Frederick P. Causey Jr.: Some of the Happiest Years of His Life, at Manzanar

Frederick P. Causey Jr. was not incarcerated. His father worked for the War Relocation Authority, and the family lived in Manzanar's staff housing.

Getting there

When the war began, the Causeys lived in Bethesda, Maryland. His father, Frederick P. Causey Sr., was a civil engineer for the District of Columbia; his mother, Mildred, a stenographer at the National Institutes of Health. Frederick was in seventh grade, his sister Ann in fifth.

• In 1942 his father tried to enlist and failed the physical, then volunteered to build gun emplacements in Trinidad. The family got as far as Miami before learning they could not leave the country in wartime, and stayed there.
• In 1943 his father came back and went straight to Manzanar. The rest of the family took a troop train from Miami to Chicago to Barstow — five days and nights on sandwiches and soda among what seemed like thousands of soldiers.
• His first impression: "what a beautiful place, the sky so blue and the mountains so tall." Back east, a 2,000-foot hill counted as a mountain.

Staff life

His father worked as a WRA civil engineer, his mother as a secretary in the administration. "Manzanar was like a little city where everybody in the staff area knew everybody else."

• They lived first in one room with a bath, then in an apartment with two bedrooms — comfortable but stark.
• Though they had a kitchen, they ate in the staff mess hall: good food, plenty of it, and dinner was the big social event. They marveled at the fresh fruit and vegetables — given a little desert and water, he said, the Japanese Americans could grow almost anything.

A boy's Manzanar

• Basketball on a hard-packed dirt court about 300 feet from a guard tower — one hoop, one ball, strange bounces, and never quite enough boys.
• A failed attempt with a friend to climb Mount Williamson: for every few hundred feet up, they slid a hundred back.
• Swimming in the Los Angeles Aqueduct, a half-mile walk away, with no parents along.
• Chasing wild donkeys across the highway, watching sheepherders' dust clouds, and visiting the Manzanar airport.
• His father bought a 1929 Model T for $25 — too weak for mountain roads — which took them to Lone Pine most Saturday nights for John Wayne war movies. In camp they sat on the ground at the outdoor theater in Block 16 with Japanese American residents.
• At the military police canteen, the kids got cold Cokes while his father had a beer with the soldiers.
• He and Ann went to school in Independence, rode their bicycles around camp and once all the way to town, where a huge milkshake for ten or fifteen cents was often lunch.

He never felt any animosity from Japanese Americans. As a child he may have held some ill will, he admitted, until he lived among them. They cooked the staff's food and cleaned their apartments; everyone got along, and everyone was glad when camp closed. He saw the guard tower manned only once or twice.

After

• In 1945, as the camp wound down, his father was laid off; the family worked in Sacramento until the war ended, then returned to Bethesda.
• After finishing high school in 1947, Frederick joined the Navy and flew as a pilot for 20 years.

He remembered his Manzanar years as among the happiest of his life, in a close-knit group of children and adults.

Sources

Based on "Frederick P. Causey Jr.," one of the ID booklets of Manzanar National Historic Site, National Park Service, written by park rangers with the people profiled and their families; the booklet's first-person account is retold here, with short quotations. The booklet closes with "Wind and Dust," a poem written at Manzanar in 1943 by George Nishimura, age 16, which is not reproduced. For more on the ten camps, see the Park Service's "War Relocation Centers."