Densho Digital Repository - Tink Cooper Interview (Densho ID: ddr-densho-1020-7-2)

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EK: So that's actually a great lead-in to your role with the Office of Redress Administration. What do you recall about the early years and the establishment of the office?

TC: From things that I had heard is that when the law was passed in 1988 and then Bob Bratt had petitioned at the Civil Rights Division to administer the program instead of the Civil Division, which was approved. And then he quickly collected a key group of, like, four people, and it was Bob Bratt, Shirley Lloyd, Alice Kale, and Valerie O'Brian was the first attorney. Valerie wrote the initial regulations, Bob was getting the office up and running, Alice Kale and Shirley Lloyd were doing the research and collecting a wealth of data from the National Archives. They coordinated with the Social Security Administration to get current addresses, they worked with INS to get information. They also obtained the vital statistics, the birth and death records from the states of California, Washington, Oregon, and Arizona, to come up with the master list of the 120,000 internees in the ten WRA camps.

EK: So this master list, was it actually a physical master list, or was some of it in a database or in a computer of some kind?

TC: Well, all of the information they collected were documents. For instance, the camp rosters were these huge documents about three feet long and two feet tall that were very detailed, everything was put in an electronic database. And the other information, they also received IBM cards from the Bancroft Library at the University of California in Berkeley, they put that data in. They put all the data in, they removed duplicates, they were able to put dates of death and dates of birth, because the act required you to be alive on August 10, 1988. So all of these hard copy data was downloaded into an electronic database, and I believe, the first database was called Aspen. Aspen was one of the contractors who did it. And then a later database, I think, was Super Mario, and then eventually it became the JARVIS database.

EK: Do you remember what JARVIS stands for?

TC: Yeah, Japanese American Redress Verification System.

EK: Great. I also recall there was microfiche. Do you remember what was on that?

TC: The microfiche had the Form 26 cards that also came from the National Archives. And the Form 26 cards were the forms that were input for each family into the WRA camps. So it had a wealth of information with the family name, the history, the children's names, the pre-evacuation address, and then if they were transferred to another camp they would have transfer dates, the names of the camps, and then when they eventually left camp, it would also include information about where they went, I think. I mean, that was on the camp rosters, and I think much of that was on the Form 26.