<Begin Segment 18>

MR: Just, after Pearl Harbor and before internment, police sometimes searched houses. Did that happen at your house?

MB: Yes. It happened five times. We weren't, us kids weren't always home when the police came. But twice when I was home, they did come, and what they did was walked into the house and trashed everything, pulled out drawers, threw them on the floor, and just went through the house and just made a holy mess out of the house. And this one time, the fifth time they came was the last time they came. Mrs. Sunderland had come home from work and seen the police car at our place. She came down to see what it was about. She walked in the, in the door, and here were everything on the floor, and the police, two policemen walking over the stuff, and she asked them what they were doing. Well, there'd been a burglary in the neighborhood. They came, they knew that we were the culprit, or they wanted to find out if we were the burglars, and they were seeing if they could find things that were stolen, and Mrs. Sunderland said, "Where's your search warrant?" They didn't have a search warrant. So Mrs. Sunderland asked Mama, did they ever give her a paper before? No, they had never given her a paper before. So she went to the local police station, and they didn't know anything about it, and they contacted the main Portland police station. They didn't know anything about it. These two policemen had come on their own just to harass us. And after Mrs. Sunderland told them what happened, they were both suspended.

<End Segment 18> - Copyright © 2003 Oregon Nikkei Endowment and Densho. All Rights Reserved.