Norman Mineta Interview (page: 4 / 9) Former U.S. Secretary of Transportation	Print Interview

What was it like, as an 11-year-old boy, being uprooted and sent to Cody, Wyoming?

Norman Mineta: Well, for me originally, it was "Wow, I am going to be on an overnight train ride!" The first time for me. I remember when my mother took me up to see Fantasia in San Francisco, but here we were going to go on a really long train ride overnight from San José to Santa Anita. So as a kid, it really was much different than the impact on my dad. Towards the end of February 1941, he got his insurance license renewed. It was dated February 17th, but stamped across it was, "Suspended for the Duration of World War II." So his business ended at that point. The impact on our elders -- on my older sisters, my brother in college -- was tremendous. For me, an 11-year-old kid, it was a lot different. I remember the day we left San José, to board the train...

Get the Flash Player to see this video. They had us all board at the freight yard, not at the passenger depot, but at the freight yard, which in a way had a good thing, because the freight yard was about five blocks from my grammar school, so a lot of the kids from the grammar school came to see us off. That day I was wearing my Cub Scout uniform, had a baseball, baseball glove, baseball bat, and so as I got on the train, then the MPs confiscated my bat on the basis it could be used as a lethal weapon. So they confiscated the bat and I got on the train with my baseball and baseball glove. And then all the shades were pulled on the train, and we had MPs at each end of the cars. Now, people would want to peek out, see where we were, and of course, that would just bring in a flash of light into the car, and the MPs would yell at us.

So it was a very different experience.

Get the Flash Player to see this video. All of a sudden, here we are in Santa Anita, barbed wire enclosure, every 300 feet a military guard tower, searchlights, machine gun mounts. I remember, as a kid even, looking up at the guard tower thinking, "We were told we are in here for our protection. Well, if we are in here for our protection, why are the machine guns pointed in at us, and not out?" Then, those searchlights would go by, back and forth during the course of the night. We didn't have glass on the windows in the barracks. We had Isinglass. They had sort of diffused kind of plastic on wire. You could see the searchlight going back and forth. Even with your eyes closed, you could still see that searchlight going back and forth. Even if you put the blanket over your head, you still -- quote -- "saw" the searchlights going back and forth.

So we moved in May. We had no school, so we did what kids do to entertain themselves, played kick the can, played baseball, whatever, and then, in November we were moved from Santa Anita to Heart Mountain.

Senator Simpson, you remember those times in Wyoming. Can you tell us about that?

Alan Simpson: I don't think most Americans remember this, but Wyoming people sure do.

Get the Flash Player to see this video. Suddenly in 1943, when I was 12, the third largest city in Wyoming sprung up in the sage brush, between Powell, Wyoming and Cody, Wyoming. Carpenters out there worked day and night, with lights on, building tarpaper shacks. And the carpenters were all 45, 50, 55 -- we thought they were ancient, but there they were. They were pretty adroit and they built a city. Suddenly, 11,000 Japanese Americans came in on the train. They were Americans who were gathered up in San José, and in the coast of California and taken to Santa Anita race track and put in the stalls and told that they could have one bag and that they were headed for Manzanar in Colorado, or Heart Mountain in Wyoming. And they were U.S. citizens, they were not aliens. Some were permanent resident aliens, very few, I mean, maybe 10 percent. The rest of them were called U.S. citizens and they were all Japanese American. We didn't do that with the German Americans. We were fighting them, but we couldn't identify them, and we didn't do it with the Italian Americans, and we were fighting them, because we couldn't identify them. But we could identify our fine fellow Americans. It was a total racist operation.

There was great fear. Don't forget that the Attorney General of California who signed the order was Earl Warren, and don't forget that a Supreme Court Justice who upheld that act was Justice William O. Douglas. They spent the rest of their lives trying to atone for it. All their writings disclose the pain of what they did in that situation, but it was something they thought had to be done. We thought there were submarines off the coast. We thought people were signaling them in, and there was real fear.

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