The Studs Terkel Reader_My American Century

by Studs Terkel

  My furloughs were spent in camp, visiting my father and sister. Going to camp was like going home for me, to see my family. We made the best of what we had. We celebrated Christmas in the American fashion. We tried to make our lives go easy.

  We came back to Los Angeles at the end of the war, believing that there was no other way but to be American. We were discouraged with our Japanese culture. My feeling at the time was, I had to prove myself. I don’t know why I had to prove myself. Here I am, an ex-GI, born and raised here. Why do I have to prove myself? We all had this feeling. We had to prove that we were Americans, okay?

  My mother and father sent me to a Japanese school teaching the culture. My wife and I did nothing with our children in that respect. We moved to a white community near Los Angeles. It was typical American suburb living. We became more American than Americans, very conservative. My wife and I, we talk about this. We thought this was the thing we had to do: to blend into the community and become part of white America.

  My children were denied a lot of the history of what happened. If you think of all those forty years of silence, I think this stems from another Japanese characteristic: when shame is put on you, you try to hide it. We were put into camp, we became victims, it was our fault. We hide it.

  My oldest daughter, Cathy, in her senior year at college, wanted to write a thesis about the camp experience. She asked if we knew people she might interview. Strange thing is, many people, even now, didn’t want to talk about it. Some of the people she did talk to broke down. Because this was the first time they had told this story. This is the same thing I did. When I first went into detail, it just broke me up. When it came out, I personally felt good about it. It was somethin’ that was inside of me that I’ve wanted to say for a long time.

  How do the Sansei feel about it—your daughter’s generation?

  Very angry. They keep saying, “Why did you go? Why didn’t you fight back?” They couldn’t understand it. They weren’t raised in our culture. Today, I would definitely resist. It was a different situation at that time. This is what we tried to explain to our daughter. Today if this happened, I think a majority of the Japanese would resist.38

  When I think back to my mother and my father, what they went through quietly, it’s hard to explain. [Cries.] I think of my father without ever coming up with an angry word. After all those years, having worked his whole life to build a dream—an American dream, mind you—having it all taken away, and not one vindictive word. His business was worth more than a hundred thousand. He sold it for five. When he came out of camp, with what little money he had he put a down payment on an apartment building. It was right in the middle of skid row, an old rooming house. He felt he could survive by taking in a little rent and living there. My sister worked for a family as a domestic. He was afraid for her in this area. He died a very broken man.

  My wife and I, we’re up on cloud nine right now. Our daughter just passed the California bar. Guess what she’s doing? She works for the redress and reparations group in San Diego.39 How’s that?

  BETTY BASYE HUTCHINSON

  On first meeting her, you sense that she had once upon a time been a beauty queen. She is sixty.

  I was in the class of ’41, the last high school class. You see? By that winter Leslie Bidwell would be dead at Pearl Harbor. My class would be dying.

  Oroville was a little mining town eighty miles above Sacramento. My stepfather was a tenant farmer and owned just a little bit of land. He had just got electricity three years before. We lived in the kitchen because that’s where it was warm. My stepfather kept things to himself. He would read the papers, but he never shared. My mother was busy feeding all her kids. I was the first one of nine children to graduate from high school.

  I was dancing at Fresno State, at a big ball, when I first realized Pearl Harbor had happened. It was a whole week later. I was a hayseed Basye.

  Immediately, I was going to become a nurse. That was the fastest thing I could do to help our boys. Here I was only one semester at Fresno State, and by February 5, I was out at the hospital as a registered nurse.

  It was expensive for me. You had to pay something like twenty dollars a month to live at the nurses’ home. I didn’t have any money. Fortunately, the Cadet Nurse Corps came into existence. The government paid for us to become nurses. That really saved me.

  I remember February 5, ’42. Our superintendent called us all together. Two little Japanese girls, sitting in front, who had come into class like me—why in the world are we saying goodbye to them? I couldn’t understand what had happened. They were gone and I never, never saw them again. It must have been okay if President Roosevelt said it was okay. But I knew those girls should have been nurses.

  I wanted to really have something to do with the war. It meant my kid brother on a tanker in the Mediterranean, delivering oil to Africa, to Italy. It meant losing several more Oroville schoolmates. It meant my boyfriend, whom I’d been engaged to ever since we left high school. He’d joined the marines and was gone. It meant just an end to all that life I had known just a few months before.

  “He was president of the student body. I was an athlete, a drum majorette, everything. In February of ‘42,1 I was all-American drum majorette. I was offered a movie contract. I was going to be a star in this thing, this movie called Twirl Girl. [Laughs.] I was in nurse’s training when the call came in. I just said, ‘Thank you, but I have to go back to duty.’

  “It was that picture in all the national papers. Cheesecake. I don’t think the word ‘cheesecake’ had been invented yet. I had a baton under my arm and I was standing on a pedestal. Posed, with one leg up. Really short skirt and little velvet boots on. [Laughs.] My hair was full and long and red.

