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HH: And with all the schooling that you went through from San Jose State through Penn, where did the World War II fall in?

MW: With all my schooling, where did World War II fall in? World War II came during my senior year at San Jose State college.

HH: I see. And how did that affect your education?

MW: How did the war affect my education? I was not there for my graduation. During my senior year, my fellow students and I were all applying to get into graduate school somewhere. And I had actually been accepted at a graduate school, but in the meantime, we, of course, left San Jose, or where we lived, to go to a camp. I don't know whether you want me to go on or whether...

HH: Yes, I do.

MW: All right. So we went to camp, and in the meanwhile, I'm still agitating to see whether I can get into a graduation school which had really accepted me, which was the University of Wisconsin. Places like, on the West Coast, like Stanford, California, they were not amenable to accepting Japanese American students at that point anyway, because the curfews and then the news had started. On the other hand, Wisconsin was way inland, and they were willing to accept me. However, it turned out that there was some army or navy or some kind of war related effort, research going on there. And they decided that they couldn't take me as a Japanese American student. On the other hand, friends in Cambridge, Mass, had put in money, put forth their money, actually, for sponsoring a couple of students in Radcliffe, for the Radcliffe Harvard graduate school or whatever. And Radcliffe and Harvard were willing to accept me, so that's how I ended up at Radcliffe and Harvard. I think the interesting thing was that after I got to Harvard and was in the biology department, I'm working in a building shaped like a U, and the section that I was in was in one arm, and that the other U had been taken over by naval research. So I thought it was very ironic that Wisconsin was not able to accept me, but here I am at Harvard Radcliffe. I just thought that was kind of ironic. I think I jumped over a lot of your questions, okay.

HH: Now, while you were waiting for all this to happen, you were in a relocation camp?

MW: I was in Santa Anita and then at Heart Mountain, and I think writing letters all along, including someone at the National Student Relocation Council reminded me some years that I was agitating a lot. And she reminded me, "Oh, yes, Mary, you even wrote to Mrs. Roosevelt." And indeed I did, and I did get a letter back from her. Someday I'll have to find it, I don't know where it is.

HH: Oh, really?

MW: But, see...

HH: So all told, how many months did you spend in the two places?

MW: In camp?

HH: Yeah, in Santa Anita and Heart Mountain?

MW: I wasn't there very long, because I was in Heart Mountain from about May/June, I've forgotten exactly when we left. And then we left Santa Anita, I think, in September, to go to Heart Mountain. And then I left Heart Mountain towards the end of January of 1943. So all told, roughly six or seven months for me.

<End Segment 2> - Copyright © 1994 JACL Philadelphia. All Rights Reserved.