Densho Digital Archive - Jane Wehrey Interview

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JA: Just for the record, tell me your name and where you're from.

JW: My name is Jane Wehrey and I live in Hacienda Heights, California. I was born in Lone Pine, California, which is just south of the Manzanar Historic Site, and I grew up partially in the Owens Valley and partially in Los Angeles.

[Interruption]

JA: Just tell me, from what you know of it and what you hear from your parents, what kind of a place, what are the towns of Lone Pine... what is Lone Pine? Just tell me about Lone Pine.

JW: Lone Pine is the southernmost town of the four in the Owens Valley. It's really a commercial town, it has a lot of hotels and motels. And in the 1940s, it was starting to be the first stopping-off place where people would get gas and eat when they were coming off the desert and going north to the fishing and camping places. It was also very heavily used by movie companies from Los Angeles who would come up and stay at the Dow Hotel and a couple of the other smaller ones and just take over the town for two or three weeks at a time. So, it was a, it was a town of commerce and there was a fairly large Mexican American population. It was also... there was still the railroad coming up to Lone Pine station. I'm not quite sure of the schedule but I think in the '40s it was coming pretty much every day, maybe twice a day with passengers and, you know, freight. And so it was a pretty, it was a pretty active place. There was a lot of cattle ranching going on around there, so it was a very mixed population that was... but commerce mostly.

JA: Were there any Japanese or Japanese Americans living there at that time?

JW: No, no. I believe there was a Chinese or a half Chinese woman living there and there had been Chinese people in that area working on the railroads and in the mines. So, people had seen Chinese populations previously. But, at that time I don't believe there were any Asian, there was any Asian population in that area.

JA: Well, from what you know of your family at least, what would have been their reaction when hearing about Pearl Harbor?

JW: My father's reaction was that, of course, they were shocked, and he, he told me that he just immediately wanted to go and join up. I don't know if it was the Army or the Navy, but he was really ready to go. He tried to get into the, I guess it was the Navy Seabees, finally, and I'm not quite sure why he couldn't, but he, well, he's very tall for one thing and he's also quite color blind. But he also was an engineer up in Independence at that time for the City of Los Angeles and he, everybody else left to go and he got, I guess what's called an occupational deferment. And so they needed him to stay there and keep an eye on the aqueduct and all of the water system at that time. They were both just totally shocked and they talk about the town --

<Begin Segment 2>

JA: What was the reaction of your family or people in general in the valley when they learned that there was going to be a relocation of people of Japanese ancestry and it was going to happen there?

JW: My understanding, based on what my parents have told me and what I've heard from other people and what I've read of the newspaper accounts of the time, was that it all happened extremely quickly and people at first were very alarmed by it. They, they were concerned at the large numbers that they were talking about because I believe originally they were talking about up to 20,000, and at that time the population of the Owens Valley was, I don't know, somewhere around 7,000. And then they, they began to hear about some of the things that might happen as far as the camp, how the people would be used as labor for some of the public projects in the valley, and this kind of helped to turn the sentiment a little bit towards the idea that, "Well, maybe this wouldn't be so bad for us after all." The people also there were very... I don't know if conservative is the right word, but they were, they understood that the government was, was usually right, even though they rebelled against the government in terms of like, the City of Los Angeles and some of the things that the government came in and imposed on them but they were still very respectful of the government. And this was a case where they realized that, well, this has to go somewhere so it might as well be here and we'll do what we can to make it, to make it work. I think overall it was just the idea that there was very little they could do about it anyway and so they just had to learn to accept it. As time when on, or after the internees started arriving, I think there were still a large number of people who were very, very opposed to it. They, my father talked about one person in Independence who slept with a shotgun next to his bed and called them the "dirty" you know what, and was very, very hostile. Their feeling that I've gotten from my father and from my mother was that people felt very sad and very... perhaps not sympathetic, but just that this was a bad thing in many ways. They didn't, they were sad to see these people confined this way. They knew that many of them were American citizens and that was... so in some ways they felt this kinship with them, they saw this on a daily basis and they, they saw this confinement and that was disturbing to them.

<Begin Segment 3>

JA: I think in your interviews with your parents, both of them, or one of them, anyway, talked about being out there on the day that some of the internees were brought into town or through town?

[Interruption]

JW: My parents were both waiting out by the gate where the buses would turn into the camp and they saw the people getting off the buses and they, they said to me later how sad and bewildered these people looked and it was, the dust was blowing around, the wind was blowing, and there were these crude barracks and these people were carrying their little bundles and their suitcases and they just looked so, so lost. And my parents just felt very sad about it for them. My mother said, she said many times, "I was so upset by that and I, I was so mad about that, that I was ready to write in to the newspaper and say that, 'These people don't belong there. They're American citizens, so why are they there?'" And then she said, "But, you know, this was the government doing this, and you just don't fool around with the government."

JA: Was there ever much interaction with internees at the camp and people in the town throughout that timeframe? I know some people in the town would have worked there, but what was the nature of any contact there would have been?

