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EK: And how about your biggest success?

BB: Biggest success? I was afraid you were going to ask that... there was too many of them. There were many successes that we had. And it's "we." I would say it's getting to work with the staff that I got to work with, this first rate group of people, quality people, and being able to get the folks I got to work and stay and work as hard as they did. That, to me, was the most successful thing I did in that entire time. I mean, I certainly had my relationships in the community as you mentioned, and many different places. But without the machine and the hard work behind it, that wouldn't have mattered if we couldn't deliver stuff.

EK: What would you say is your biggest takeaway from your experience, either personally or professionally?

BB: The biggest takeaway is, I guess it would be for anybody that was working in the government. My biggest takeaway was we created and managed, we created and managed a successful program within the confines of the U.S. government. So you have people telling, in government now, saying, "I can't do this and I can't do that," I tell them to come back and think again. There are ways to approach and manage being a civil servant as a twenty-five year veteran civil servant, there are ways that we learn how to work within the system. And it's not throw up your hands, and it's not some of the things I see happening now in government and all, or point fingers, it's figure out how to make it work. So the takeaway is, within all that, and with all the attorneys telling me, "No, no, no," the staff and us and we figured out how to make it work for everybody.

EK: Well, for the record, you DID have attorneys on the staff who were saying...

BB: Helped.

EK: "We'll figure out."

BB: That's correct. But I'm talking about the ones outside the staff that were always saying no.

EK: Just want to make that clear.

BB: You certainly know that.

EK: So were there any others whose contributions you want to mention or other topics or stories you want to tell?

BB: Well, there's always stories. But we had great stories. I mean, we had great stories of whether it was the names of some of the folks that were uncovered that were always interesting. You certainly remember some of the folks that were uncovered. We had a "Billions," and we had a "Zillions," and we had some really cute names of what people's given name were. We had, that's what came out in all these community stories, there'd be eight thousand unique stories, and you'd have all these cute stories, you'd have romance stories of what happened and all in this camp, all the way down to the horrific story of the one that was out here that I remember. I was sitting with a gentleman in the community, because we did all these workshops and constantly heard this and that, who was in Pearl Harbor the day it was bombed. Went, travelled  across the United States, across Europe, and relocated them back, himself back to Hiroshima. And so he was in Pearl Harbor and he was in Hiroshima the day the bomb was dropped, and that story was one that came out of these workshops. So you just never knew, on any given day, what you would hear. And like I said, it'd be a combination of heartbreaking to funny stories as well.

EK: Thank you Bob.

<End Segment 16> - Copyright © 2019 Emi Kuboyama. All Rights Reserved.