  “It was one of the first available pinup pictures. Suddenly the fan mail started coming in. I still have clippings, letters from all over the world. ‘Cause I was busy at the hospital, they would come to my aunt. The poor postman would carry boxes of this mail. The college began to send these pictures out to the boys who would write from different places and ask for a picture. Servicemen.

  “I have one in French I’ve never translated. One from Argentina. One of them said, ‘As soon as the war is over, we’ll get together and we’ll have a wonderful time. Would you please wait? You are the most beautiful person I’ve ever seen, but you look wholesome.’ It was just that kind of time.”

  All the regular nurses began to drop out and join the army. Many of my instructors left. We were down to just a skeleton crew at the county hospital. In Fresno. The student nurses were running the whole hospital.

  You were supposed to stay in for three years as a student nurse, but the army took us out six months early. We went down to our first military assignment at Hoff General Hospital in Santa Barbara. We were given uniforms with a nice little cocky beret. It was basic training really, because most of us were gonna go into the service. About six months later, we went back to Fresno to graduate, get our pins, and say goodbye. The day President Roosevelt died, I was an official army nurse. I felt even more committed to go ahead.

  I was on an orthopedic ward. Quite a few wounded paratroopers. I remember rubbing the backs of these people who had casts from head to foot. You could hardly find their backs through all these bandages and pulleys. It’s not like plastic surgery where the really deformed people are. I was struck by the horror of it, but it wasn’t as bad as what was to come.

  Now I go to Dibble General Hospital in Menlo Park. In six weeks, we became so skilled in plastic surgery that they wouldn’t let us go. Six-week wonders. It was coming to the end of the war and now they needed plastic surgery. Blind young men. Eyes gone, legs gone. Parts of the face. Burns—you’d land with a fire bomb and be up in flames. It was a burn-and-blind center.

  I spent a year and a half in the plastic-surgery dressing room. All day long you would change these dressings. When you were through with those who were mobile, who would come by wheelchair or crutches, you would take this little ca
rt loaded with canisters of wet saline bandages. Go up and down the wards to those fellas who couldn’t get out of bed. It was almost like a surgical procedure. They didn’t anesthetize the boys and it was terribly painful. We had to keep the skin wet with these moist saline packs. We would wind yards and yards of this wet pack around these people. That’s what war really is.

  I’ll never forget my first day on duty. First Lieutenant Molly Birch introduced me to the whole floor of patients: “This is Lieutenant Basye.” They’d say, What? Hayseed? Oh, Basie. Oh, Countess. So I got the name Countess.

  I was so overwhelmed by the time I got to the third bed: this whole side of a face being gone. I wouldn’t know how to focus on the eye that peeked through these bandages. Should I pretend I didn’t notice it? Shall we talk about it? Molly led me down to the next bed: The Nose, she called him. He had lost his nose. Later on, I got used to it, all this kidding about their condition. He would pretend to laugh. He would say, “Ah yes, I’m getting my nose.” He didn’t have any eyebrows, a complete white mass of scars. The pedicle was hanging off his neck. He had no ears—they had been burned off. They were going to be reconstructed. But the nose was the important thing. Everyone nicknamed him The Nose. He didn’t mind—well, I don’t know that. Molly was right. She was giving them a chance to talk about what happened. At the time, I couldn’t stand it.

  As soon as we got back to the nurse’s station behind glass, I went to the bathroom and threw up. Then she knew. She didn’t introduce me to the patients who were in the private room that day,’cause they were far the worst. They couldn’t get up and couldn’t joke so much. The next day she took me to them, one at a time. I was beginning to anesthetize myself.

  I remember this one lieutenant. Just a mass of white bandages, with a little slit where I knew his eyes were. This one hand reaching out and saying, “Hi, Red.” There were many, many, many more with stumps, you couldn’t tell if there was a foot there or not, an eye, an arm, the multiple wounds. It wasn’t just the one little thing I was used to in nurse’s training. This is what got to me.

  Oh, there were breakups. The wife of The Nose was going to divorce him. What can we do to make her understand? That was the talk all over. The doctor wanted her to understand it’ll take time, he’ll get his face back. But they broke up. She couldn’t stand it. That was pretty common.

  Sitting at the bedside of this young flyer who went down over Leyte. He got his own fire bomb. Next to his bed is a picture of this handsome pilot beside his P-38. He wants to be sure I see it: “Hi, Red, look. This is me.” He was never gonna leave that bed until he got his face back. That handsome photograph he insisted be there, so that’s the person you’ll see.

  He was very hard to manage because he would scream when they changed his dressing. He was insistent that he never was gonna leave that room until they brought him back to where he was before. The staff couldn’t quite figure this out. Why isn’t he quiet? Why can’t he be brave when they’re changing his dressing? What does he think we are, miracle makers? This mystique builds up that Bill can’t handle it as well as the others. Be brave, be brave.

  I can’t say I ever really became used to it. But I became more effective as a nurse and adopted a kind of jocularity. I began to be able to tell jokes, banter back and forth. When I’d come in pushing the cart, there’d always be hooting and yelling: Hey, Red, Hayseed, Countess, come in, I got a cookie for you. There was a lot of alluding to sexuality. One said to me, “Why do you always walk that way?” I didn’t know how I walked, but I had a walk. I said, “I don’t know.” And they all howled.

