Santa Barbara, Fall 1958

I was put in a mixed first and second grade class. There were only five second graders in the class:  me, Kitty Noble, one of the Lorenz twins, Mickey Ortega and Johnny Itoh.  This was pretty typical of the ethnic mix in the school -- there were very few black kids, but probably 25% of my class had Hispanic or Asian surnames.  I don't believe any kid in Washington School thought anything the matter; I know I did not. I do, however, remember feeling strongly that being in a mixed-grade class was EXTREMELY un-cool (back with the babies!)

I soon realized that it did not matter: Miss Keiling was one of the best teachers in the school.

My first hint of what a great teacher she was came during the first week of class.  All the second-graders in the class were there because we had been identified as early readers.  At Washington school, students were not given chapter books or to allowed go to the school library until they were in third grade.   Teachers had considerable freedom to do what they wanted and it turned out that Miss Keiling had picked out books for all of us.  Real books!  Rather than sit through tedious reading circles, she showed us how to use a dictionary, allowed us to read on our own and asked us questions about what was in the book we had.  And every week, there were more books. 

The books did not just arrive on their own.  Each week, one of the second-graders got to be "book monitor."  The holder of this lofty office took the books from the prior week back to the library, submitted the list for new books and brought them to class.  The best part was that the book monitor go to spend about 30 minutes  in the school library sneaking a read while waiting for the books to be pulled.  And if an occasional extra book came back with the monitor, there was never a problem about it!

I was hooked on books!

In addition to our school library, there was a city library downtown.  The children's room there had about a million books and pleasant areas to sit and read.  Additionally, they had cases filled with wonderfully detailed models of ships that someone had donated.  It was not always possible to go downtown to the library (it was WAY too far to walk), but there was a Bookmobile that visited the shopping center at the bottom of the hill once a week.  The Bookmobile was a special bus that was fitted out with everything the library had, but in miniature: bookshelves, lots of books divided into a children's section and an adult one and even a special desk for the librarian to use when they checked out the books and put the card in the back that showed when you had to return them.  It was as tidy and well-organized as a ship.

As soon as I could read, I was entitled to have a library card of my own and could get three books a week!  The Bookmobile did not have all the books in the library, of course, but they had a very good card catalog.  The card catalog was made of wood and had many drawers with special latches that could be locked in place while the Bookmobile was travelling.  The drawers were filled with neatly typed index cards that listed the books that were available. There was one set of cards that was organized by author and another by topic.   If you found a book you liked, then you could use the cards to find other books by that author; make a list and ask the librarian who drove the Bookmobile to get them for you the next week.  Bookmobile day was special not only because I got new books, but also because  Mom drove down the hill to meet it; Roy and the twins got their book for the next week and I not only got new books, but a free ride home to boot.  What luxury!

Because it was a mixed class, the second-graders often worked on their own but several times a week, we improved our knowledge by helping the first-graders with their reading.  In leading the little reading groups, I think we all found how fun it is to explain something and see that special expression when someone else "gets it."

So not only did I "get" to read, Thanks to Miss Keiling, I got a taste of how exciting it can be to share knowledge with someone else.

And there was more.  Once a week, our class got to go to music in one of the third grade rooms where there was a piano.  When Miss Keiling saw I was interested in the piano, she very generously let me come in early for school once a week and spent time with me before class teaching me the rudiments of playing and reading music.

If she gave the same quality of passionate attention to all other kids in her class, I cannot imagine that she had any time at all left for a personal life.

We did not have a piano at home, so Pop built an interesting device for me to practice on.  He built a box of Masonite (an artificial material that does not change size even when the temperature or humidity changes.)  He put a hinged and rotating piece of wood on top, a bit like a tone arm on a record player, except that its base was anchored and the business end could be placed down any place in the circle around it.  There was a wire inside it so that a circuit inside the box was completed when the arm touched down.  He explained that because the circuit contained a coil (that he had wound around the tube from a paper towel), the pitched buzzing tone that was emitted varied based on the distance from the start. This was because the electricity had to traverse a different distance, which changed its frequency.  The electrical frequency was changed to vibration and this is perceived by the ear as sound.  Using his clarinet to get the pitch, Pop marked the locations on the circle for the two octaves around middle C.  Although this was really nothing like playing a keyboard instrument, it meant that I could use it to practice reading music and to understand the rhythm.  Plus it was fun. The explanation about the coil, electricity, frequencies and sound also seemed very reasonable.  But that was Pop -- always happy to explain things. 