JW: My understanding is that the contact was very carefully controlled. That, as time went on, when the camp became functioning and self-sustaining, that they would hold these open houses for the people in the Owens Valley and they would have entertainment and they would show their, all of the produce that they had grown in their gardens and people would be invited in for a day or, and, you know, take a tour and they would be, the kids would do singing or little plays or... that's what I've heard mostly from people in the Owens Valley. People would go in who were working there, of course, and it's my understanding that some of the people that worked there were able to buy things from, through the camp at greatly reduced prices and... but as far as the general population of the valley, I don't think there was a lot of interaction except during these special occasions.

JA: What sort of reaction was there when word got out about the riot?

JW: I really don't know about that. I have not heard people talk about that. I have not heard my parents talk about it and I really didn't know anything about the riot until I started studying this.

<Begin Segment 4>

JA: In your opinion, out of the constitutional issues, and the lessons come out of this?

JW: For me, I think, I think when we look at this whole experience, we are looking at the people who were in the camp and their experience and what they went through. I tend to look also at the people who are on the outside. What were they thinking, what power did they have to do anything about it? What could they have done about it? And I think that's really an issue for me because we don't know as we go down the road in history whether we may end up being on the inside or on the outside and I think everyone has to take a look at both, both aspects of, of what it's like to have this happening to you but also to have watched this happening to someone else. It's very, it's very difficult to know what you would do as a person and you know that you would like to do something, but what can you do?

JA: That's very nice, a good comment. You've known personally a number of the people who were at Manzanar. Could you give a sum evaluation of the spirit of people who were there when they were there and what you've seen afterwards in terms of just their attitudes and human spirit? I mean, whether it's, are people bitter, are people hopeful at that time? There was a drive for redress and things changed in the course of the aftermath, in your observation?

JW: I haven't really met that many people until maybe just the last ten years, and mostly through my work as a historian and some personal contacts. My sense is, of course, that for a long time there was nothing said and they kept it to themselves, they were silent. I, I understand that there was a split in the Japanese American community. There was bitterness and about, amongst themselves. The people that I've met are not, not bitter. And one person in particular is Mary Nomura as an example. She sees this time as a, that she was in the camp, as a time of growth, a time when she met her future husband. She and her husband Shi both were very, they understood what was happening to them, they understood the wrongs, but they were not bitter because they, they gained each other and they, I think they just don't see their lives that way at all. And I've been very impressed with the way, the way these people are, and again I ask myself if, if this happened to me, would I be able to feel this way? I'm not sure if I would or not.

<Begin Segment 5>

JW: My ties at Manzanar go back to 1919 when my mother's family came from Colorado and settled in the Owens Valley at what was called the Manzanar Irrigated Farms. It was an agricultural community started by George Chafey who had don a lot of agricultural development here in Southern California. My grandfather ran the store there at the little town and the little, the town's population was only a little over 200. And there was about two or three thousand acres of apple and pear and peach orchards and general farming and ranching going on there. Between 1910 and about 1930, the town began to die out in the '20s when the City of Los Angeles began to purchase properties, as they did all over the valley, for their water rights. And a lot of the people weren't doing too well at Manzanar anyway, so they were, they were, some of them were happy to sell out, others did not want to. So my grandfather sold his store in 1925 and the family moved to Independence. My mother had attended grammar school in Manzanar, at the two-room schoolhouse, and then she started going to high school while the family still lived there and the students were bused to Independence to the high school from Manzanar. And then my mother just finished high school and went to college and then when she finished college she moved back to Independence and began to teach school.

JA: What would valley residents have seen driving down that highway?

[Interruption]

JW: When the camp first started, the people in the Owens Valley, as they would drive by, would see a scene of dust and chaos, they said. As time went on, the camp changed in appearance and as they would drive by, they would see the fields cultivated, the people in the camp were growing crops and there were lots of trees, they could see that they had planted these flowers, and there was a real changed appearance in terms of how it was green. And this was something that impressed the people in the Owens Valley because Manzanar had once been green and then had been, had gone back to the desert. Not too many of the people that I have talked to allude to the guard towers, but they do remember them being there. They also say that after a while, the guard towers were not manned. They also try to tell about -- they tell about how the internees would get out the camp and go up in the mountains and fish. I think there's a tendency on the part of the people in the Owens Valley who remember this to minimize the aspects of confinement about the camp. They wanted to not see the camp as it might have been actually, because it was sort of a blotch on their own history and their place. So most of the, most of the people that I've talked to and the people in the Owens Valley see this scene as one that changed quite dramatically from this dusty chaotic time into this more ordered, green, lush environment.

JA: A lot of people today, not just in the valley would use that to support the claim that they were better off there.

JW: That's right, that's right, exactly. There is that sense among people at that time who said that they were there for their own protection and that they were better off there, and that even during the war that they didn't have rationing, they had better food, they had... they were protected, they were being taken care of by the government. So there was a lot of mixed reaction to this as far as the people on the outside, the people in the valley looking at this, who were looking from the outside. Most of them had not been in the camp. So, they really didn't understand what was going on. They could only see the scene that had, that had changed over this period of time.