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PW: Tell me about, last year I went for the first time to the Roberts Park Veterans Memorial Day. Tell me about that, what is that ceremony and when did it start?

LS: Well, in 1992, we were still holding E Company reunions. So we hosted a Northern California reunion, and I was kind of in charge of making all the arrangements. So I went to the chamber of commerce, or the city of Oakland, it was an office that I went to, and I met this lady. And I explained what we planned to do, and she says, "I know exactly who we should contact." And her name was Jo Hemphil, lived in Lafayette, it was about thirty-five, forty miles away. But a couple of years before, the pope had come to Northern California, and I think the group was so large, she had handled the reservations for them. And I think she hired five hundred buses to handle taking people following the pope. And so I contacted her and told her, this is what we'd like to do, we're going to be at the Waterfront Hotel, Jack London Square, what do you think we should do? And she said, "I know a little bit about you because my husband was a navy veteran in World War II, and he knows about the 442." So she said, "I'd be glad to do something." So she made up an agenda for four days, and one was a trip to Livermore to the Livermore National Lab, U.C. Berkeley. And it's a pretty closed facility, we had to get clearance from the military, every person had to be signed up, we had to birth certificates, all this stuff, to clear everyone that was in our group. We got to meet with some of the scientists, they took us to the inner auditorium where hardly anybody from the outside ever can go, and they showed us projects they were working on. And this was 1992, and it was very interesting. Now, that was one.

We had golf tournaments, every night we had a program going at the hotel, and food and bar and all that. And one of the trips that Jo Hemphil made up with, Bay Bridges and Parks and Open Space, I think she called it. And we had buses, so Jack London Square in Oakland, we went, I guess, across Golden Gate Bridge. No, we went across the Bay Bridge to San Francisco, toward Golden Gate Park, across the Golden Gate Bridge, I guess that's Contra Costa County, and had lunch at... what's that famous, there was a city right on the northern bay, had lunch there, and then I guess we came back on the San Raphael Bridge and came back to, above Oakland, the East Bay Regional Park District has a redwood forest. Of course, none of us knew about that. So we go up there in that forest, and we meet a man, small, about five-seven or eight, white haired man, and he was retired, his name was William Penn Mott, Jr. He had been the director of the East Bay Regional Park District, he had become the National Parks director of the United States, now retired. And when Jo Hemphil told him what this trip was about, he said, "I want to do something for the 442." So he acquired that location where the redwood trees are, he had them bring that big rock that sits there. First they had the bench placed there and they made a plastic, kind of a sign that was imprinted, put in that, but plastic dies out. The park eventually put that brass plate in that rock where it sits now. And that's where, in 1992, our boys planted this, about a six-foot redwood sapling. It's now about thirty, forty feet tall, and that's where we have our incense set up by that tree. So we've been going back every year since 1992.

PW: And what do you do for that ceremony?

LS: Well, we found a Mills High School band, got them to come and play for us, and now that band has transformed into Band of the West, it's Navy Sea Cadets. So they are actually part of the U.S. Navy as Sea Cadets, they have Navy uniforms, they have camouflage uniforms, and they had other uniforms. So we had them play, we have a section down below where about twenty-five, thirty of the musicians, mostly high school age, one or two older, will play military tunes for about an hour. And then we have chairs that the park ranger keeps for us and brings out up on the top, and then he brings the speaker system out. We have a short program. We have a Buddhist minister from the Oakland Buddhist Temple come, we have the Boy Scouts from Berkeley to come and do the honor guard, sometimes we get the impersonators, I guess you'd call them, to come out with their uniforms and equipment. We've run out of speakers, so I'm usually there to say a few things.

PW: And when is this held every year?

LS: Hmm?

PW: When is it held every year?

LS: It's always the third Saturday of May, it's Armed Forces Day throughout the country.

<End Segment 17> - Copyright © 2019 Densho. All Rights Reserved.