39 Months at Tule Lake

By Margaret Lowery

The observations of a man who was a staff member at the Tule Lake Segregation Center from March, 1943, at the start of segregation until the center closed in 1946. Sheldon Lowery chose to be part of the staff there because of his deep sense of unease at the injustice of the evacuation of a group of people just because of their ancestry.
His job was to take care of the property of the evacuees, whether it was a sewing machine that was needed at camp or a farm or other business back home.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Xlibris US
• Release date: Aug 12, 2004
• ISBN: 9781462835553

Margaret Lowery

As a teenager during WWII, Margaret Lowery lived at the Tule Lake Segregation Center with her parents. Since then she raised five children, taught first grade, and now lives with a daughter, two dogs and a cat in Coronado, CA. After her mother’s death in 1988, her father’s papers came to her. She compiled and edited them into this account of their time at Tule Lake, recounted for the most part in his own words.

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Copyright © 2004 by Margaret Lowery.

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Contents

Acknowledgment

Preface

Introduction

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Chapter 6

Chapter 7

Chapter 8

Chapter 9

Chapter 10

Chapter 11

Chapter 12

Chapter 13

Appendix I

Appendix II

Notes

Photos

Bibliography with notes

Glossary

To those who work to assure

Liberty and Justice for all.

Acknowledgment

Many thanks to the California Civil Liberty Public Education Program administered by the California State Library and their grant without which this book would not have happened. Thanks also to the many, many beautiful people, too numerous to name individually, who have come into my life because of this grant. Thanks also to my parents and their sense of fair play which is what took our family into this situation to help as they were able.

TULE LAKE

by Margaret Lowery

A Tanka Triplet

Dust. Dust everywhere.

Dust, fine dust, seeping through toes,

Through tarpapered walls

In the food, in the shower,

Reflecting lives finely ground.

Lives torn from their roots

By fears of powerful men.

Now block after block

Of dusty black tarpaper

Barracks some have to call home.

Beauty created!

Flowers in small gardens grow.

Shells, once hid in dust,

When touched by talented hands,

Blossom as flower petals.

Preface

Margaret Lowery

For nearly sixty years, whenever the subject of WWII and the Japanese evacuation of the West Coast comes up, the question is often asked of me, Whatever were you doing there? and I’ve tried to answer as best I can.

My parents, Sheldon and Helen Lowery, were calm, reasonable, highly principled people. He was born in upstate New York in 1892 and remembered clearly the day they met. In 1897 his mother took him to see Helen, the sister of his playmates, on the day she was born. Their families were friends, and they all moved to California shortly after the San Francisco earthquake of 1906.

My father, Sheldon Lowery, trained as an engineer. My mother, Helen Davis Lowery, was a Cal (University of California at Berkeley) liberal arts graduate with a never-used teaching credential. In 1941 he was working as an appraiser for the Federal Land Bank, appraising real estate and businesses that were eligible for federal loans.

On Sunday morning, December 7, 1941, I came downstairs, very late for breakfast, to find mother and my older sister reading the front page of the paper, listening to the radio, and looking extremely worried. We’re at war! The Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor.

The paper must have been an extra. In those days before television, when a major news story broke, a new front page was hurriedly printed, and newsboys traveled throughout the urban streets shouting EXTRA! EXTRA! READ ALL ABOUT IT! as householders hurried outside to hear the news and buy the paper. On this day the newspaper hawkers must have added, WAR! JAPANESE ATTACK PEARL HARBOR!

Life was never the same again. The Berkeley hills, along with the rest of the Pacific coast, were subject to blackouts when sirens moaned that not a light was to be visible until the sirens blared an all clear. A civilian volunteer block warden patrolled to enforce the restriction.

Four tires and one spare only were allowed for each car; all extras had to be turned in. We lined up for ration books, for shoes and sugar, meat and beans. Gasoline was rationed on the basis of how much you needed to drive. Victory gardens sprouted in every backyard. If you were lucky and were at the front of a long line, you could purchase a dozen eggs. Daylight saving time suddenly was all year, then double day light saving. School children had double sessions. Students who rode streetcars to school could do so only when war workers were not riding to their round-the-clock shifts.

