<Begin Segment 9>

JF: So they wind up all going to Santa Anita. That's where... you know, my mom and uncles, they never really talked anything negatively about camp because I think for them it was like going on vacation. Finally they get to spend as much time as they wanted to, lifting weights in this "Mighty Midgets" or something, club that they were in, and then my mom wound up getting a job in the payroll department. So the payroll manager showed her accounting techniques. I don't know why, but all three of those Kitaoka kids were kind of pretty good with numbers. She does really well there, and he, the payroll manager, gets a letter from a friend in Chicago named George Plessing. And Mr. Plessing, who is a German guy, I mean, I don't know why I even mentioned that, it has nothing to do with the story. But he owns his own import-export firm, and he's looking for specifically a Nisei girl that needs a job, who's good with numbers. The payroll manager tells my mom, Chiz, about this opportunity, and says, "This is a way that you might be able to get out of camp." And my grandmother and grandfather always told the three kids, at night, when they were together in their barrack room, that this is no place for the family. And they all wanted a way to get out of camp as soon as they could. So by this time now they were in Jerome, Arkansas, and let's see now. She went in on April the 4th and leaves on April the 4th one year later. So April the 4th, 1943, she's one of the first four people to leave Jerome. The other three were men, I think all four of them were bound for Chicago, so they traveled together. But she got seated next to some hakujin guy who was real big and had no interest in her at all. I don't think they ever spoke, so it was a pretty quiet train ride. But she remembers looking back and, of course, they weren't allowed up come up to the train to see them off or anything. But they're at the fence, and she remembers... I forgot the Japanese term that she used to describe how she felt. But it was obviously a really sad time for her, and she watched as long as she could through the opening in the window as the lights of camp receded. So she winds up only spending a year there. The rest of the family gets out maybe nine months later, because they accept a sharecropping deal to sharecrop sugar beets back in Utah of all places. I don't know if that had anything to do with their accepting the offer. They go up to Utah and Harvey and Nori somehow earn enough credits to graduate from, I think their diploma says "Denan High School" or something like that. Anyway, it's marked as an Arkansas high school. And then they...

BN: Oh, you mean before they left?

JF: No. When they're in Utah, sharecropping, sugar beets, they were there.

BN: High school there.

JF: Yeah. They go to a high school there, but for some reason, the units are transferred back to the camp high school, and that's for the diploma.

BN: So their diplomas, it's Denson High in Jerome.

JF: Yes. Even though they don't appear in any Denson class photos or anything.

BN: Even though they're actually Utah.

JF: Yeah.

BN: That's an interesting... I wonder why that one.

JF: I don't know why the high school up there didn't put that on the diploma. And so in the meantime, they're still corresponding with the oldest, my mom, in Chicago. And she says, oh, she's being treated really nicely there. She was really apprehensive about meeting Mr. Plessing. She's never set eyes on him before she gets off the train. She's the only Japanese American girl, yet she's seventeen, eighteen, nineteen, I don't know. She must be nineteen. And Mr. Plessing walks up to her face and says, "Dorothy?" [Laughs] And she says, "Mr. Plessing?" And they go off together. He's a really friendly person. I had the chance to meet him actually when I was a young kid and he would take us to all these... he had this thing about hitting all the California missions, so we would take these road trips with Mr. Plessing. Anyway, he takes her to the office and she's flabbergasted that she's going to have her own desk right outside Mr. Plessing's office. And he's got everything neatly set up with her own Royal typewriter and her own telephone and her own chair and blotter and all that stuff. So she's super jazzed about being treated like royalty as a worker there. And then, inside his office, he introduces a woman who is a part of the Daughters of the Revolution or something, DAR. Anyway, this woman had spent some time in Glendale, and so was kind of sympathetic to the plight of the Japanese Americans, and she was working behind the scenes -- this is all happening before my mother even arrives -- she had arranged through the DAR and their relationship with the YWCA, YMCA? I don't know, that they had started up a business women's housing project in Chicago, and they secured a room for my mom. And so not only does she have this job waiting for her with her own workstation, and she finds out she's got her own place to stay, which was her primary concern. She doesn't know anybody in Chicago. So it was all prearranged for her by this woman and Dr. Plessing. So she stays there, and of course she's writing back home, and she's describing how wonderful everything's turning out for her, they don't have to worry about her. In fact, if they want, why not join her in Chicago if you can find work? So that's what they do.

My uncle Nori comes out first. He joins Chiz, and they wind up using what little money they've saved from their camp jobs, plus what Chiz is making, to parley it on leasing a ten-room, two floors of this walkup. So it consists of ten rooms that they can sublet. Evidently there weren't any rules against them doing that, so that's what they did. They lived in two of the rooms, and then they sublet the others to other Nisei who were looking for places to stay.

BN: It was probably good business, because there were a lot of Nisei looking for places to stay.

<End Segment 9> - Copyright © 2023 Densho. All Rights Reserved.