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RP: Yes, Joanne, I just wanted to return to my original question about the oral history project that I guess the Florin JACL took on?

TI: Oral histories. [Laughs] How I got into it.

RP: Yes.

TI: Well, we moved up here to Sacramento, and I was told about the Tanoshimi-kai lunch that is held every Wednesday at the Japanese Methodist Church, so I went. I thought, "Oh, that'll be a good time to meet some Nisei." Sat next to Nami King, and I shared where I came from and what I was doing there, that I'm a retired teacher. And that night, I got a call from Mary Tsukamoto, not surprising. And Mary said, "Can you help me with some posters?" See, they had a program where they would put posters up in the Elk Grove school district board room. And then she and some veterans would talk to the children about the internment. And so I said, "All right, so the next morning, 9 a.m., I was at Mary's house. And so that became one of the things that I did for Mary. And I worked on those posters, I'm a retired teacher, I know how to print primary-style, so I made posters for her. And I helped to put them up and then in time, I helped to talk to the children, and we got more people in to do that. And, of course, one of the projects that she had started was the oral history project. And Marion Kanemoto was the leader of that project at that time. And so I was asked to do some transcribing. And I think at that time I had my Brother machine. It was not the computer-computer, but it did have some capabilities of taking a line out or a section out or something. And so, and after that, I think I got the computer. And I transcribed some of the oral history interviews, and then later on, of course, I was doing Mary's interview as well. And I did that at the library archives at the university, and we did that in four sessions, the third session of which I did not check the volume of the machine. [Laughs] So that one didn't go well at all. Anyway, that's how I got into it, and I'm still doing some.

RP: Well, that's really commendable that the community has documented its own stories.

TI: Well, I hope you have some time to look at it. Or if you want the whole collection, we can make copies and bind them up if you want them bound like that, like we have. We can talk to Marion about it. 'Cause I have part of the collection. I got some legacy fund money from the government as part of the public information or whatever program they had, and I asked for money. I didn't know how to write an application. I asked some of our JACL people who do things like that for their work, and Stan Umeda said, "You write very well, but you don't answer the questions." [Laughs] So anyway, I learned from that, and I still got the money, and we formed a committee here with some people from Stockton, French Camp, Lodi, Placer County chapters with our Florin chapter. And every chapter had, in that one year, made at least three, I think, books. So that's my legacy.

KP: That's a great legacy.

<End Segment 17> - Copyright © 2008 Manzanar National Historic Site and Densho. All Rights Reserved.