<Begin Segment 28>

KL: What did she think of the exhibit? Was it Rosalie or was it Barbara who sent you the --

DW: Barbara just sent me this and she didn't, she just sent it with a note, "Do you recognize anybody?" But we had talked on the phone, and Barbara is one of these people, she said, "Okay, don't send me an email because I don't know how to run the computer, and my husband, half the time he ignores it." And she said, anyway, I talked to her on the phone -- or we write. Actually, we use letters. Old fashioned.

WJ: Snail mail.

DW: We use the snail mail. So she just sent this and an envelope, I mean, a separate envelope just said, "Do you recognize anyone?" and I would not have recognized Rosalie.

JJ: My wife and I went to this exhibit.

DW: Oh, that's this one.

JJ: And we were disappointed just in what they had out for display. I talked with the ladies there, and they were going to contact us about maybe donating the stuff, but I haven't heard from 'em. But they said they just, they had just a token amount of stuff out of her collection and other things they had. They had a huge inventory in the warehouse, and they didn't have a big enough space to put it all out. So they had just selected a few items to put out there, and it was, well, it was a big-sized room. But I expected to just see tons of stuff. Like they might have a table this big, and it had three things on it, you know, just kind of spread out across this pretty expansive room. So we were disappointed not in the quality of what they put out, but just, they didn't have a lot out. And they just said, well, they're waiting to get a better facility to put it all on display.

WJ: Do you remember anything about murals painted on the wall of the central community center or one of the school buildings, maybe on the outside?

DW: Well, I think so, because we painted the whole inside of our classroom.

WJ: But there were some pretty --

DW: The high school students did that, yes.

WJ: High school students did some pretty good murals.

DW: I think it's in here.

WJ: And I don't know whether that got saved in any way and maybe a picture.

DW: Well, the buildings are gone, hopefully they saved the picture.

WJ: But it was painted on the building itself.

DW: I know.

KL: In our Eastern California Museum in Independence, there was a, I don't know what medium it is, but it looks like a silk painting almost, on the wall. And it was created in Manzanar, and then I guess somebody found it at a miner's cabin or house or something years later.

DW: And it was still the same that way.

KL: And donated it to the museum, yeah. But sometimes those paintings travel to surprising places.

WJ: The buildings were just auctioned off in Rohwer.

DW: Oh, I didn't know what they did with that.

WJ: And people bought 'em and made a house for themselves.

DW: Yeah, or dismantled it and used all the pieces.

WJ: Dismantled it and used the wood to build a shed.

DW: You guys tell the stories, I'm going to look through here.

KL: When you were at the Art of Living exhibit, were people having conversation, did you get a sense for what, just the public response was, were they surprised?

JJ: Yeah, there were very few people there when we were there. I don't know if we just hit it on an off time or off day, but I would say there was less than twenty-five people there, and probably ten of them were staff. It was, we didn't engage in conversation with anybody other than the staff.

DW: Kind of disappointing then, huh?

JJ: I don't know if the whole turnout was, were they disappointed or what, but that day there was not many people there, and there was no young people there. Everybody that was there was, were our age or older people. I still get this feeling that the younger generation as a whole has forgotten it or doesn't even know about it.

WJ: People Jeff and John's age, your sons and daughter, Jennifer, my son and daughter, that was an era when the schools, they didn't mention it in history, it just wasn't brought up. And you know, if you asked the history teacher a question, I'm sure he would have answered, but it wasn't taught as part of the curriculum.

DW: I've been trying to teach my seventh and eighth graders, whatever... I didn't, I actually taught history very little compared to the other jobs I had, I mean, I got switched around. But a couple years I did, it seemed like it wasn't in the sections I was teaching, because I think I would have said, "I lived in a Japanese camp," probably did when I hit close to it. But as part of teaching, it's not built into a curriculum anywhere. I thought I saw background on one of these pictures that showed that painting.

<End Segment 28> - Copyright © 2012 Manzanar National Historic Site and Densho. All Rights Reserved.