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BY: So you were not in Seattle when the commission hearings were held here then?

SM: When the commission hearings were held, I was here.

BY: Okay. And you told me an interesting story about your mom, which I'd love you to share.

SM: Yeah. My mom graduated in what they called secretarial sciences, like business school for women back in the '40s when they were supposed to be in a secondary role in business. And so she knew shorthand like... and she would even do her recipes in shorthand so we couldn't even tell what her recipes said. But she would not talk about the camps or anything that happened. But suddenly, when those hearings came to Seattle, she got on the bus, took her steno pad, sat in the back, and she wrote, in shorthand, she wrote everything that was happening. And the next day, she would have them all typed up, she would go home and type it up, manual typewriters. And she would have it all typed up before the official copies ever came out. But both days, she was there taking down everything, and that was kind of like her contribution.

BY: Do you still have copies of those notes?

SM: I don't.

BY: Densho might like those. [Laughs]

SM: We don't, and we haven't seen them in years. I think she probably handed it over to the leaders who were doing this. Because I remember somebody in that leadership group, every time I ran into him, would say, "Oh, and your mom finished ahead of the court stenographers." So I think she must have just given it to them, and that was the days before copy machines and things.

BY: All right, so other organizations?

SM: I was involved in grad school and beyond in an organization called Seattle Third World Women, and it was women of color, highly progressive radical, patterned after the Third World Women's Alliance in New York that had some really heavy hitter women who organized that. And we did community service projects, we had our own projects, and the big thing that was great for us is we had study group once a month. We had meetings every week, but one week a month, it was to study. And that was at a time when the men were leading everything. And there was a whole lot of Mao Tse Tung, Marxist theory, things like that that was new to us. And a lot of the women felt intimidated to be in the mixed gender groups because the men were, like, know-it-alls and they were pontificating and whatever, and they didn't feel like they could ask the questions and learn, and so that was a priority for us to make it a safe space to ask any questions and learn from each other. It's not like any of us were experts, but we learned from each other. And that was real important. I was involved in, I don't know, the World Affairs Council with international visitors. I was involved in so many different things, it's hard to remember.

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