Densho Digital Archive - Susan Brown Phelps Interview (denshovh-psusan-01-0005)

<Begin Segment 5>

RM: When your family left Manzanar... well, I guess you and your mother and your brother would have left from Bishop, but when your father left Manzanar, can you tell us a little bit about why that came about and what he was going for?

SP: Well, looking back again, I don't know enough about the whole history of Manzanar to know why he would have left at that time. It must have been that it was winding down so much that they didn't need his position filled anymore? I honestly don't know how it all evolved, but he did get this job with UNRRA, which was the organization that was working with the displaced refugees in Eastern Europe, and maybe other parts of the world, too. But I know he was involved with the work of people in Eastern Europe. And so we went to Washington, D.C., lived there until the war ended, and all I know is that my mother was unhappy about our, about going to Washington, and she took me and my brother up to Palo Alto where she had this fantasy that she would live with us while my father was working in Washington, and she was going to enroll me in a certain preschool that she admired, and my brother would have a good education. And I don't know exactly what happened, but I suspect that she couldn't find housing because of the war, and there maybe wasn't enough money to support two households or something? I don't know, but in any case, I remember vividly this trip we took in our family car, which was an old Plymouth station wagon with wooden sides. And she found through a newspaper ad or something, (a man) named Ken (Richter). He later became one of these travelogue people who would do films, he would travel around the world and do films and then go around giving lectures. And somehow he became the person who drove with us across the country, and I remember this trip quite vividly. And so then we were in Washington for the last part of the war. I have certain memories of that.

RM: I want to step back just very quickly. When you were still in Bishop, and you of course would have been very young, but I was wondering if your brother or your parents ever talked about any repercussions in the communities of your family because your dad worked at Manzanar. If there was ever any blowback from that.

SP: Interesting. Yeah, that would be interesting to know about. I don't know. I certainly never felt -- and going back to Bishop afterwards, I certainly never had anybody say to me, "Oh, how did your father work in the Jap camp?" or anything like that. No, never felt anything about that.

RM: Did your brother ever talk about his memories at the time as a slightly older child?

SP: Sorry to say I never really talked to him about it.

RM: So in Washington, you said you had memories of being in Washington. What are those?

SP: Oh, gosh. Well, I have memories of going to nursery school and I had a friend named Patty Hackman, we did things with her family. I can remember having to do blackout nights when they were afraid the... or maybe they were just practice things or something where we would have to put dark curtains on the windows and turn out all the lights. And I can remember finding my parents through the glow of their cigarettes. [Laughs] They were both terrible smokers all their lives, and they paid for it, too. And I can remember their, my mother having me take a drag on a cigarette so I could see what it would be like, and that was what did it for me. I never had any interest in cigarettes after that. I can remember playing out in the rain on a tropical downpour in the summertime. I can remember driving down to Dupont Circle to pick up my father from work, and I still, now my daughter lives near Dupont Circle. And when we walk by that building, I say, "That's where my father worked and where we picked him up."

RM: And that was the headquarters for...

SP: UNRRA.

RM: Do you remember being scared during the blackouts as a childhood experience of war?

SP: I don't think I was... I think my parents were good about making it not seem too scary, yeah. Something we had to do.

RM: In your father's diary he mentions that he got a job offer to go run a camp in southern Europe. Do you know if he ever did that?

SP: No he did not do that. That was a big deal in our family, and my mother... the idea was that the whole family would go over there, and my mother refused to do it. She was very adamant about his not doing that, I gather she was not that much in favor of his even coming to Washington to work. When I first used to hear those stories I would think, "Oh, Mother, why weren't you more adventurous? That would have been such a neat experience." And now at my age, I look back and I say, "That would have been something to go over to Europe at the end of the war with all the hardships that were over there." It would have been really hard with children, young children. So I don't blame her any more about it, but it's a reflection of my father's sense of adventure, I think, that he wanted to do something like that. Another memory I have is Christmas in Washington and how we received from Bishop a box of gifts from friends. And in the box was desert holly, and what a wonderful treat that was, and I remember that that was a wonderful recollection of the place we'd left behind.

RM: It sounds like your mother had fond feelings for Bishop, especially considering how often you visited afterwards.

SP: Yes.

RM: Do you think she would have preferred to stay in Bishop instead of moving?

SP: Yeah, that's a good question. It's a really good question. I don't know what she thought about the Bishop schools, and I went to first grade in Big Pine. After the war we wound up coming back to Big Pine and there was an apple ranch that's just outside of Big Pine that I tried to find yesterday and didn't succeed, but I'm going to try again. I don't know the full story, but what happened was that we went there to try to make a go of this ranch, I guess. I think my parents always had the, one of their ambitions was to run some kind of a resort. They had spent summers in Yosemite working in Camp Curry, and they loved that life, being around vacationers and having a good time and outdoor life. And I don't know whether they thought maybe they thought, maybe they could turn this apple ranch into a resort or what. I know my father worked at Glacier Lodge that summer. There's a story that I think I dimly remember of me riding a horse at age probably five or six, riding a horse and being so excited to show my father that I was riding a horse that I rode the horse right into the lodge. [Laughs]

Anyway... we lived on this ranch for a year and I went to first grade in the Big Pine school. But during that time, my mother had my brother go and live with family friends in South Pasadena so that he could attend the junior high school down there, because I think she didn't think the Big Pine school was good enough for him. So I'm not sure whether she would have wanted to live, stay in Bishop or not, or whether she would have wanted to move down to the Los Angeles area anyway.

RM: Do you know the years that they were working in Yosemite in the summertime? Was that when he was teaching in Big Pine?

SP: It could well have been. I think... I remember stories about my brother being three, so that would be 1936. So, yeah, in the late '30s probably is when they did that.