<Begin Segment 5>

Q: Jim, do you have something you wanted to relate?

JH: Well, I guess it was just a story that I had told Rick one time trying to give him an idea of some of Gordon's quirks, I guess. We grew up during the Depression time so that we were always short on money. And one day he came to visit me and here we were, both in our professions and making a great deal more money than we did during the Depression. And he was asking me how much it cost to send an airmail letter back to his office in Canada, and I said, well, I think those days it was ten cents. And the regular surface mail was five cents in those days. And so he's sitting there contemplating, he says, "Well, how long does it take to get a letter back there by surface mail and by airmail?" And then I finally figured out that he's trying to, trying to decide whether to use a five cent stamp or a ten cent stamp. And then I got mad at him and I says, "Hey, you know, you're wasting our time. Here's a ten cent stamp, airmail it," and I gave him a stamp. And I later found out that he had airmail stamp, but he used mine. But it's the kind of thing that you, when you experienced certain kinds of things during the Depression, you don't forget it. You're always trying to save your pennies and he spent quite a bit of our time thinking about it.

RS: I think that that's really true in the sense that Gordon's a very particular man, and his sense of keeping track of things, of doing the right thing is very particular and I think that that's also a part of him that helped him to do what he did because it was, he had a particular point to make to the American government, or to, what it is to be an American citizen. And he wasn't gonna let 'em get away with it, so, it's just that, it was like a coming together of a lot of ideas. His idealism, his particularness, his family background, there's so many things that came together and just seemed to give him, everything seemed to give him the strength to do what he had to do, which I think is great.

Q: You think this shook his faith in this country?

RS: No, I don't think so, 'cause as I said earlier, he's a man of great patience. And whether it takes a year or ten years or forty years or a lifetime in order to receive the kind of justice or to assert himself and have the country realize that, in fact, they did make mistake, that would be proof the America, you know, for him, that America does believe in those ideals. Personally I don't, but he has that kind of faith in America, and that's a great thing.

JH: I think he's facing the rehearing with that same kind of attitude. He still believes what he did is right, and so the rehearing is just another phase of it.

<End Segment 5> - Copyright © 1983, 2010 Densho and Steven Okazaki. All Rights Reserved.