<Begin Segment 7>

FS: I know they had to get permission to leave Ely, and a lot of them went to Utah to look for work. Because the government didn't want the Japanese to scatter, they wanted to know where they were at all times. So they had to have permits to leave different towns, so they can keep an eye on it, all the railroad workers who were leaving. In Nebraska, there were many that were fired. One section worker had pulled the stakes out of the railroad tracks because this is how he was taught to repair the railroad tracks. There was a military train due in, and as he was repairing the tracks as he did at any other time, the railroad bosses noticed that it was not the correct way to do it, and they thought he was sabotaging the line because the military train was coming through. So they fired him immediately on the spot. He went to live in a rooming house, a boarding house in Nebraska where another railroad family was also staying. He committed suicide by hanging himself at the rooming house thinking that all the railroad workers were fired because of what he had done. So because of the shame and the disgrace, he did hang himself. It was very, very sad, because that was not the reasoning for the firings.

RP: Can you share with us that, how you used that story in your, sort of, final push to influence ORA?

FS: There was another railroad worker's daughter that went to Washington, D.C., with me. And she happened to be staying in the rooming house at the time that this man hung himself. So as we were making our presentations to Bill Lann Lee and ORA, she brought up this story. And everybody gasped because I think it was a well-known fact that this man had been fired, but no one knew what happened to him afterwards. So when she told the story, I noticed that De De Greene, who was in charge of ORA at the time, just gasped. She couldn't believe it, she was in shock. And it was, it was a very tragic story. A lot of the railroad workers were not married because some of 'em were still going to Japan to get wives. But there was a certain period there where there was an exclusion act and the Japanese were not allowed to come to the United States. So we had a lot of bachelor men who were working for the railroad at the time. We don't know the exact number. I think Western Pacific -- no, excuse me, Union Pacific fired before February. So that was a railroad firing, but it was with the encouragement of the FBI. They had to get the clearing from the government to fire the workers. So it was still... the railroad company is kind of controlled by the government, because it's transportation. So they had to go through the government to do this firing.

RP: So essentially, they were, like many people in agencies, were victims of war hysteria.

FS: Uh-huh.

RP: The hysteria associated with sabotage, Hoover's paranoia, strong paranoia about that, influencing the president and also...

FS: Well, I remember when my father was fired, he was told not to set foot on railroad property or he would be jailed. We weren't allowed in any buildings, railroad tracks, bridges, or anything to do with railroad property at the time.

<End Segment 7> - Copyright © 2008 Manzanar National Historic Site and Densho. All Rights Reserved.