Grandpa and Grandma Hendrick had a piano and an electric organ. In the middle of the year, they sent their piano to us.  It was a nice little Winter spinet that they had bought in the 1930's for Pop to play.  As a kid, Pop had discovered that he liked the clarinet better than the piano, but Mom was good at playing piano and we liked to listen to the old songs and sometimes even sang with her.

Mom gave me that piano when I was living in Redwood City, California.  It subsequently moved with me to Maine, to Washington State, back to California and eventually with us to Texas, where it sits today: 

Both my children, Robby and Elizabeth, learned to play on it, although they moved on to other musical pursuits (trumpet for Robby, voice for Elizabeth.)  Pianos are serial numbered and the manufacturing records publicly available, so our piano technician in Texas was able to tell us that our Winter was manufactured in New York 1931 and first sold in Oklahoma City in 1934.  We know that Grandpa Hendrick's family came from Oklahoma, but at the time they got the piano, they were living in the Los Angeles area.  I'm not sure we will ever know how that piano got from Oklahoma to California.  Still, it is fun to think that today that it is sitting only a few hundred miles from its original point of sale

Although I enjoyed my music lessons with Mrs. Keiling, I was laboring under a serious misunderstanding when it came to reading music --I did not realize that those blobs on the lines meant anything -- I thought the numbers above the blobs were what I was supposed to read and it was fortunate that our lessons ended when they did because there are a lot more than 10 notes on a piano and I was finding it quite confusing that "5" for the right hand was not necessarily the F above middle C. 

At the end of the year, Miss Keiling accepted a teaching position at an Army base in Morocco and left Washington school.  It seemed very remote and magical to me, but Mom, very practically, noted that Miss Keiling was getting older and that she would have a better chance of finding a man there.  

After Miss Keiling left, I started attending the group piano lessons that were offered before school.  During the summer break, I'd forgotten a lot of the stuff about numbers and I did not find it difficult to learn correctly how to read music. 

Miss Tamura, the school piano teacher, suggested that might be a good thing for me to have private lessons with her.  She gave them at the home she shared with her parents.  So, for the next two years, although it must have been a very considerable inconvenience, Mom dropped me off for my lesson at 4 and Pop picked me up at 5 -- if he remembered, which he did, usually.  It was sort of embarrassing to be forgotten, but if we had to wait for Pop, Miss Tamura would tell me stories while she knitted, darned socks or did other handiwork. 

This is how I came know that, when she was my own age, she had spent her teenage years in prison.   She told me how this had happened.

Miss Tamura's parents had emigrated from Japan to the United States as many people had, due to hard times in Japan and opportunity in the US. 

Things in California were not always fair for them or other people who came from Asia or their children.   Unlike people who were black, Hispanic or white, people of Asian descent were not allowed to buy property in California.  They could own cars or trucks or boats, but they could only rent their home, business property or farm and the leases could not be for more than three years.  People of Asian descent were not allowed to marry anyone except other Asians; those who had emigrated from Asian countries were barred from becoming U.S. citizens, although any children they had that were born on U.S. soil were citizens by right of birth.

Despite these restrictions, her parents married, established a successful business and started a family; all was going well.

But then came the war. 

in Europe, even before the war started, the governments of the Nazi countries had started requiring anyone with "Jewish blood" to register this fact with the government.  "Jewish blood" was defined as meaning the person had even a single great-grandparent who was a Jew.   Soon, restrictions placed upon Jews that were not placed on other citizens:  they were not allowed to marry anyone who was not also Jewish, their right to own property was restricted and they were denied the right to travel without permission.  Not long after that, the Nazis started using their registration records to round up those who had identified themselves as Jewish and sending them to concentration camps where most were killed, tortured or worked to death. 

