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TI: And there's another campaign and that was to put a, a monument in Washington, D.C., so there's another group that you got involved in.

BS: Oh yeah, in 1989, Mike Masaoka wanted a national Nisei veterans group to put up a monument in Washington, D.C. so, oh, I don't know, about thirty of us Niseis met in Reno, Nevada, and we formed this Go For Broke National Veterans Association and Mike asked Judge Bill Marutani to head this organization. And so we got started and I became the membership chairman and the newsletter editor. I didn't know a thing about newsletters, and computer, only thing I did on the computer was a text editor, which was just like a typewriter. I didn't have a word processor, and so when Marutani asked me to be the editor, I couldn't say no to him, so I had to learn word processing real fast. And so I started to put out the newsletter, and so we got going. We had Mineta and Inouye and Robert Matsui and the senator from Hawaii, Spark Matsunaga, and we had legislation passed in Congress, but we veterans could not put up a monument and so we formed this National Japanese American Memorial Foundation. We got all these rich people to finish this for us, and so they put up this monument for the soldiers, Japanese American soldiers killed during World War II, so that was pretty good. Yeah, I remember I was, I was selected to, let's see, we got soil from the ten camps and we put it in this container and I put it in this, not a vault, you know, some kind of time capsule, so I put it in the time capsule and we put a lid on it. And I remember we had Janet Reno, she was the Attorney General, she spoke. Norman Mineta was there. Yeah, as he spoke he said something and I was pouring the soil from the tenth camp, he was saying I'm doing this and so I'm pouring this [Laughs].

TI: That's a good story.

<End Segment 27> - Copyright © 2010 Densho. All Rights Reserved.