Densho Digital Archive - Rose Tanaka Interview (denshovh-trose

<Begin Segment 29>

AL: What did you study in college, and did you have a career after college? Besides raising kids, which is a career.

RT: Didn't accomplish very much. I studied social studies, and I wanted to become a social worker. But after I married and had children, well, I did work a very short time for the Bureau of Public Welfare in Denver, and then I worked for the YWCA as a Y Teen counselor. But then after I had children and was busy raising the children who came in succession, and when they reached school age, I decided to go into teaching. SO I went to the University of Colorado Denver Center and got my teaching certificate. And so I taught in the Denver Public Schools for about twenty-five years.

AL: What did you teach?

RT: Where?

AL: What?

RT: Oh, I taught first and second grade, I taught Head Start for a while, and then my last assignment was with the bilingual education class with first graders. And again, it was something I had wanted to do. I took a break and studied teaching English as a second language, and then I decided, since Denver was a segregated -- not officially segregated -- but they had a segregated population and they were trying to assimilate with children. And I worked in the lower downtown area, and they had a plan for bringing children in from the south part of town, paired it with another school and brought these two populations together in hopes of trying to integrate the populations in Denver. And so the school was at was called Del Pueblo, "of the people." And so that was the school that brought the children in. The older children, the fourth through sixth graders were then bussed out. They bussed in the lower group, the lower ages to our school, so we had an integrated school, and we had a lot of Hispanic children, a lot of immigrant Hispanics there. So there was a need for bilingual education.

AL: So for your own family, how many children do you have and what are their names? You should know that one. [Laughs]

RT: Yeah, I think I can answer that. I have four children, the oldest one is Danny, and he is currently living in New Zealand. He majored in art at the University of Colorado. My daughter, the only daughter I have, is a public policy person, she works for Peter G. Peterson Foundation in New York City. My third child is a son, the father of Anda, and he's legal counsel at Iowa State University. And then eleven years later, another baby came along, and he is Ken. And Ken is a computer programmer, and he's the only one that lives in Colorado close by. He has two children. So altogether, though, I do have seven grandchildren.

AL: And you said that you had had a family reunion, or a group went back to Manzanar in 2006, what was that like to go back there?

RT: Oh, yes. I invited all of... well, many years ago I invited Breckenridge, Colorado, and that was both the Tanaka and the Hanawa reunion, and invited both sides of the family. It got to be such a... well, I had hoped that somebody would take it up and do it again but they didn't, so I decided this time I would have just the Hanawa reunion, I mean, the Tanaka reunion, sorry. The Tanaka reunion, so that meant all of my children and we went to Santa Barbara, where Floyd's sister lives, and we had our reunion there. And it was at that time that Carol wanted to go back and see Manzanar, and Anda and Kai, her brother, and Paul and Peggy, their parents, and we drove up to Manzanar so they could see Manzanar.

AL: What was it like for you to see it again?

RT: Well, it was very different to see nothing there except for the visitor's center. You call it the visitor's center? Okay. And, of course, the monument by where the hospital was. So we just wandered through there and brought back a lot of memories of what life was like there.