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LT: So talk a little bit more about his goal for the redress money.

TT: So what he wanted was to make sure that -- because this was so many years ago that the Minidoka Interlude had been published, he knew that colleges and libraries didn't have 'em. So for him, he thought if we reprinted it and to make sure every university and every library had, Multnomah County couldn't say, "We don't have money to buy this," so he gave it all as gifts. And so our first, after it was published, the first three years, to find all those places and to mail everything out, it was amazing, and we got such terrific response from many of the places, and it was a fabulous gift. We kind of scrambled around to find someone who could replicate the front, front design, and a friend of my sister's was a graphic designer, so she did a lot of that. And then we were lucky enough to be able to find a book broker, a printing broker, and Bob Smith was able to go and find the best paper price and the best printing, and so he actually did our footwork on that, because my dad didn't have that part done, he just had the other list. But it was a huge project, and I credit my sister Diane, who was pretty tenacious, to get the project done. It was huge. And then she did a lot of the mailing, and she's been car-free forever, so she would take these books in the box, put it on the back of her bike, and it to the post office. And so when someone ordered a book, we always told him it would be a week. Because by the time she got it and she'd wrap it up... but she did, and so it was her, she said, "I'll take care of the delivery if you'll do this, this and this." So we kind of... so on her bike, every day, she'd take off for the post office. And you get a few of these, and it's heavy. So, yeah, so this one, this is even heavier than this one. And so the, and then she'd wrap it up and everything, I mean, so it was a terrific family project, that thank goodness, my dad had done most of the footwork on it. But I'm proud of it. I'm very proud that when I went to Lincoln High School to visit my friend who was the principal at the time, it's the first thing she brought out to show me, and that does, it feels good. Because the word is getting out, not well, I think we still have to do more classes and things like that, but it's something people at least need to know about.

LT: And I noticed that your father wrote his statement for the reissuing of the Minidoka Interlude in 1989, and then he died the next year in February 1990.

TT: Uh-huh. I was so glad we found it and were able to put it in. And then it was really important to me. I felt, at first someone said, "Well, are you going to put his picture in?" and I said, "Yeah, I'm putting their picture in, and I'm putting our picture in because he did it." I mean, I give myself no credit, but obviously this man did it, and I just really thought it was important.

LT: How wonderful that your family was able to finish the project for your father. I will tell you that I spoke to Jim Azumano, who was the chair of the Friends of Minidoka, and he was very appreciative that you and your family... and you can finish.

TT: Yes. After Diane rode the bike eighty million miles to drive and be able to get all these books, she said, "So what are we going to do in the future?" And we talked about it a lot, the whole family, and we thought what we'd like to do, I would love to see the Minidoka site become like the Manzanar site with an interpretive center and everything like that. So then the more we talked about it, it was obvious that the money that the book can make -- and there's a lot of potential for the money that the book can make -- should go to, and we didn't know where to put it, because things change. So the Friends of Minidoka is what came up, and we decided to give all the rights for the reprinting to them asking them to never go to a reduced price. At the time we started -- it keeps going up, I notice, it's like huge now, but we didn't want them ever to do like a end of the year book sale or anything, that they need to keep the price, and if they up it, it just needs to stay, and no end of the year sales or anything, because those people bought it. So, yeah, we're very pleased that it's, now they can get it on the website, and they can still get copies reprinted. So hopefully for generations, and who knows, maybe it'll end up in all school libraries and in some history books.

<End Segment 10> - Copyright &copy; 2014 Oregon Nikkei Endowment and Densho. All Rights Reserved.