Norman Mineta Interview (page: 5 / 9) Former U.S. Secretary of Transportation	Print Interview

Secretary Mineta, you were in the internment camp in Heart Mountain when you first met Alan Simpson. How did that come about?

Norman Mineta: The first thing we did when we got to Heart Mountain -- not "we," but our elders...

Get the Flash Player to see this video. Somebody had written to the Boy Scouts of America and said, "Please send organizers to come and help us organize the Boy Scout troops." So we all became Boy Scouts, we had jamborees in the camp, and our Scout leaders decided to invite the Boy Scouts from outside the camp to come into the camp for the jamboree. But here we were in a barbed wire enclosure, guard towers, and so as our Scout leaders invited people in, they said, "We are not going to go in there, those are prisoners of war, we are not going to go in there." At that point it was the third largest city in Wyoming, but they wouldn't allow anybody in the camp to register to vote, because of the implications of maybe swaying the elections one way or another. So in any event, we had our jamboree. Someone finally said, "Hey, hold it. These are Boy Scouts of America. They read the same manual you do, they wear the same uniform, they go after the same merit badges you do," and so finally, the Boy Scouts from Cody came in.

Senator Simpson, how were you introduced to the Scouts at Heart Mountain?

Alan Simpson: I was in Boy Scouts, and the Scoutmaster, he was sitting there one night and he said, "You know what we're going to do next week?" We were all tying our knots and looking around, so we said, "What are we going to do?"

Get the Flash Player to see this video. He said, "We're going to go to the Jap camp." That was what it was called. It had guard towers, it had barbed wire, it had guards in the towers, and we said, "We're not going out there. We could be killed." He said, "No, no. You need to go." He was a Scoutmaster ahead of his time, and honestly, I can't remember his name. This was the tragedy, but anyway, we went to "the Jap camp" and here were these 12-year-olds, just like me with San José Scout Troop No. 24, and telling the same stories, reading the same stupid little horrible books. Telling the same jokes, speaking the same language. They didn't even know where Japan was. And there's where I met Norm Mineta, this pesky little rascal. And we laughed and tied knots and did some other devilish tricks. He says that we did more tricks than I imagine.

Secretary Mineta, what activities could you do as Scouts in this situation?

Norman Mineta: We had our knot-tying contests, how to start a fire without any matches, all of these kinds of things you do as a Boy Scout, carving contests with our knives.

Get the Flash Player to see this video. We got paired off into pup tents, and of course, when you have a pup tent, especially like in Wyoming where it could rain anytime, you had to build a moat around your tent to protect it. So this other kid and I built a moat around it, and then all of a sudden he said, "There is a kid from my troop in the tent right below us, and I don't really care for him that much, would you mind if we cut the water to exit that way?" I thought, "Well, no skin off my nose. Sure." So we did. We built our moat and we cut the water to exit that way, and as luck would have it, it started raining, and our moat worked perfectly, and the water drained off, tent pegs pulled on the tent down below us, tent came down, and this kid is in the tent going, "Hee-hee-hee! Ho-ho-ho! Ha-ha-ha!" Laughing. And I would say, "Alan, would you please shut up so we can get some sleep." It was Alan Simpson, who then eventually became the U.S. Senator, but through junior high school, high school and college, we wrote to each other, and developed a great friendship.

Senator Simpson, what was it like for you, meeting these interned Japanese Americans at Heart Mountain?

Alan Simpson: Here they were, living in tarpaper shacks. And all the people in there were people who were either over 50 or under 16, because the people 17 through 30 were in the U.S. military, in special units, like with Bob Dole. As a kid, it just didn't fit. Your mind couldn't run it up. Nobody spoke Japanese, very few. Their fathers were professors.

There was a sign on the door in the restaurant at Cody that said, "No Japs Allowed," and yet, the trustees would come into town from the camp and they were all wonderful people. Then some Cody kid would be killed on Guadalcanal, or somewhere in the South Pacific, and there'd be some racist thing on the window. Yet on the other side, the Japanese who were gone from the camp were serving in the U.S. Army. I never sorted that out.

There was a lawsuit that the people of America missed. They took about 19 of those kids who had been in the camp there for about three years, and drafted them into the U.S. Army. And they refused to go until their people were turned loose from Heart Mountain. They went to the Federal District Court in Cheyenne. That's a wonderful story. You talk about some of the great trials, that one was a great one. They lost of course, and they all were drafted. They said, "Okay, we love America, we don't even know Japan, but let my mother and my little brother out of Heart Mountain." Somebody ought to do a story on that one.

Secretary Mineta, did you and Alan Simpson keep in touch as adults?

Norman Mineta: I graduated from Berkeley, had an ROTC commission, the Korean War was going on, went overseas, lost track of him, and then...

Get the Flash Player to see this video. I was elected Mayor of San José, and Associated Press had a short story about me being elected. In the body of it, it said, "Mineta was one of 120,000 Japanese Americans evacuated and interned in camps during World War II. He and his family were at Heart Mountain, Wyoming." Well, The Cody Enterprise picked up on the story, printed it. Alan was practicing law in Cody. The next thing, I get a note, "Dear Norm, congratulations on being elected Mayor of San José. I have been wondering what the heck you'd been up to all these years." Well, in 1974, I got elected to the Congress, and in 1978, he got elected to the U.S. Senate, and our friendship went back together as if we were sitting in that pup tent in 1943.

Senator Simpson, how do you recall getting back in touch with Norman Mineta in later years?

Get the Flash Player to see this video. Alan Simpson: Mineta goes off, becomes the Mayor of San José and I wrote him a letter. I said, "You remember the fat kid? Tying knots?" He said, "Oh, God..." and he wrote. Then we got to Congress together, and we were in the Congress together. A wonderful guy. And then we were on the Smithsonian Board of Regents together and now we're on the Smithsonian National Board. The only horrible part is that every time we see each other we just kiss each other and hug each other, and our wives say, "God, there they are, doing it again." But it was a great adventure, and a powerful one, the most powerful of all.

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