  Having pretty young nurses around was very important to them. You were not supposed to date enlisted men, but you could date officers. I escorted Bill, the pilot, for the first outing out of his room. I talked him into escorting me to the officers’ club. He still had a bandage on his one eye, terrible scars, one side of his face gone, and these pedicles of flesh. You look absolutely grotesque and you know. We had a drink at the club. He looked around and saw other cases there. So he began to get used to it.

  One of the nurses in charge fell in love with an enlisted man. She carried on a very quiet love affair with him. We never alluded to it. After about a year, they were married. It was always a secret in those days. It was discouraged. I’ve always had the theory that they made us officers to keep the army nurses for the officers. We were just technicians. I was just a twenty-two-year-old kid who knew how to do bedpans. Why was I an officer? I feel it was a way to keep us away from the hordes and keep us for the officers. Oh, there was a terrible class feeling.

  The doctors were the givers of gifts to these men. They were gods on a pedestal. The elusive, mobile god, who moves in and out and doesn’t stay there very long, under a terrible amount of pressure. The nurses were counsel when marriages broke up. The doctors were busy someplace else.

  V-J Day occurred while I was still at the hospital. Oh, wow! Just total chaos. Our superintendent of nurses led a conga line up and down the hospital, serpentine, up past every bed. This took hours, because it was ward after ward. [Laughs.] Everybody joined in. Absolute bedlam.

  The hospital closed and they sent the patients out to other places. Plastic surgery was going to go on for years on these people. I went down to Pasadena. This is ’46. We took over the whole hotel, one of the big, nice old hotels right there on the gorge. All my friends were still there, undergoing surgery. Especially Bill. I would walk him in downtown Pasadena—I’ll never forget this. Half his face completely gone, right?

  Downtown Pasadena after the war was a very elite community. Nicely dressed women, absolutely staring, just standing there staring. He was aware of this terrible stare. People just looking right at you and wondering: What is this? I was going to cuss her out, but I moved him away. It’s like the war hadn’t come to Pasadena until we came there.

  Oh, it had a big impact on the community. In the Pasadena paper came some letters to the editor: Why can’t they be kept on their own grounds and off the streets? The furor, the awful indignation: the end of the war and we’re still here. The patients themselves showed me these letters: Isn’t it better for them if they’re kept off the streets? What awful things for us to have to look at. The patients kidded about that. Wow, we’re in Pasadena.

  This was my slow introduction to peacetime, through the eyes of that woman when she looked at my friend Bill. It’s only the glamour of war that appeals to people. They don’t know real war. Well, those wars are gone forever. We’ve got a nuclear bomb and we’ll destroy ourselves and everybody else.

  I swallowed all this for years and never talked about it. ’Cause I got busy after the war, getting married and having my four children. That’s what you were supposed to do. And getting your house in suburbia. You couldn’t get anybody to really talk about the war. Oh, the men would say, When I was in Leyte—buddy-buddy talk. Well, their buddies got killed, too. They never talked of the horrors.

  My husband had been in the South Pacific. You could never get the father of my four children to talk about the war. It was like we put blinders on the past. When we won, we believed it. It was the end. That’s the way we lived in suburbia, raising our children, not telling them about war. I don’t think it was just me. It was everybody. You wouldn’t fill your children full of these horror stories, would you?

  When I think of the kind of person I was, a little hayseed from Oroville, with all this altruism in me and all this patriotism that sent me into the war! Oh, the war marked me, but I put it behind me. I didn’t do much except march against Vietnam. And my oldest son, I’m happy to say, was a conscientious objector.

  It’s just this terrible anger I have. What is this story I want to tell? I even wrote short stories for myself. I started an autobiography, and always the war came up. This disappointment. We did it for what? Korea? Vietnam? We’re still at war. Looking back, it didn’t work.

  In 1946, my house burned with all my mementoes. The only thing that was saved, inside a hope chest, was t
his scrapbook of burned-edged pictures. Of me, when I was in the service.

  Today, we’re going through the romance of war. Did you see The Winds of War? It was nothing, worse than nothing. It didn’t tell us what’s wrong with war or the reality of war. They showed that picture of Pearl Harbor, that pretty place, all bombed up. Wasn’t he on the hill, looking down, the hero? I was trying to find some saving grace. But it wasn’t like you were there. Somebody should have said, See, underneath this water is Leslie Bidwell. He died, you see?

  Part II

  The City

  Division Street: (1967)

  INTRODUCTION

  On undertaking this assignment, I immediately called Dr. Philip Hauser, former chairman of the University of Chicago’s Sociology Department, one of the country’s best informed demographers. Is there a street in Chicago today where all manner of ethnic, racial, and income groups live? His reply—though a blow—was not unexpected. There is none. The nomadic, transient nature of contemporary life has made diffusion the order—or disorder—of the city. The bulldozer and the wrecking ball have played their roles.