any programs to run at, I mean, you'd have to write your own programs. There were no Excel or no word processing or anything like that. We had something called the compiler where you would write your codes and tell the computer what to do in a particular way, so I was able to do that. And so I remember in the 1980s the JACL started this redress drive to right the wrongs of the camps and this fund drive leader here in the Los Angeles area was gonna start it, and I told him, "Hey, you can't do this without a computer," and so I volunteered to do the computer work for this fund drive. And it was pretty cumbersome using the old PC with no programs, and I remember there were no sorts, sort utility. You had to write your own sort. And I remember we had floppy drives that I had to put the whole database of seven thousand donors on three floppy disks, and I had to write a program to recognize each disk. Oh, it was really cumbersome, but that was the only way we could do it. And yeah, the computers have come a long way since those days. So anyway, we got this fund drive, we raised a lot of money and the redress was a success. I remember Reagan was gonna sign the Civil Liberties Act of 1988, I was invited to the signing, but I couldn't make it. And so that was a pretty good job.

TI: It was pretty impressive because, to be invited because it was a very small group that was actually invited to D.C. for that signing. I've seen the, the footage of that, video footage. There weren't too many people there. The senator was there, Senator Inouye, Norm Mineta was there, I believe, so it was quite a select group.

BS: Yeah, they call me up on a Sunday night to be over on Tuesday, I just, I just couldn't go.

TI: Good.

<End Segment 26> - Copyright © 2010 Densho. All Rights Reserved.