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BN: And then I wanted to ask you also about the, your work with the Heart Mountain Wyoming Foundation, because I know you actually were a board member, right?

SM: Yes. So I'm a member of the board. My main contribution is to do two things. One, I speak for board activities, including activities at Heart Mountain. So for example, during the summer when we have a real heavy tourist season and people coming in, I've been Zooming into their auditorium at Heart Mountain, which, by the way, they named after me, which was a very nice gesture. They're speaking at the Sam Mihara Theater. And we're just ending up our season for this year and done about forty of those sessions for visiting people who come And the other thing I do is I donate all of the speaking fees, I give all of them to the foundation, Mineta Simpson Foundation, and it helps build a new facility that we're working on, so I enjoy doing that.

BN: How often do you go to the site?

SM: To Heart Mountain?

BN: Heart Mountain, yeah.

SM: Usually about three times a year usually. This year it was four times, but usually it's about three.

BN: Have you visited the other WRA camp sites?

SM: Yes, I have, I've been to several. I've been to Manzanar, I've been to Tule Lake, and I've been to Topaz. I went to Lordsburg, my father-in-law was there, and many of the other places. But I haven't been to all of them.

BN: You mentioned you have five states you haven't been to. Do you have any other goals that you'd like to achieve?

SM: Well, I'm working on one right now which is really, really showing a lot of promise, and that is to educate the world. I found out that Encyclopedia Britannica, headquartered in Chicago, has an enormous audience. I mean I'm talking millions of people around the world, and it's all virtual, virtual now, they quit making the paper copies. And for interesting topics they create stories, so people can dial in a story. I'm in the process now of recording with them lessons. It's designed for age level, so in the catalog, say you're a middle school teacher, they look under middle school history, and they look for Japanese American incarceration and they find my story. And they can order it in one of fifty languages, and they can even order by chapters. I just finished a chapter on my father's blindness, a two-minute segment on how my father became blind. And so that's now available in their catalog, so that's the system that's going on. And I'm working with them to finish it up, the potential of reaching the world with billions of potential people. That would be a great achievement on my part, I feel comfortable getting to that kind of an audience. Never possible to do it as an individual, impossible.

BN: Right, yeah. You can only physically talk to so many people.

SM: I can do physically very limited, with the pandemic situation, very limited odds. So it works out well.

BN: That's great. So we're just about ready to wrap up, I think we're right on time. So just as a conclusion, how would you like to be remembered?

SM: Well, that's probably one of the more interesting questions I've ever had. Probably as an educator, I try to teach about what happened to me and to my fellow Japanese Americans, that it should never happen again to anyone. Just teaching that and getting people to recognize how can they make sure that it doesn't happen again to somebody else? Just knowing that is very, very helpful. That's what I want people to remember me as, an educator.

BN: Great, thank you so much, Sam.

SM: Thank you much.

<End Segment 25> - Copyright © 2022 Densho. All Rights Reserved.