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FC: Tell us how long Current Life lasted, how many issues and how many months and how many years.
AH: You want me to talk about that right now? Well, Current Life lasted from late 1940 to late 1942. And they had an issue that was going to come out at the time that the evacuation came along. And Jimmie's plan was to quote/unquote "voluntarily evacuate" to Denver and then start up Current Life over there. And that was something that never came about, that was the end of Current Life. So it's a two-year sort of run that it has. And it was getting better with each issue. I think if you look at the longitudinal sort of development of it, it got to be a much better publication at the end. At the beginning, most of the things that he had by people like Saroyan and everything I thought were, were really just the kind of thing when you open up a magazine and you ask a lot of prominent people to write a letter to the magazine, there wasn't anything really substantive. The substantive thing started to come about from people within the Japanese American community, and he went away with a lot of different manuscripts. Toshio Mori, who became a quite well-known writer, he had him -- I even have in his papers right now a manuscript that he had by Charlie Kikuchi that was never published. Other people, Kenny Murase was writing for the paper and people like James Sakoda. And all these people either became social scientists who worked in the evacuation for the Japanese Evacuation Resettlement Study out of Berkeley, or in the case of Kenny Murase later on, would become, you know, the head of the social work school at San Francisco State, still alive.
FA: How about poet and fiction writers?
AH: Poet and fiction writers, let's see, who were the people that he... I know that the... I've mentioned Saroyan already, but you mean of the Japanese Americans? Well, Toshio Mori had stuff in there and then... what's the women writer?
FC: Toyo Suyemoto?
AH: Yeah, he had actually had a long relationship with Toyo Suyemoto. And so she had some poems that were in there. And I can't think of all of the other people that had those in...
<End Segment 12> - Copyright © 1998, 2005 Frank Abe and Densho. All Rights Reserved.