Densho Digital Repository - Lynne Horiuchi Interview (Densho ID: ddr-densho-501-16)

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BN: Then you were starting to talk about the Japanese American Family Album project.

LH: Project, yeah. So I was out of school, and I started doing different things. I worked in the Eames, Charles Eames office for a while, but then eventually I got, I went back to my... I had done, like, a civil service job in Colorado to earn some money to do whatever, I always did that. As an, what do they call it, engineering aide, or something like that. So Caltrans opened up their employment to women, this is the big one. So that was the first time they opened up employment to women, really. And so I applied for a job because I thought, what the hell, I can just do this because I get a regular paycheck, I get some benefits, my health coverage was, I got health coverage, might as well do this for a while. And I found an advertisement in the paper of all things, which is not normally the way you find out. So I went and they hired me, and I just stayed there because I found a very convenient way to pay for my avocation. So I had a vocation, but I paid for my avocation through Caltrans. Caltrans sponsored the Japanese American Family Album project. And I was in the traffic operation center working, so I could do these odd shifts so I could actually do the work. And I wrote an NEH grant for JACCC. How did that work? Oh, yeah, so I did the NEH grant and a California Council for the Humanities grant through JACCC and convinced them to be the sponsoring agency, and then I sort of sat up there and it was a small room. And I ran the project from there, because I got these, both grants were successful, and we were able to put together a good pilot. And then from there we, it took us a while, it took us two iterations of the NEH grant, I call it the mother of all grants, it's enormous and ponderous. And then we got through and we (received) $145,000 for the second part of it.

BN: How did you get there? Because you had an... that wasn't really your area to that point. I mean, how did you make the connection with JACCC?

LH: So the Caltrans office was two blocks from JACCC. So somehow, can't even remember how it happened. Well, my thought was this. So I graduated with my M.A., and I'd had a pretty good life by that time and just decided I needed to give back to the community, that was one thing. So I decided that I would do a project for the community. So I was sort of casting about for that, and talking to my friend, Elizabeth Chestnut, and we came up with this idea for the Japanese American Family Album project with Don Rundstrom and Suzie Rundstrom. So, but I basically drove all the administrative part of it and all the grant writing and all that sort of stuff. So that's how it came together. And I parted ways with Elizabeth, unfortunately, at a certain point, because she just couldn't deliver her chapters for the work for the project. And that was like a big crisis, like what do we do? Do we give the money back or we just keep going? So we just kept going, and Dick Chalfen, Richard Chalfen, whose name is on the book, this was another thing. I had an M.A., I didn't have a PhD, and I was doing this NEH grant, so I didn't have any clout. But we managed to put together a pretty good exhibit, and people were very receptive to the exhibit, they really liked it. And, in fact, the pilot, I met all these people, like Philip Gotanda showed up, and he said, "Lynne, I really love this exhibit." And that's when I knew, I was like, "Okay, great." And when I went to New York... oh, I'm spacing now. (...) Dorothy Rony, she was at the Chinatown History Project.

BN: Chinatown History Project.

LH: Right? Oh, you know this?

BN: I knew Dorothy.

LH: Okay, you knew her then, right? She's this ball of fire from Cornell, like, boom. I never met a (Asian) American woman like this. And so she sponsored the New York City (showing), Michi Weglyn went to see it, and she said, the report back was that she said, "This is an important exhibit." I was like, oh my god, that was my biggest compliment ever, from Michi Weglyn. But it was hard because I was Japanese American from Denver, I had no connection in the Japanese American community and I didn't fit in. I found out very quickly. I started playing taiko and I was like, oh no, this was not going to work for them or for me, it was immediately like, we're not compatible. And it partly is because I, you know, there are very formed groups in the Japanese American community, whatever your peer group. So you cannot easily break into them. But if you're from Denver... and then later I found, even if you're from San Fernando Valley, it might be tough, you know. So it's just the way that the community works. But I connected with a lot of people, and I'm still connected with people, the Miyamuras, which has been wonderful. But, of course, they have a base in New Mexico, and they were one of the groups that we worked with.

BN: This is the Hershey Miyamura...

LH: Hershey Miyamura's family. Because I was interested... because I came from Denver, I was interested in interethnic diversity because I could, I wanted to actually get people to think about that. We're so different, right? If you grow up in another area, you can be a really different component of that ethnic community. So, and actually just get people to see that, that maybe you thought you were a cowboy when you were growing up, which was really true. I was thinking about the difference regionally, because in Denver especially at the time of the '60s, it was still the wild, wild west. So I grew up with that sort of thinking about how you went mountain climbing or whatever, you were sort of, it's a different mentality.