Everyone had known Japan was at war with China; newsreels shown in every movie theater had shown scenes of that war as well as pictures of Hitler and scenes of the war in Europe. But to be attacked—plunged dramatically into a hardly prepared-for war—while they read of the diplomatic efforts in Washington to negotiate a peace treaty left most people shaken and fearful.

In the spring of 1942 President Roosevelt signed executive order No. 9066—to remove all persons of Japanese ancestry, American citizen or not, from the Western Military Zone—which changed things even more. In March, 1942, I was walking home from Junior High School when I first saw the signs, those ubiquitous signs that changed so many lives forever. They were nailed, it seemed, on every telephone pole along College Avenue. All persons of Japanese ancestry must leave the area! That didn’t apply to me, but I was suddenly uncomfortable, sensing this meant something very serious.

When I got home Mother was upstairs ironing, angrier and more upset than I had ever seen her. I tried to comfort her by saying the signs did not apply to us. She was not comforted and very solemnly told me that if our government can do this to any group, they can do it to any other. And so began my Japanese American experience during the Second World War.

In my entire fourteen years I had never met anyone who was Japanese. I doubt that my parents had met many, but they had had confidence in the American legal system where citizens in the United States were always to be considered innocent until proven guilty, as well as all the other legal protections we so often take for granted. Both of my parents were deeply disturbed by what they considered injustice and was, in their opinions, the blatant unconstitutionality of the forced evacuation.

When the opportunity came, they moved to the Tule Lake Relocation Center. Daddy left for Tule Lake quite suddenly in March of 1943. Mother stayed behind a month or two while she packed, rented the house for the duration and arranged for me, a high school student, to stay with family friends until the school term was over in June. My sister, Mildred, and her new husband were living in their small apartment in Berkeley.

In June, 1943, when school was out, I had my first overnight trip on a train. Wartime train space was very limited and I was lucky to have an upper berth.

Klamath Falls, Oregon, thirty miles from the camp, was the nearest train station/shopping community to the center. My father and some other staff members who had come to town for some shopping met me at the train. From Klamath Falls it was an hour’s drive at the thirty-five-mph gas-conserving wartime speed limit. The road was relatively flat and treeless with long stretches of sage brush interrupted by farms on either side of the highway. At four thousand feet this was high desert country. An occasional outcropping of lava rock made small mountains here and there.

The small town of Tulelake hardly showed from the highway. Then we passed Stronghold, which was on the map but, in reality, was only a gas station with a small store and phone booth with a cabin or two behind. A mile or so further on we saw acres of barracks. The buildings closest to the road were administrative buildings and staff housing, wood covered and painted green. The others, much more numerous, were covered with black tarpaper, lightened to dark dusty brown by the dust which covered everything.

A bored soldier in a small guard station waved us through the entrance gate, and we stopped at the security building to get my visitor’s pass. Daddy pointed out the administration building, the staff mess, and the recreation hall where later I perfected my pool-playing skills. Then swiftly we drove on to my new home, our two-bedroom apartment in a green army barrack.

Mother had just come home for lunch. Like most staff wives, she had been recruited into the work force. She was using her teacher’s credential for the first time since graduating from Cal many years before.

After lunch she and I walked the hot and dusty mile to her classroom, through the fine powder so thick it billowed around our ankles with every step. On the entry step to her barrack classroom, we stamped the dust off our shoes as best we could, and inside the stifling room, I was introduced to her two Japanese teaching assistants. While the class of fifth graders drifted in after lunch, one of her aides asked me, How do you like being with all these Japanese? As I floundered trying to answer, she said she’d had a hard time at first because she’d never seen so many together in her life before the camps. But, she said, I’m used to it now. I wondered when I would be.

I had glimpses of the apartments in the Japanese section, the colony, as we’d passed. Each barrack had what appeared to be four or five separate units, one square room, each about the size of a double garage, per family. Eight barracks facing each other made a block. The shower, toilet, and laundry facilities were in two barracks between the housing units in each block. I was appalled that there were no doors on either the toilet or shower stalls in the women’s section. Much later, I learned the facilities at the assembly centers, where the evacuees had been held before the relocation centers were completed, had been worse.

One barrack in each block was the mess hall which could also be used for meetings. The quality of food served in each mess depended on the skill of the evacuee cooks and, while they were given training and recipes, many were learning on the job. Some mess halls tended more toward Japanese-style cooking,