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BN: And then I noticed you were also involved, maybe as a consultant, with the Strength of Diversity? Because that was a significant project also.

LH: Oh, really? You saw it then, right? You saw the exhibit?

BN: It was little before my time. I know the book, and Alice Yang has written a lot about the significance of that project also.

LH: Oh, who?

BN: Alice Yang.

LH: Oh, okay. So, well, there's...

BN: And it lasted a long time.

LH: Well, Ros got together, Ro, who was the executive director, pulled together this committee that was like, again, it was that whole Nisei core, I don't know, actually, Alice Yang, so I have to go look for that article.

BN: Yeah, I can send you that.

LH: Yeah, I'd love it because I wish we had recorded those meetings, that's what I wish we had done.

BN: You had some really dynamo people working on there.

LH: Everybody, right? Everybody. I mean, Janice Mirikitani, who was the woman that... Nikki Bridges, and everybody, everybody was on that. It was just, the conversations in those meetings were just amazing, amazing.

BN: And were you up there, or you were in L.A.?

LH: I was here by that time, yeah.

BN: You were "here," meaning...

LH: I moved from L.A. to here.

BN: To the Bay Area.

LH: And then JACL became my sponsor for the rest of the Family Album Project, when I finished up the Family Album Project.

BN: So when did you move to the Bay Area?

LH: Pardon me?

BN: When did you move to the Bay Area?

LH: I want to say '83, '84. '83, something like that.

BN: And have you pretty much been in the area since?

LH: Yeah.

BN: Because that was, that started in, what, the mid-'80s?

LH: Well, '81 was our first grant, and then our last show was '85, I think.

BN: Yeah, I probably started getting involved just a couple years after that, so I missed that part.

LH: Well, and I was working full-time, the whole time.

BN: Sure, sure. Are you still working with Caltran through this whole period?

LH: I worked full-time the whole time, yeah.

BN: What were you actually doing with Caltran?

LH: I was working, well, that was the weird part is they hired me, right?

BN: Yeah. Well, they hired you as an art historian.

LH: They hired me as an engineering aide. And then, so I have this whole community, I have this humanities background. But they kept promoting me and promoting me and promoting me because they had no women. So every time I went up, it was insane. So I actually got up to a fairly reasonable amount of income as an assistant engineer just working in the, mainly working in the traffic operation center. And then when I came up here, I worked in surveys. And then I realized that there was this cultural resource department in the Environmental Resource section that did environmental review. So then I moved into environmental review and did environmental review for a long time. And then I became a cultural resource specialist. So I went through the whole Section 106 training and did a lot of Section 106 review and a lot of cultural resource review. It was a really interesting job because the environmental portion, you worked with interdisciplinary teams, so you worked with biologists and hydrologists and cultural resource people. The main people were like environmental analysts, I was an environmental analyst, and then I sidelined with cultural resources.

<End Segment 18> - Copyright © 2022 Densho. All Rights Reserved.