<Begin Segment 31>

KL: I lied, I do want to ask you one more pointed question, because I wanted to ask about the woodcarving artist and how your family came to have those carving, that carving.

WJ: He gave it to my mother and dad.

DW: He gave it to our parents.

JJ: That's my memory of what Mom said, it was a gift to my father.

DW: And he was in camp...

WJ: Just in appreciation of his running of the camp.

KL: Did they work together, did he work with your dad?

WJ: I'm sure probably in some...

DW: He was probably a block leader or something.

WJ: He was probably a block leader or something, but I don't know that.

DW: But I know that we've had that... where is it right now?

JJ: It's at John's under his bed.

DW: All my time growing up, that picture hung over our couch. Wherever we lived, that picture was hanging somewhere.

JJ: Well, I had it hanging up in my little den room, and John took it home and treated it with something, put preservative on there...

WJ: It was getting dry, yeah.

DW: Oh, yeah, it's old.

JJ: He tried to protect it.

DW: You realize what it's aged then, we got it during the war, '42...

WJ: '44.

DW: Well, say '42 to right now is '12, so what's that, seventy years. Sixty... I don't know.

WJ: That's a long time.

DW: So it needs a little treatment.

JJ: He's got it looking pretty good.

WJ: Yeah, it looks good.

JJ: I don't know what he put on it, but something that was supposed to protect it.

WJ: If anyone besides Butler or some charitable place wants any of this, I say great. If they don't, I suggest John gets it.

DW: Well, I started saying, he is the one child of our children that has a really sincere, his middle son, interested in this.

WJ: It's his younger son.

DW: Well, that's true. The youngest child is a girl.

KL: Oh, gotcha. Well, I'm going to leave, you know how to reach the Butler Center, and I'm going to leave you this article about the museum in McGehee so you'll --

WJ: We might consider making it directly to the McGehee center.

JJ: One of the Rotarians, superintendent of our school, daughter was doing something out in California, in fact, I can't even remember what it was, might interact with something you all are doing. But anyway, he went to McGehee, he got real interested in this from the presentation, he was one of the few that had some memory of it. And he was very discouraged about trying to donate it down there at that time, this was a few years ago. He said he didn't think they were going to have the wherewithal to really have an ongoing thing. He didn't think it had the money.

WJ: That's the problem, even the Butler Center, I don't know how well funded they are, probably very well. But the university's program has got a little more chance of surviving over a longer period of time.

DW: Well, and you have enough problem -- I work at home in a local museum in the canyon, and it's local history...

KL: What is the museum?

DW: It's the Colman Museum, it's in Butte Creek Canyon outside of Chico, and it was an early settlement of the early days, and so there's a lot of stuff from the local miners and ranchers. But the problem is it's still small, it's staffed with volunteers, we don't have income from anywhere, volunteer and donations. But people give you stuff, and storage is such a problem. We have stuff that we suddenly have begun to get worried enough about that we bought two storage units, one of them climate controlled, to put this stuff in. We don't have room to display it. You have a problem when you donate stuff if they don't have the facilities to take care of it, much less display it.

WJ: Display or preserve it.

DW: Preserve it. I mean, that's why we're getting concerned there, because there's so much of the stuff going to be lost.

KL: Well, if you run into a point where you do want to have it in a collection where it will be well cared for, I'd have to confirm with our curator, but I'm certain the National Park Service in Manzanar would be happy to accept it. The problem is us is that we would care for it well, but we don't really have the facility to display objects. And it wouldn't be in Arkansas, it would be...

WJ: Well, I would recommend that something --

KL: But that's an option, too.

WJ: -- be done, if you could scan all of this and just put it available online, that's the way to display it, where people like John who are interested can look it up.

DW: But then you still, for historical purposes, need some way to preserve this stuff, don't let it just crumble to dust.

<End Segment 31> - Copyright © 2012 Manzanar National Historic Site and Densho. All Rights Reserved.