<Begin Segment 6>

FC: Guntaro, who taught him how to write English and where did he learn?

GK: Oh. [Laughs] Frank... he studied a little bit Japanese -- I mean, English in Japan. He knew the alphabets and those things, but to write was a little hard, so Frank Emi taught him how to write. But his writing was not spelled always right, and when you translate Japanese into English it gets backward or something, I don't know, so whenever we felt down and we get a letter, the whole family gets together and read it. So my sister will come and say, "Hey, didn't you get a letter? Let's laugh, laugh together," she said. "Let's read it and laugh together." And she would come all the time like that, so when I showed her the, the tape that I got, she started laughing, she said, "That's me."

[Interruption]

FC: Okay, let's... this time, could you tell us that Frank Emi taught him how to write English in jail, or at Leavenworth?

GK: Oh yeah, uh-huh. Yes. Frank Emi taught my husband how to write English, you know, make sentences. He used to talk broken English and could write a few things, but lot of time there so he learned pretty fast. So he, he used to write to Maki and I, and some of spellings were wrong, but I always heard from him. And he started drawing pictures because they have so much time. He used to write and I kept those letters.

[Interruption]

FA: Gloria, tell me again, how did your, how did your son come to be named?

GK: Well, we, my husband heard about Gordon Hirabayashi getting picked up when he was going to college because of the curfew. And so he didn't think he'd get picked up because he had his citizenship and everything, he was just as good as the other Caucasian boys, he claimed. And so when my husband read that in the paper he said, "Someday if we ever have a son, we'll name him Gordon." So that's how we named our son Gordon years later in camp, because he was born in Heart Mountain.

<End Segment 6> - Copyright © 1993, 2005 Frank Abe and Densho. All Rights Reserved.