Feb. 19, 1942 Internment Order - Executive Order 9066

Signed by President Franklin D. Roosevelt

 

    All people of Japanese ancestry living in California, Washington, and Oregon and some in Hawaii to be relocated. Seventy-seven thousand U.S. citizens and 43,000 illegal and legal resident aliens were rounded up, herded to trains guarded by soldiers and sent to 10 hastily built internment camps

 

    My mother remembers the government forcing them to leave their grocery store at Southeast 49^th and Hawthorne.  She remembers the confiscation of the family’s beloved Phil co radio by government agents who feared they might communicate with Japanese ships by short wave.

 

     They each were allotted one suitcase per person.  They had just bought a brand new truck which they had to leave behind on the street.  People did not buy their belongings because they knew they would have to leave them behind which meant they could have them free.

 

JUNE 1942 - In Portland, the Japanese were put in converted livestock pens at the stockyards of the Portland Fair Grounds for four sweltering months.  Each family was given a stall.  My mother was in her last three months of her pregnancy.

 

AUGUST 1942 -  She remembers the biting bugs and sweltering heat in the Portland stockyards, where she tried to keep her two boys, George and Paul clean.  She also remembers giving birth in those stockyards to her third son, one of 5,981 babies born in or on the way to relocation camps.

 

 

SEPTEMBER 1942 - They were put on trains and taken to Hunt Camp an abandoned army barracks..  Between the dates September 1942 to October 1945, nine thousand, nine hundred and ninety people (9,990) were taken by train to the internment camp. It was a desert landscape, barbed wire, black rows of barracks, tumble weed, dust and mud.  There were single rooms with cots, a single swaying light bulb and a pot-bellied stove.  There were 503 tar paper barracks, about 12 to a block, and 42 blocks in all. Each block had a mess hall, a wash room without partitions between sinks, laundry tubs, and toilets. My parents block was Block 34.

 

 

 

     They stayed there for four years.  My father was a fireman.  He played baseball, played Go which is Japanese war game with a game board.  He also learned how to make furniture out of the grease wood found in the barren land.  My mother cared for her three sons. My mother does remember January 1943.  It was 12-below zero, wind biting through the barracks as she washed diapers in the morning darkness before the hot water ran out.

 

SEPTEMBER 1943 - I WAS BORN AND STAYED IN THE CAMP UNTIL 1946.

 

 

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