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KL: You told me about an interaction you had with Ansel Adams when you were an adult? Would you tell that story?

JO: Oh, yes.

KL: Would you tell that story?

JO: Well, I wanted to buy... first of all, my mother bought three copies of Born Free and Equal, and they were a dollar each, from Ansel Adams, and she ordered some photographs, of which I lost track of now. I can't believe I lost track of them. But after she moved for so many different places, we just, her stuff got all messed up. But these three books were magazine format, they were really, some of them were written in, because my mother loaned it out to people, and my mother was like... they're all falling apart. So actually, one never got returned, and there was two left. And that would have been one for my sister and one for me, because she wasn't gonna get it. Anyway, so I did have this one raggedy copy, but it wasn't mine yet, because my mother didn't give it to me. This was in '83, 1983. In '81 I had gone to Washington, D.C., and I heard that the archives was selling the Ansel Adams book for two hundred and fifty dollars each, and there was only one copy left, and I figured, by the time I would ask for it, it would be gone. So I decided I would write to Ansel Adams and see if he had any extra copies. So I wrote this letter to him asking him if he had any extra copies, and he wrote back a nice letter to me, oh, I should have brought it, I didn't bring it.

KL: I took pictures of it last time.

JO: Oh, you did? Okay. I have this letter that he returned to me saying that he's sorry he didn't have any extra copies, and the book is a very book, and he gave his copies to the University of Arizona archives. But would I accept a picture? So I got a photograph of him, autographed photograph, of myself signed by Ansel Adams. And I showed that to a high school photography teacher, because I worked at the high school in Los Alamitos, and she says, "Oh my gosh, that is so valuable." And I said, "But it's of me." [Laughs] She said, "Doesn't make any difference, it's an Ansel Adams photograph. It is valuable." Well, I didn't believe it, but I knew that I went to one of his exhibits where his, some of his photographs were selling for twenty and thirty thousand dollars, and it's not worth that much. But that was when I was teaching, working at the high school, which was 2005, and, but my son, he wanted to buy the picture that the Fresno museum put up for sale on eBay, I guess, or Amazon, somewhere. They put it up for sale anyway, so he goes, "Mom, I'm going to buy you your photograph." And he went to ask, and he found out it was fifteen thousand dollars. [Laughs] And he says, "I don't think I can afford that," so he just gave me the copy, the printed copy that was on, in the catalog. He says, "This is," and he framed it, "this is in place of that photograph."

KL: Was that before you had written to Ansel Adams?

JO: No, it was after. No, Ansel Adams died in 1984, so this was in '83 that I wrote. And my son did this in 1999. He didn't know that I had this photograph, because he was never that interested in all my doings. So he didn't know I had the photograph, but he did this when he was, this was in... well, shortly after the Fresno museum had their exhibit and then they put all the photographs on sale.

KL: How was it writing a letter to Ansel Adams?

JO: Oh, well, I just... I had to hunt for his address, and I don't know how I happened to find it. But I found it and then I just wrote a letter. But it was, I think it was handwritten, I wrote a handwritten letter to him. But he typed his letter, of course, back to me. His secretary, Mary, typed it. But I think I might have typed it. I didn't have a computer in those days. We had a computer, but it's not the kind that, with word processing.

KL: When people that you don't know very well, or even people that you do, when they connect you to that book initially, do they have any kind of a response to that? How do people react to your connection to that project?

JO: Well, they're happy. I guess happy is the one thing. Because it was so long ago, but my very latest experience at doing just that thing, I was at the museum for member appreciation day, and we get twenty percent off of whatever we buy. So I'm buying all this stuff, and then I finally told the cashier, I said, "See that book up there?" Because it's right up there, I said, "That's me." She said, "Oh, my gosh," you know, surprised. So that was my very latest experience at doing that. But I try to do that whenever I'm at Manzanar and I talk about it, people go and rush and buy the book. Or if people come by and they hear about it, because I bring a book and I display it there and I say, "No, it's not for sale, you have to go and buy it at the store."

KL: I brag on it sometimes, too, I tell people, "I've met that lady." It's kind of unusual because I don't know whether to say, "I've met that girl," or, "I've met that woman."

JO: "I've met that girl, she's now an old bag." It's been many years now.

KL: You wrote an essay, a short essay that's on the fly of the reprint.

JO: Yes, uh-huh.

KL: How did that happen?

JO: How did it happen? Well, Wynne Benti became very friendly to me, because we talked back and forth, and every time she came down I would meet her for lunch or dinner. And she just said, "You want to write something?" and so I said, "Oh, I can." I had written different things, you know, just different essays for her. And then she said, "Oh, I think..." and then she told me what I should do, and then I wrote that about my father, because my father was not in the book. And I wanted to write about my father and about the dresses. I never asked my father if he read that, you know, I never asked my dad. Oh, it came out after he died, that's the problem. He died in 1999, and the book was published in 2000, right? Yeah, so that's why he never knew. He never knew about the dresses, I never told him.

KL: It's hard to know.

JO: I don't even know if my mother read it, although we all had copies and we had her sign copies of it, all the family members.

KL: Did she keep in touch with Dr. Carter at all?

JO: No, I don't think so. I don't know, she may have, you know, they might have exchanged Christmas cards and things like that. Because that's what my father and Henry Fukuhara, they exchanged Christmas cards. And you know, Henry Fukuhara used to draw these really nice Christmas cards, I threw them all out. I should have saved some of it. But they remained friends and went to family gatherings. My father went to his family gatherings, his anniversary parties and things like that. My parents didn't have anything like that. Oh, they did have, they did have a fiftieth anniversary party.

KL: The workshop, the Fukuhara workshop is a really neat event. He's got a lot of legacy.

JO: Yeah, he does.

<End Segment 12> - Copyright © 2013 Manzanar National Historic Site and Densho. All Rights Reserved.