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TI: ...we'll go and I'll get into it, but when you, when you think about the Japanese American community, we sometimes focus, we focus a lot on the negative aspects, the incarceration. But then I've interviewed people who said, well, because of, of the incarceration, it actually opened up new possibilities because...

HM: But --

TI: They, they were like either in a very small, essentially a ghetto --

HM: Yes.

TI: And all of a sudden they saw a much bigger world, and it, it changed them. And they, they relocated to the Midwest, after the war. And then all of a sudden they, their careers took off.

HM: Okay. Yeah, several months ago -- in fact, Alice attended the same session I did at the Seattle Public Library. We had a guy named Waller. And he came up from Lake Oswego, Oregon. And he was the guy that the WRA used as, as a basis of getting different cities to allow Nikkei from the camps to relocate. And he was trying to promote them, the fact that here were some professionals, well-trained, and capable people, and you guys are having a labor shortage in these different places. This was during the war. And he would convince these people from the Chamber of Commerce and the mayor's office and everybody else that they should at least provide opportunities for these people in the camp. And he did -- he went a long ways. Otherwise a lot of people like Minoru Yamasaki, for one, he woulda still been a low-level, low grade-type employee, rather than being a superb architect like he turned out. But he -- that guy Waller did a tremendous job for us. And the Japanese American community, as far as I know, had never given any commendation or any award or any recognition of the fact that he did this.

TI: Now, how old is Waller? Because I, I remember talking to Alice about this.

HM: Oh, he's about, probably late (seventies), maybe (eighties), sometime. He's, he's very lucid. He's, he's got all the memory functions. He remembers a lot of things that he did.

TI: And so he would go out to these communities, just sort of, and, and talk to mayors and council people --

HM: And Chamber of Commerce people and different key individuals that were capable of hiring these people. Even the school districts because he was recruiting for school teachers at that time. But he started in Salt Lake and Denver, and then he started working his way towards the East Coast. And directly through his work, Yamasaki got his job opportunity. And I know one person that was an aeronautical engineer, and when he went to St. Louis, the -- those guys at McDonnell Aircraft were really hard up for engineers at that point. And he got his opportunity to do that, that venue. And had it not been for that, probably -- and like you say, we were still stuck on the West Coast. We would have never got into Boeing.

TI: Well, do you think it, it accelerated? Because before the war I interviewed people, and, and they got an engineering degree, but they ended up working at the Pike Place Market.

HM: Yeah.

TI: They couldn't, couldn't get --

HM: Well, they couldn't get a job. They wouldn't even give you an interview at Boeing. The, the friends that my brother knew at that time, they were aeronautical engineering graduates, and they were highly placed graduates. They wouldn't even get an interview with Boeing.

TI: And so do you think the war changed that? Or was it the need for engineers after the war that really changed things?

HM: I think a combination of different things. One was the fact that Nikkei were looked upon as very dedicated workers. They, they knew their stuff. They were capable and willing to work. And the other thing was, like McDonnell had different connections, different companies. And so consequently you start with one, and you got a reputation of being a fairly good producer, you're gonna be able to be employed with somebody else. And this is what started the whole system because once the inflow of Japanese engineers started in the aeronautics business, man, they just started overwhelming the companies. Like even at Boeing, we got 11 percent Asians in the engineering force there. If they took out the Asians outta there, boy, they'd be hard-pressed to replace them.

<End Segment 1> - Copyright © 1999 Densho. All Rights Reserved.