<Begin Segment 32>

SY: You know, I love the stories you've told about being on the Manzanar bus for all those many years and some of the people who went with you on the pilgrimage. Can you tell us some of those stories about some of the people who went?

NG: Well, I was just saying that, how it was, it got to be a chore, but after the day you knew why you did it, because people who had never been, this was their first time, they'd come, came back with that same kind of emotion I felt. So you knew it was worth it. And I was saying how... was it Tomai? No, Tonai. No...

SY: Min Tonai.

NG: Min Tonai's niece came when we were, I think must've been the, when they opened, and so she lived up north and so she was on that trip. He had called and said, "She wants to go on the trip. Can you reservice it?" Sure. Didn't realize that she was there when she was an eighteen year old years before, and how that trip and that whole, opened up her, her feeling for the career that she chose, Rosalyn Tonai. So you know, those kind of things that just... and I know Dr. Oda did not want to go for the longest time, and when she finally did it was like catharsis for her.

SY: She went on your bus, huh?

NG: Yeah, she did. That was the year we had a couple of buses, and she wasn't on the one I was riding on, but... yeah. And I remember one year one of the fellows that was in the children's orphanage, he was a hapa and it was hard for him being a hapa in that children's camp, but he came. There was a woman professor from Boston, I think, and she was, she came on it for something she'd, her studies or something, but she wanted to experience this. I remember being, there was always students, so one year they had this program where we all got in a circle and, to talk about being in camp, so the kids, of course, they're young, they are, they're irate, "How could this have happened?" And then there, here are these Isseis who are seventy, sixty and seventy years old, and they're saying, "You know, we really had kind of a good time," and they, those kids didn't want to hear that. [Laughs] So, but yeah, it was a good experience, a lot of, lot of people.

SY: To do it for twenty years, though, was pretty amazing.

NG: Yeah.

SY: And then finally you just said...

NG: Yeah, and it was, it was also to where you would get, I would get very discouraged 'cause to me I felt like everybody should go on this. Why wouldn't you go on this trip? And pretty soon I'm, it was hard to fill the bus, and then where most, the majority of them were not from the San Fernando Valley, so then I said I think it's time to...and they still call during the Manzanar time. "Are you gonna, is there gonna be a bus?" So we have, we've gone, we've done, when the opening, did it again, and then we, for our thirty-fifth or one of those we... this time was under JACL. We dissolved the Manzanar Bus Fund and put it with the JACL.

SY: JACL. So your group is now paying those special fines that they take the bus out.

NG: Yeah.

SY: So you developed a relationship with Sue Embrey over the years?

NG: Yeah, so I go, so I go to my first pilgrimage and I want to get involved, so I go to this meeting. And I, it's six people doing this, all this work, and they used to come every year asking for money and I remember one board member saying, "You know what? Why don't they get a grant," or do whatever. Then I realized it's six people, you know? Then, and she was always so good. She would help us with the buses. Well, Tak Yamamoto worked on her committee, so he always got the bus for us, and she always kept us abreast of what was happening. And we always had Mas Okui, who always, he used to -- we lost him to the teachers, but he would do the narration and he would lead us -- that was a new thing we started too, where when he came we'd get off the bus and then he would, we would go through the camp and walk over to the cemetery area. And then as soon as UTLA started then we lost him, but he would always come home with us and give us a talk. He's great.

SY: So, yeah.

NG: And then Ralph Lazo too, he used to, came on our bus a couple of times, and he, you know he, I don't think he would've shared anyway, even though we would, he didn't want to talk about ever 'cause he always felt it was a Japanese... you know. But a wonderful man that came with us.

SY: Wow. That's amazing, 'cause you, yeah, so you got sort of...

NG: Yeah, and he was, he's just, he... 'cause I was teaching at San Fernando Elementary at that time and we used to have career day, so he, I'd always get him because he was a counselor, so he'd come and talk as a counselor. He was also a park ranger, so he would come and talk as a park ranger. [Laughs] Just a neat guy.

SY: Really? It's nice that you got to know him.

NG: Yeah.

<End Segment 32> - Copyright © 2011 Densho. All Rights Reserved.