February, 1942
Jennifer Harris
My
parents Meriel and Erich Wellington lived in a big house in Berkeley,
California, with their two children Frederick Sherwood and Jennifer Jane, plus
Meriel’s mother Marie
Elizabeth Byrne Sherwood. Since they had
an empty room upstairs and lived about a mile from the University of California
campus, they provided room and board for a female student in exchange for help around
the house. It was a good arrangement for
my parents and for the student. My
mother always preferred to have Japanese-American girls because “they were so neat
and clean.” These girls were often my baby
sitters.
I
remember two of these girls very well.
Aiko was the daughter of a turkey farmer who lived in Turlock. At Christmas and Thanksgiving her father
would arrive to pick her up for the holiday with a freshly killed turkey for
our family. Since this was during the
depression my parents were happy to receive this gift; the drawback was that my
mother had to gut or draw the turkey which she did not particularly like
doing. In later years when I had to draw
ducks my husband and I had shot when hunting I appreciated how she felt.
The
last young woman who lived with us was Marie Kurihara who was studying
nursing. After December 7, 1941 there
began to be rumblings about the Japanese-American residents of California. On February 19, 1942 President Roosevelt
signed Executive Order 9066 stating that all Japanese American residents in the
west would be rounded up and sent to internment camps. These poor souls had little time to prepare
and often lost farmland and homes. Their
plight is well chronicled in the novels Snow Falling on Cedars and Hotel at
the Corner of Bitter and Sweet. I was
only ten years old so was not very aware of what was happening.
Some
of the university students were permitted to continue their studies but only at
colleges and universities located inland in the United States. They were not allowed to be on the coasts. It was a horrible thing to have done to these
innocent hard working citizens. It meant
that we no longer had young Japanese-American women to live with us. We felt they had been part of our
family.
One
of the young women, probably Aiko, met a man with whom she fell in love at the
internment camp. It was spring and she
knew we had a big garden full of flowers.
She wrote and asked my mother to send some flowers for the wedding. I remember my mother cutting large sprays of
our flowering plum trees and packaging them carefully before sending them off
to Aiko.
The
student living with us in February 1942 was Marie Kurihara who was studying to
be a registered nurse. She was a lovely
person and we were so sorry to see her go.
As far as I know we did not have contact with Marie after she was so
brutally taken away from us.
Fast-forward
to 2008 when I signed up to attend an Inclusion Day at The Sequoias San
Francisco, a companion community to the Sequoias Portola Valley where I
live. Upon arriving I saw on the program
that one of the speakers was a Sequoias San Francisco resident named Marie
Kurihara. I wondered if it was the same
Marie Kurihara who had lived with us in Berkeley. I wrote her a note asking if she had lived
with the Wellington Family while a student at UC Berkeley and if so telling her
that I was the young girl for whom she had baby sat. She said yes.
I was thrilled to see her and we hugged each other. She gave me a lovely origami crane which has
now disappeared. I believe she still
lives in San Francisco but I have lost contact with her.
Marie
had been able to complete her nursing studies and had never married. She had returned to the Bay Area where she
worked at UC Hospital in San Francisco and eventually became the Director of
Nursing there. My mother, who loved
things medical, would have been thrilled to know this.
Marie
had retired and moved to the Sequoias shortly after my aunt Betsy Sherwood, who
also lived there, had died. They just
missed each other; I think Marie would have remembered Betsy who often came to
visit us on weekends from San Francisco where she worked. Betsy was so incensed by the Executive Order
which was announced on February 19, 1942, that she tore down one of the posters
announcing the ruling which was posted on a telephone pole in San Francisco and
she kept it for years. Somehow in many
moves it was lost so I do not have it.
This
year marks the seventy-fifth anniversary of that horrible Executive Order 9066
by Franklin
| Roosevelt. It was a decision that I hope will never, ever, be repeated in our country and is certainly a black mark in our history as a nation. |
Poster from Department of the Interior
War Relocation Authority. Obtained on
Wikipedia 18 February 2017
_______
Note: the Library of Congress Blog Post Journalism Behind Barbed Wire explores the newsletters of the Japanese Internment Camps
Jennifer
Wellington Harris is a retired secondary teacher who taught science for three
years at Fleming Junior High in for the Los Angeles Unified School District,
nineteen years at Ukiah High School in Ukiah, California, and one year at the
International School of Lusaka in Lusaka, Zambia. In 1986 she received the Presidential Award
for Excellence in Science Teaching for California. She retired in 1991 continuing as an
Educational Consultant and a teacher and student teacher evaluator for
Dominican College’s credentialing program in Ukiah. She became interested in genealogy in the
1950s and has been researching off and on ever since. In 2003 she moved to the Sequoias Portola
Valley where she now lives.
