Historic Hood River

Notes

Ten year ago Homer Yasui sent me this 1967 reunion picture of the Hood River High School class of 1942.  I wish I had asked him a few questions about this frame, but I didn’t.  We exchanged information about the location of the various Yasui Brothers stores, the Japanese employment service that operated out of the store, and I even asked him if he knew what happened to the cannon which had been at the old courthouse (he didn’t). He tried to identify the people waiting patiently to board the train at the Hood River depot.  But at the time it didn’t occur to me to ask him about this image.

Homer and his family were loaded onto that train on May 13, 1942, so he couldn’t have attended his graduation.  They were taken to the Tule Lake War Relocation Authority Center and assigned “Family # 16261”.  Homer was very clear to me he considered it a “Concentration Camp”, not a “Relocation Center.”  He didn’t like to see history sanitized by such language.  In September 1942 he was allowed to leave Tule Lake to attend Denver University, which was outside of the “exclusion zone”.  He then attended medical school and later practiced medicine in the Portland area.

Based on my exchanges with Homer I’m a bit surprised he attended his 25th high school reunion.  I wonder what it was like for him to reminisce with his classmates, considering the circumstances of his departure.  And I can hear him chiding me for using the word “circumstances.”  I wish I could ask him to elaborate on the mixture of nostalgia and bitterness he had for his life in Hood River, but Homer passed in 2023 at age 98.

Last spring I found myself pulling off the highway at the Manzanar National Historic Site to learn more about the experiences of the families forceably sent to those sites 82 years before.  While Homer and the Yasui family were at Tule Lake, not Manzanar, the camps were similar in many respects.  The interpretive site at Manzanar aims to connect visitors with the lives of those living at the site.  Yet only a few representative buildings remain at this site, the perimeter wire and guard towers are mostly gone.  It was a struggle to imagine hundreds of building spreading across the desert, housing thousands of people– families, including children, confined by fences in the middle of nowhere. Conjuring a crowded city with its noises and smells was really hard as I wandered the site alone.

These cities– Manzanar, Tule Lake, Minidoka–  are gone, but we have the personal accounts of the people who lived there.  I was glad I pulled off the highway and spent some time looking at the exhibits and thinking about the few stories Homer had shared with me.  And then I appreciated the freedom to get in my car and drive away.

You can read all about Homer and his experiences during the war (including an oral history) in these sources:

National Park Service

Densho Digital Repository

Oregon Encyclopedia

Obituary

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