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Tom Ikeda: Okay, Spady, let's get started. This is your second interview, and it's a real pleasure. I interviewed you -- how long ago was it? It was about, over a year ago...

Spady K.: Yeah, over a year ago.

TI: ...that we interviewed. And, and I remember at the end of the interview we got to -- through World War II, through the point where you were injured, and then through your recuperation at -- in Spokane, at -- was it the Bax...?

SK: Baxter -- B-A-X-T-E-R...

TI: Right, Baxter (General Hospital).

SK: ...the current location of the Spokane Veterans Hospital.

TI: Right, right. Anyway, I got to that point, and the stor -- we ran out of time, and I really wanted to continue. So you are back in Seattle, so we're going to continue it. We're in the end of June. It's June 28th, 1999. I'm Tom Ikeda, I'm the interviewer, and then we have Spady Koyama back. So let's pick up the story from right there -- where you're now leaving Baxter Hospital -- and explain to me what happened then.

SK: I was out of the service, approximately fifteen months in Spokane. And I got a job at what is known as the Galena -- G-A-L-E-N-A, Galena Air Depot, which is a forerunner of the current Fairchild Air Force Base. And people there discovered that I had been in, in intelligence work in General MacArthur's Headquarters in Australia in World War II, and that I had a security clearance. So they gave me a pistol to wear on my hip, assigned a tall, six-footer as my assistant, and together we would drive a great big truck down to the main post office in Spokane and load up all the classified mail for the depot. And then we'd lock it up, and then saunter across the street to the nearest coffee shop. And all the citizens around me would do one of these double takes when they see this Oriental with a pistol on his hip, because this is summer of 1946 -- less than a year after the end of war. And I was doing that, when I got this very mysterious and perplexing kind of a letter from Pentagon.

TI: Before you go there, did you ever talk with anyone? When you said you got these sort of looks -- the sort of perplexed looks of, you know, why does this gentleman have a pistol who is, looks Japanese, is probably Japanese. Did anyone ever ask you?

SK: Not directly, no, but I know they asked my -- the Caucasian who was my assistant about me.

TI: And what did he say to the...?

SK: [Laughs] Well, he just told them that, "He's an American, he's a GI -- ex-GI, and he's my boss." And that we work in the, out at Galena Air Depot.

TI: And when people -- during this fifteen-month period, you mentioned how, because you worked in Military Intelligence in General MacArthur's Headquarters -- when people find out about that, like employers, you said that sort of elevated you, sort of into a special class that you could be trusted because of -- you said you're given security clearance and things like that?

SK: Well apparently so.

<End Segment 1> - Copyright © 1999 Densho. All Rights Reserved.