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LH: Okay, well, we're going to skip ahead a little bit. But after you left the camp, did you return to California?

GU: No, I never returned to California, and I'll tell you what went through my head. I figured if they didn't want me, I just didn't need to go back to California. So from Rohwer, I went to St. Cloud, Minnesota, to state teachers college, figuring that the original plan in those days was to work more or less in the Japanese American community. Engineers, you know, couldn't find jobs, they ended up as draftsmen. Lawyers practiced in their communities, dentist, doctors and so I was going to become a piano teacher, meant that I would be teaching in that community since I was already the church pianist and organist. And so that would have been my, the route I would have taken if I had stayed behind in California. And so going into a big area like Philadelphia, where they have, you know, the Curtis Institute and top musicians, all of those kinds of things -- just teaching piano wasn't something that I wanted to do. But nonetheless I felt that I had to have more credits, and that was why I went to Minnesota to get some actual teaching credentials. And then the level of work at the school was not at the level that I wanted to study, so went back to camp and from camp I went back out to Richmond, Virginia, to work with the Southern Baptists and became their editorial secretary, in Richmond, Virginia.

Interesting thing is that when people left camp, almost every one of us who went out to work could only find service jobs. And if you wanted to, if you were an engineer, and you wanted to work for a major company, they needed engineers but you had to wait until you received your navy and army clearance. Well, when I went to Richmond, Virginia, because I was the first person of Japanese ancestry to arrive there, I guess, or maybe they had surveillance on the others, it was not too far from Norfolk Naval base. And so I had this tall lieutenant evidently assigned to me. And the two Caucasian women who are -- one is a top Presbyterian, you know, staffperson and this other one that I was working with is a Baptist person, they said, "Grayce, let's cook a sukiyaki dinner and invite him over to dinner." Because every time I got on a bus there he would be in the back, you know. So we invited the lieutenant over and we talked and, "Oh," he thought, "gee, she is just as American as I am." And evidently he must have talked with his superiors and that stopped.

And shortly after that I heard from my brother that I really should come up to Philadelphia, because there was still two siblings and my parents left in camp, and by that time the relocation program was, you know, going into full swing. So then I moved to Philadelphia and we had the help of the Quakers again. And the little group called the Fellowship House had an apartment on the top floor of their building, and they converted that into rooms that would accommodate a fairly large family. One brother already was in the 442nd infantry and he was abroad. And another brother was studying at the University of Michigan, and the sister was at the University of North Carolina, but it was all the four other, three other kids that we had to be concerned about. But when we got to Philadelphia, and that must have begun to turn the direction of my life, because I immediately plunged into work with the War Relocation Authority as a volunteer individual, because as I said, the work was menial. I became a typist at Family Service of Germantown. Family Service in most communities is a very big social service institution that deals with family breakups, children's problems and things like that, and so I became the receptionist and the typist. And mind you, I already had a college degree, even if I received it in absentia. So everybody else I knew became, you know, house cleaners, gardeners and those were the kinds of work people found. A fellow that I married in 1946 also came from the Rohwer camp, he came directly with another group of young people. And in his case he was loading newspaper, getting it ready for going into the printer, I guess. And again, because he had to wait for the army and naval intelligence clearance, that was the kind of work that he had to do, and eventually Westinghouse Corporation hired him, but it took a little while. So we spent a lot of our time, because our jobs didn't require that much energy on our part, and we began to go around and speaking at churches (and schools) like at Bryn Mawr and communities all surrounding (Philadelphia).

<End Segment 3> - Copyright © 1997 Densho. All Rights Reserved.