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CO: You had more, other connections to various aspects of the internment. And so could you tell us about your involvement at Tule Lake and how you happened to get into that situation?

EB: Tule Lake... well, it's about 400 miles from here. And we received some information concerning what was going on at Tule Lake. We had requests from some of the detained people to talk to them, to interview them, and we also received communications from some employees there who were acquainted with our activities, so they contacted us. And we decided that we would advise the people who were residing there, that we would come up to interview them and get all the information to see what assistance they were entitled to and that we would give them. I went up there with a secretary, Alice Adams, who's a friend of mine. And we drove up there in an old car that I had, but it was good enough to go 400 miles. And we met with a man by the name of Bates who ran this place -- Best. Not Bates, Best. And we were assigned a room to sit in. At first they wanted to have some people sitting in there, some guards sitting in there with us. I objected to that. They could sit outside if they wanted, but I had a right to interview these people in private. That was allowed, and this was permitted for two days. After two days, they got a little tired of our presence and they claimed that there had been a killing in the area and we were interfering with that. There was no interference on my part but I was ordered to leave. And a couple of men, guards, accompanied us outside the establishment. And we then got into our car and started to drive off. But we had great difficulty driving because something had been put into the car, some... not... salt had been put in the, in the carburetor. And as a result I had difficulty driving the 400 miles. The car would start and it would go a short distance and then it would seem to come to a bit of a stop and then start again, and so on from the start to the finish in San Francisco. Ultimately we did get back to San Francisco and we, the car was fixed up and we were ready for another adventure.

[Interruption]

CO: Tell us about Wayne Collins.

EB: Well, as I said before, Wayne Collins was a member of the board of the ACLU. And when he undertook the Korematsu case, he did that on behalf of the ACLU. When he handled the cases at Tule Lake, some five hundred or five thousand cases... six, six thousand cases. He was handling them out of his office for himself. And he was paid by, through a fund that the Japanese had established. So the ACLU had nothing to do with that.

<End Segment 4> - Copyright © 1992, 2003 Densho and Emiko Omori. All Rights Reserved.