After the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor in December of 1941, the freedom of people of Japanese heritage became increasingly restricted in the U.S. and Canada.  Canada arrested and imprisoned most of their male citizens of Japanese descent early in 1942.  Around the same time, President Roosevelt signed an executive order that required anyone with even a single Japanese great-grandparent to register with the U.S. government.  In addition to the restrictions that already uniquely applied to citizens of Japanese descent, the President's order additionally denied them the right to travel anywhere without getting permission from the government.  Similar restrictions were enacted in Mexico and many of the countries on the Pacific coast of North and South America.

Not long after they registered, Miss Tamura's entire family was ordered to report to an assembly center and then sent to a concentration  camp.  This camp was located on an Indian reservation in the desert far away from any town or city.   

The Tamuras spent almost three years in the camp, crowded with many other families into tar-paper barracks, fenced in with barbed wire and guarded by soldiers with machine guns.  There was food to eat and no one was tortured or worked to death, but they could not leave, either.  At at least one camp, several men who tried to escape were shot dead by the guards. 

In the camp, Miss Tamura attended school organized by the parents and spent the most rest of her time playing the piano in the chapel area, wishing she were home. 

When the people were let out of the camp in late 1944, each internee got $25 and a bus ride home. The whole business seemed very wrong to me, but Miss Tamura said it could not be helped: to win the war, everyone had to do their part and that had been theirs.

After the war was over, the citizens of Japanese heritage gradually achieved the legal rights to be treated like other citizens, but it took almost 20 years for them to achieve full equality.  In 1946, the California Supreme Court ruled that the laws barring Asians from owning property were illegal. In 1948, the California Supreme Court ruled that the laws requiring people of Asian descent to marry only other people of Asian descent were also illegal.  In 1965, the U.S. Congress changed the immigration laws so that people from Asia were allowed into the U.S. at the same rate as people from other parts of the world.

Over time, some of the losses of the internees were compensated: in 1948, the U.S. Congress passed an act to compensate those who had lost property because of the relocation.  To get a claim paid, the people had to submit their tax records and by the time the law passed, the IRS had already destroyed most of the tax records through the end of 1943.  Because of limitations in what they could take to the camps, many of the internees had been unable to keep their financial records and by the time the application period had elapsed, only 26,000 of the 112,000 people who had been interned still had records detailed enough to file claims for their lost, stolen or impounded property.  For those who did, an average of $1,392.65 was paid.  In 1988, Ronald Regan, then President of the U.S. (and a former governor of California), approved an act to pay each surviving internee $20,000; awards were made to 82,210 former internees or their heirs. In 1992, George Bush, then President of the U.S., issued a formal apology from the U.S. government to those who had been imprisoned in the camps. The last payment to a former internee was made in 1999, 57 years after the first citizen had been locked up.

Miss Tamura was a very good musician, so when she went to college, she became a high-school music teacher.  She was a real perfectionist and very strict with her students. Every Christmas, she would send me a personal card.  I saved them carefully in my scrapbook and have them today.  I admired her fiercely and wanted to be as good a pianist as she was.

I never came close to approaching her skill, but thanks to Miss Tamura, I did become the best pianist in Washington school (admittedly a very small field!)  Starting in fifth grade, I was the accompanist for the Glee Club and also played in the orchestra; when I got to junior high school, I played in the jazz band.  Folk singing was very popular in the 1960's, so I saved my allowance and bought a $30 guitar which I played through the end of high school.

Washington School, in fact, had a very good orchestra program and an incredibly able orchestra teacher.  It was assumed that we would all learn to play a musical instrument of some sort.  Pop had played the clarinet in the Stanford band, so Roy decided to play that, as did Allison.  Joanne played the flute and we all played in the orchestra.  We all had to practice a half an hour before going to school.  When Pop played the clarinet, it sounded smooth and liquid, but in the hands of Allison and Roy, it became an instrument of torture, emitting horrible squawks, squeaks and wails.

Nonetheless, we did all persist.   Possibly because failure was not an option!  And perhaps because the alternative to practicing was having to clean all the bathrooms.

It is a great tribute to everyone -- music teachers and parents alike -- that I, my brother and sisters  not only enjoy music, but that almost every of our own kids has learned an instrument and participated in a band or an orchestra.

My son Robby is on the end of the second row in this informal parade picture