<Begin Segment 9>

DG: Is there... I'm trying to think, were there any other stories during the war that strike a memory as far as... I mean, you were talking about the relationship that the kids had, the schoolchildren especially. I know the senior class was a very tight-knit class. Talk about like maybe that class graduating in 1942?

MW: Oh, yes. There are a couple of... yes. Again, my mother had a description of the goodbyes. The army came to each home on the morning of the 30th of March, the day that they were to leave the island, picked up everybody and brought them to Taylor Avenue. And the high school allowed their students to leave. "If you want to go say goodbye to your friends, you can." And Mother talked about... she said it was very touching. It was like any group of teenagers saying goodbye, it didn't matter what race they were. There were tears and it was very, very wrenching to watch that. It was difficult to see the pain that they were in saying goodbye to their friends. The younger grades, kids weren't allowed to leave but many did. They played hooky and came and said goodbye to their friends. The class that had just graduated had very, very close friendships and continued to meet. I think they still do on a weekly basis, those who are around here get together for coffee, have a little mini reunion every week. It's wonderful to see those friendships. But one who was forced to leave, Jerry Nakata, had a good friend who was working at the shipyard, and he had asked if he could go and the shipyard guy said no, so he couldn't go. That was hard. But there were kids who, they couldn't take the same ferry that the Japanese were on, so they scurried and got another family into Seattle, met their friends in Seattle and actually chased behind the train waving and crying. I mean, Rich Barr talks about, "We were sobbing, and these were our friends who were leaving. It was so... what could we do? Well, we could run along and wave." So there were some just very poignant scenes of goodbyes, some pictures of... there's one picture in particular, tall, she looks maybe Scandinavian, and her two Japanese friends, and they're just, their faces, they're looking down, and obviously they were very close friends and they're saying goodbye, and they don't know for how long. They don't even know where their friends are going, and they don't know how long, when they'll ever see them again. It was very, very sad. There were many adults who came also to say goodbye to their friends. Jerry Nakata again tells the story of his brother's grocery that almost immediately after Pearl Harbor said these folks came in to pay their bill. And he said his brother would say, "Oh, no, that's not necessary." "No, you need this." They came in purposely to help their friend, kind of make it, ease it a little bit.

DG: And so your parents covered... even backing up, did they cover the stories of the families having to pack up and leave?

MW: To a degree. Again, today I think that probably there would have been reporters there, but no, that wasn't so much covered. Although there were a couple of references to, sort of to counter some of the pictures coming out of California and Seattle of wholesale having to sell the piano for five dollars, and there were a couple of references to, that didn't happen so much here. But no, they didn't really cover that. My mother was there at the landing. I think my father was there for a while but then he also caught the boat in so he was in Seattle, too, to record that. And it's interesting that the overpass was just jammed. You couldn't have gotten any more people on it watching that. And some of the folks getting on the train thought that these people were there to jeer, and some of them thought they were there to say goodbye. I think it probably was a combination. I think there were people who were waving, "We're sorry you're going," and others who maybe were, had a different attitude, I don't know. It's hard to say.

DG: Wow. And so I guess, yeah, those were the big events, the leaving that they would cover, and then during the war it was the corresponding between...

MW: They did have... they were asked by, well, Paul Ohtaki, but others, for references. You had to get, I think it's, at least initially, you needed to get somebody, some responsible American to say that you were loyal. So like Dr. Shepherd wrote some letters saying that, "I've known this young man since he was born, and he's a good person." And my father wrote a number of those, "It's okay for this person to leave camp." And so they were active that way. But... oh, I know the other thing about the graduation. The school district on Bainbridge Island was so supportive of the students, of their students. In December, after Pearl Harbor, the principal of the high school called in individual students. I remember Sa Koura saying that she had had a conversation and Mr. Dennis had said how he was going to miss her and hope things went well and was there anything he could do. So they met individually with students, they also, they had an assembly the day after, December 8th they had an assembly with several of the teachers basically saying what the Review had said, "These are our neighbors, let's not get carried away here. Let's remember who we are."

And there are two distinct things that Bainbridge High School and the Bainbridge school district -- no, actually three, that they didn't have to do, and I'm not aware of other schools doing this kind of thing. There was a baseball game about... well, island Japanese, on the 24th of March were given notice that by the 30th they had to leave. So somewhere in that, maybe it was the 26th. Anyway, it was obviously the last game that the Nisei members of the team were gonna be playing. And Walter Miller, Pop Miller, who I knew later and just loved, he was a delightful man, great sense of humor, he was the coach. And Earl Hanson, one of his players, he did not like to lose. He was very competitive. Well, this was, I think, the season opener. They were playing North Kitsap which was a traditional rival, and he put in all of the Japanese players and they stayed the entire game. They lost like fifteen to nothing. I mean, they just were shellacked. And the team really wanted to win and they were there cheering those guys on. Those guys played through the whole game, and I've talked to a couple of those players who said they will never forget Coach Miller for doing that. Sending them away -- this gets me -- sending them away with that happy memory, that they were Spartans. Lot of the boys wore their Spartan sweaters that day that they had to leave.

Another thing that the high school did, there were thirteen students who would have graduated with the class, and that's got to be a quarter of the class. Yeah, it's got to be a quarter of the class. And these were student leaders. Some of them, the stars on the basketball team, some student government leaders, they were... and many very accomplished students, too, but they just were part of the whole fabric of Bainbridge High School. And here was a whole portion of the high school that was leaving. They made arrangements for the superintendent and for Mr. Dennis the principal to send down to Manzanar copies of the speeches that they were giving at graduation. They sent down the diplomas to be presented, they made sure that the students had completed whatever work they needed to do and probably excused a lot of the work so that they could graduate. And so at Manzanar they had their Bainbridge High School graduation, and at the graduation here on the island, there were thirteen empty chairs on the dais. Isn't that something? It's another thing that gets me, too.

DG: It's all examples of --

MW: Just remarkable.

DG: Yeah, people doing things that didn't need to be done. And people making a difference, a baseball coach.

MW: Exactly. And I think it's Nobi who named her son Dennis.

DG: That's right.

MW: After Mr. Dennis. And then another thing that they did -- I don't know if this made the students so happy -- but it was a good thing for them to do to keep up on their work. Lot of other kids who came to the camps, there were schools there and they were... they had a curriculum and they were trying to follow that, and I don't know how comprehensive it was or how they really were fitted to the students. The Bainbridge Island school district hired a teacher in August to gather material and to create lesson plans for all the students, seventh grade through senior, and sent the material and the coursework down so that they could keep up on their work and they wouldn't fall behind because they were not in the high school, and it made a difference for the kids. I don't know how glad they were to get that homework, but in the long, long view of it it was a good thing that they did. And the school district didn't have to do that, I mean, they actually paid a teacher to do this. It wasn't somebody volunteering. There were individual teachers, Statira Biggs, Biggs, I think it is, Ms. Biggs, is mentioned often by people who had her. But she hooked up islanders here and islanders in the camp as pen pals so that they would get letters. And she wasn't getting paid for that, she just did it, and made sure that people were in communication that way.

DG: Wow.

<End Segment 9> - Copyright © 2007 Densho. All Rights Reserved.