Densho Digital Archive
Densho Visual History Collection
Title: Floyd Schmoe Interview I
Narrator: Floyd Schmoe
Interviewer: Elmer Good
Location: Seattle, Washington
Date: June 10, 1998
Densho ID: denshovh-sfloyd-01-0012

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EG: We were wondering how you got identified as a person of note by the FBI. But you were active, helpful, with these students and also some faculty? Were there Japanese faculty at the University also?

FS: Yes.

EG: And then as the war was coming on, and they were beginning to talk about what to do with the Japanese Americans, and the notion of internment and so on, you had something to do with all of that as far as the university system was concerned, didn't you?

FS: One of these Japanese girls, woman, spent eighteen months at the University and acquired a very, almost perfect use of the English language. She went back to Japan. I suggested that she might like a job as a cabin attendant, stewardess, with Japanese airline. She worked for six or seven years. Oh, five or six years as stewardess, 747s, and then they put her on overseas flights. And she came through Seattle occasionally, I saw her. About once a week Satoshi'd send me a postcard from wherever they happened to be overnighting, might be Rio, might be Copenhagen, might be Moscow, wherever JAL flew. Last card I got had been bought in Rio. It was a picture of the Christ of the Andes. It had been addressed and dated "Mexico City," where they had stopped, routined... stop. And then it had been mailed from Vancouver, Canada, the next day. And she said, "I flew over Seattle last night and cried because I couldn't get off." Well, I think they'll visit me sometime this spring because her husband now has a business connection in Seattle, and little Yuki is quite a good sized girl now, quite fluent in English.

EG: Maybe she'll be another student for you to sponsor.

FS: What?

EG: Yuki will be another student for you to sponsor, maybe.

FS: Yeah.

<End Segment 12> - Copyright © 1998 Densho. All Rights Reserved.