<Begin Segment 20>

MN: When did you start getting involved, ministering to the San Francisco city and county jail inmates?

LW: Oh, that was quite a bit after the seminary experience. When I was enrolled as a student at the Baptist seminary for my last year I was also asked to be a pastor of the Berkeley Methodist Church, Japanese American, historically a Japanese American church, so I was like a student pastor while I was going to school. And I served that church for two years, from 1948 through 1950. Then in 1950, since I was ready for ordination in the Methodist denomination, I received my ordination in June of 1950 and was appointed to serve the Pine United Methodist Church in San Francisco, at that time was Pine Methodist Church. So that was my first assignment as an ordained pastor.

MN: And you ended up staying there for seventeen years, is that correct?

LW: Seventeen years, yes.

MN: And is that, is that where you started to... the jail inmates, that came in the '70s or '60s?

LW: That, that came in the '50s.

MN: Oh, '50s.

LW: Since I started Pine Church in 1950, I was a member of the San Francisco Council of Churches, a clergy, all of us clergy were invited to be (part of) a church organization, the Council of Churches, which had its own organization, but it coordinated, not coordinate, but it brought together all the pastors, Christian pastors in San Francisco. So under the Council of Churches there was a prison, jail, jail ministry, and the pastors volunteered to go out to the San Francisco city and county jail. I think once a week we held services at the city and county jail, so I volunteered to be on that list of pastors.

MN: Was it scary? Did any of the inmates ever threaten you?

LW: No. They were very well-behaved since we ran the chapel service. It was... I guess it was one particular day of the week that they had chapel service, so inmates could volunteer to go to the chapel service, so during, at the end of the chapel service we had a chance to talk with any of the inmates and many of them in that situation had requests, would you check with certain people in the city, and it was trying to be a communication link with the inmates and the, their friends or families in San Francisco. So that was a position that I volunteered in, volunteered for a number of years, then eventually they asked me to chair that committee and I had the assignment of recruiting pastors to fill out the schedule at the city and county jail, so I kept that for a number of years.

MN: Now, most of these inmates, what were the ethnic makeup of these people you'd minister to?

LW: Predominantly African American, a few others, Mexicans, Hispanics. I don't ever remember running into an Asian inmate. There may have been, but I don't remember.

MN: Now since they were predominantly African Americans, were they able to relate to you since you're an Asian American?

LW: Oh yes. Well, there was, I think they welcomed anybody from the outside and so, and this also a kind of break in their, their routine schedule, so they welcomed the chapel service and welcomed anybody that would talk with them and relate to them in a different way than what they experienced in the jail. So it was hopefully a kind of a humanizing experience for them to see somebody come in and visit with them.

<End Segment 20> - Copyright © 2011 Densho. All Rights Reserved.