<Begin Segment 10>

TI: Can you recall some of the things Gordon talked about during this?

HM: Gordon talked about the time... well, he was a student at the University of Washington. He was a sociology major. And he decided, why should he have to worry about the curfew when everybody else was going around. So he decided to violate the curfew. And he was a Quaker. He was brought up in a kind of, a little bit... I got to know the parents quite well later on and his siblings. But that was after the war. At that time I guess they had come from a much more progressive family than most Nikkei families were at that time. And he felt that there was the Constitution of the United States and that he should be awarded the same kind of liberties that the Constitution guaranteed. And he was talking about the difficulty they had, getting legal counsel and the fact that the people that agreed to be his legal counsel were pressured by the Bar Association to quit their jobs, so consequently they went from one to the next. And the fact that they had this trial. First of all, he was in the King County jail and he talked about that experience. And he had some very interesting inmates along with himself in the cell. He talked about those people, talked about the trial itself and the fact that the trial had a concurrent sentencing function. And this meant that they were trying him concurrently for the two violations. One was a curfew violation and secondly was the failure to respond to the evacuation order. These were two different items. And they judged him -- because of the concurrency function that they agreed to -- they were judged in violation of the curfew law. That constitutionally of the evacuation was not tested in this case, unfortunately. But this became apparent later on when they were starting to get into this thing very seriously. But that was the violation that he was charged with and he served this sentence. And in fact in order to get the honor camp in Arizona he had to hitchhike there with his own funds and own expense to get to the honor camp.

TI: So to essentially go to prison he had to hitchhike to get to, to Arizona?

HM: There's a kind of interesting, ironic...

TI: Well and then my, I'm trying to understand in his, his stay at Minidoka at that point, was that a hiatus from... didn't he then go on to prison later on or was he...

HM: Yes, he was the conscious objector later on, and he would not serve in the army and therefore he served time in another federal prison.

TI: Probably at that point, McNeil Island.

HM: Yes, I think.

TI: Going back when, when. From your perspective, how did others treat Gordon while he was in camp?

HM: I think they treated him, well, it was kind of, it was kind of an interesting treatment. I think a lot of people wanted to support him, but then there was this drive by the JACL to have no support given to him. So it was kind of a bivalent-type situation. I guess it was kind of controversial on the part of the JACL to take their position. But at that point they were not supporting Min Yasui or Gordon. And their, their position was not to support them, not to provide any funds. In fact they scrutinized these people's activities. And they didn't feel they were comfortable in their positions.

<End Segment 10> - Copyright © 1998 Densho. All Rights Reserved.