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RB: We'll talk more about your childhood in a bit, but why don't we focus a little on the resettlement. You mentioned that your parents met after they resettled here. Do you know how they met?

MM: Apparently, International... International Services had resettlement for all kinds of ethnic groups, and being Japanese American, they were in their twenties, that group, they got together, there would be dances and get-togethers. I think a lot of that had been put on hold for the internment with the not-knowing what was going to happen.

RB: So my dad talks about, he went to a dance or an event, and Mom was there, and I don't know, doesn't make sense, but she had a cute hat on. And then she disappeared and he didn't know what happened to her. And what we found out was that the president of Drexel was contacted by, I think it was... there was a resettlement organization, and Quakers were involved, and he was friends with the president of Drexel who was Quaker or Quaker related, and they needed a nanny for the summer months. So Mom went and just kind of disappeared, and he was kind of watching for her. What's really unique is that my husband, my second husband, Steve Elkington, is a Quaker from way back. His family were at Pocono, they called it Pocono Preserve. And so I'm going, well, my mom might have seen your parents, I mean, Steve wasn't around at that point, but our parents might have seen each other in passing. It's one of those threads of a lifetime when we started talking, got to be pretty interesting.

MM: So your father, when he resettled here, I believe he was working for another farmer initially. Can you talk a little bit about who that farmer was and what the circumstances were?

RB: So Tak really didn't... I think I was doing the math here, he was only in the camps for about six months. So he went in in June of '42, and because so many men were in the army, they needed people to bring in crops, and my dad was certainly willing to go to pick crops and do whatever, so he was cleared in March of '43 and was sharecropping in the Colorado area, and I think also got his parents out at that point. And then in January of '44, he got a pass to go east. He realized if you don't try to go back to California, there's more possibility. So he went to Chicago and Detroit and ended up coming to Philadelphia in Germantown. A side story is that he went to Detroit and he proposed to a woman named Grace Fuji, and my sister found this... my dad kept a journal, not very detailed, more about the weather and what the farming was like, but he went to propose and she turned him down. So we said, "Okay, Grace, we will be here." But he left with the names of Quaker farmers, or Quakers in the Philadelphia area. And he was pretty methodical because he got ahold of, I guess, Philadelphia yearly meetings directory and went to visit some of the Quaker farmers. At that point, I want to know what else, what other kind of farming is along the East Coast, so we got on the Greyhound bus and went down through Virginia and got as far as Raleigh, North Carolina, and then was coming back up the eastern shore of Virginia and Maryland. And in Norfolk and Salisbury, he got picked up by Naval Intelligence, and they asked him, "Why were you here, here and here?" And so he realized he was being followed. Maybe I'll go back and see those Quaker farmers and see what happens.

And so Lou Barton, Louis Barton, first gave him a job and he started working for Lou, and I guess was helping with different kinds of management and realized, okay, this is a kid who has a degree in business from Berkeley, has life experience in farming, my dad would say, "I really learned my business," because I had to negotiate for my father. My grandfather didn't speak English. They would take the vegetables and whatever to the wholesaler and Tak as a teenager, as a young kid, was doing the interpreting. So anyway, Lou gave him quite, having gone back through the memoirs thoroughly enough, but Lou gave him work and then he lent him a farmhouse and Dad started renting land and eventually was able to buy a farm, and just kept expanding. So Dad credits Mom, because here she is, a girl from L.A., she's marrying a farmer despite her mother's concern about this, that you're never gonna have a good life. Well, Tak provided, ended up providing a really successful life. But Yuri moved into a farmhouse on Church Road in the Marlton area that had no, I think no running water, no electricity, it was really rough, and they used bottled gas. And eventually that improved, but even as my dad had Alzheimer's in his later years, and we would drive past where that house stood, my dad would say, "That's where the house was, that's the same tree." The tree's there, otherwise it's this big mega-mansion. [Laughs] So they started together very modestly and her in-laws moved in.

RB: Was your dad a Quaker before the war or did he convert sometime after coming?

MM: So they were married in '46, my brother was born in '47 and I was born in '49. And the meeting was helping that. I'm not sure how much, but my brother was in second grade and I was going into kindergarten. And that point, the head of school, Chester Reagan came to my parents and said, "Your kids should be at the Friends school." So I have a feeling that there was an initial, some grants that helped out. When my dad... so they were at Medford Leas retirement community in Medford, which he had helped found, and he was in the Alzheimer's unit for probably a good three years, more at the end. But when he died, I went to go talk to a longtime Quaker woman from our Quaker meeting who was in the Alzheimer's unit. I bent down and I said, "Libby Haynes," I said, "Libby, Tak died this morning," and she goes, "I know." She said, "When your family came to the meeting, we all wanted your family to succeed." In fact, that whole quarter, that whole area, wanted him to do well. She said, "And I made cookies for the children." So it was this, what happens in your life and how other people affect you and what they remember, it's what's builds lives and cares for people. To get back to your question, Dad and Mom became members of Moorestown Friends meeting in 1955, and that was significant in that up until that time, there had been a real rift in Quaker meetings. There were two areas of Orthodox and Hicksite. And in 1955, was the year that this got healed, and my parents were the first members of the healed Moorestown meeting. And I think much of my parents' volunteer work, care for the meeting, was a sense of, the Japanese sense, really of obligation and of returning kindness that's been given to you.

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