<Begin Segment 29>

KL: Well, I've got other stuff to ask you about or tell you about. There was, the person I guess who's been really involved in the museum in McGehee is Mayor Jack May. His father was a sheriff and his uncle was a security officer at Rohwer.

DW: I don't remember that at all.

WJ: That name didn't mean anything to me.

DW: I didn't either. I didn't remember the name. I didn't even know we had a sheriff.

WJ: He was a county sheriff.

DW: County sheriff, yeah.

WJ: And then we had this security detail. Security in camp was part...

DW: Part military and part local?

WJ: Well, part locally hired, and then you had the Japanese.

DW: Well, yeah, I remember in security in the camp, of the Japanese officers and then earlier the military soldiers.

KL: And he may have been, his dad may have been just a local sheriff, too, I think it was his uncle who was a security officer.

DW: But that one, I didn't remember anything about.

WJ: They may have had a security officer who was in charge of the Japanese components of the security force, and the MPs were there just to back it up.

DW: Yeah, because there were several in there that I'd forgotten because I didn't know the names.

KL: The names?

DW: So we need to go through those.

KL: Yeah, then the other two were McGehee Chamber of Commerce's man and woman of the year from some recent year, it's Jeff Young and Melissa Gober, and they're now the co-chairs for this museum in McGehee that's developing.

DW: I didn't recognize either name.

KL: That's the article...

WJ: Again, when you're little kids...

KL: And they may be recent.

WJ: Yeah, they were probably recent.

DW: That was where I read the reference to the thing for your questions.

KL: This is what I'll share with you, it's an article from February of this year, it talks about that museum that's being planned. But I guess it's going to be at a former depot, train depot, in McGehee, so I'll give this to you.

WJ: I guess it don't stop in McGehee even now.

DW: Well, even if they do, a lot of depots have been turned into either restaurants or museums or shops.

KL: And then the other thing I wanted to mention is that the museum that's supposed to go into the depot building in McGehee, the collection is from an exhibit that showed at the Delta Cultural Center in Helena couple years ago. I don't know if you all have been to that cultural center or not, it's kind of an interesting place. It's got local history, it's a really nice, nice space, and they do natural history bike rides and stuff that take off from there and go to different --

WJ: Is this part of National Park history?

KL: No, it's... I don't know where all of their funding comes from, but they're local -- I'm sure they have some national funding sources, but they sponsor a blues festival.

WJ: That [inaudible] than anything pertaining to Rohwer.

KL: I guess they showed this exhibit several years ago and created it for the Delta Cultural Center, and it's been in storage since. And that exhibit is supposedly going to be the permanent exhibit, the main stop in McGehee.

DW: Trying to get it all back together in one place. McGehee sounds like a great place, because it's equidistant from both camp locations.

WJ: Both camps.

DW: I remember those as you read 'em, because I don't have any knowledge of those names.

KL: There were two others that I guess were people very involved in getting Rohwer declared a National Historic Landmark, and one of them was Joseph Boone Hunter, he was the project director for human services at Rohwer.

DW: I thought I knew that name, too, but who was that?

WJ: He was in a state office, but he wasn't in camp.

DW: Okay, that name was familiar, it was somebody Dad talked about then.

KL: He became a... he may have been at the time even, a Disciples of Christ minister, and traveled a lot. And then Sam Yada --

WJ: Sam Yada, that's one that I'm trying to think of that did study in Arkansas, and knew Little Rock, they were very successful.

DW: You had heard about him? I didn't know that one.

WJ: When we were talking the other night about Sulu?

DW: Mr. Sulu, yeah.

WJ: That was in Rohwer...

KL: George Takei, yeah.

WJ: There was only one Japanese that I knew of for sure in camp that stayed.

DW: That's when we were talking about, you and Jim and I were talking about that...

KL: So you knew him in later years?

DW: Just of him, yeah.

WJ: I doubt if I ever knew him for sure, but...

<End Segment 29> - Copyright © 2012 Manzanar National Historic Site and Densho. All Rights Reserved.