Densho Digital Archive - Bill Hirabayashi Interview (denshovh-hbill

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MA: And you said you were also involved with the Auburn Christian Fellowship?

BH: Yes.

MA: Can you talk a little bit about that?

BH: Well, that was just a group of Niseis, and their parents were Christians, and they had to get a gathering place there. There was a little hall that looked just like the evacuation barrack, but it was called the Salvation Army Hall. And Mr. Murakami was, I guess, a captain or something of that bunch along with another fellow by the name of, I think they called him Captain Hirahara. And he had something to do with the Salvation Army. And so it was just a group that we had our meetings every Sunday, summertime we'd go to the Five Mile Lake and we'd have an outdoor service. And then in the fall of the year, around Thanksgiving, they had the YPCC, which was the Young People's Christian Conference. And so we'd go to the conference, it'd be in Tacoma one year, over in Seattle the next year. And then they had it in Portland and beyond, but I never went out of the state, it's just Seattle and Tacoma that I went to. So it was a good group of people that kept us together, and we used to have our little parties for Halloween and whatever. It kept everybody together and passed time that way.

MA: And this was founded by Reverend Murphy, this fellowship?

BH: Well, I don't know. It might have been, but it's before my days because my brother Martin and Gordon and Peter and Henry and Tank Tsuchiya, they used to all be going to that because they were much older than I was. And then I just, it was at a point where my brother says, Martin says, "Well, it's time that you could, you probably should come to the ACF also," and he took me. And beyond that, from '39, he went to Japan, so then I just, with my sister and my younger sister later joined, too, and that kind of a deal. It was just a, I would say it's something just taken for granted that that's what we were supposed to do to take care of our time for Sunday. It was fun because all of our, like I said, the friends from Auburn and Thomas would all go over there and we'd get together.

MA: It seems like your brother Martin and Gordon, and the older brothers from the families really --

BH: They were an instigator of a lot of things, yeah.

MA: Yeah, it seems like they were instigators and they created a lot of paths for you.

BH: Sure. Because I didn't even know, in my days, when I was a young kid, I didn't know there was such a thing as an auto show, but I always loved automobiles. So I was so surprised when my brother Martin took me to the auto show at the Civic Auditorium in Seattle when I was about eight or nine years old. So that was very fortunate. My brother, now I say to myself, gosh, how come I complained so much? I should appreciate all the things that he's done for me, you know. But that's, everybody has hindsight, you know, and that's one of mine.