Joan Beyers: A Teacher's Daughter Growing Up at Manzanar

Joan Beyers was not incarcerated at Manzanar. She was the daughter of a teacher who worked there, one of the few white children who lived in the camp.

Before Manzanar

• Her parents, Marjorie G. Mount, a teacher, and John P. DaValle, married in 1927 and bought a home in West Los Angeles. Joan was born in 1930 and her sister Shirley in 1931.
• The Depression was hard: her father lost his pharmacy on Melrose Avenue in Hollywood.
• When Pearl Harbor was bombed, teachers talked about it in hushed tones, and families kept the blinds closed at night.
• In February 1942, Joan started seventh grade at Emerson Junior High School. One day all the Japanese American students were gone. Teachers said only that they "had to go away," and would say no more.

Going to Manzanar

Her parents divorced in 1942, and her mother needed work. The only teaching job open was high school math at a new "war relocation camp" called Manzanar, in eastern California, at $2,000 a year. She took it reluctantly.

• The family's 1936 Plymouth had room only for clothes and a few small things on the eight-hour drive. They stored some belongings with an aunt, sold or gave away much else, and rented out the house.
• They arrived in September 1942 in the worst sandstorm Joan ever saw.

Living in the barracks

At first they lived in the same tar-papered barracks as the incarcerees: one big room with curtain dividers, an oil heater and two double beds, with her mother's classroom next door.

• Every winter morning a man knocked with a friendly greeting in Japanese to light the heater.
• The block latrine had open common areas; she showered when no one was there.
• They ate in the mess hall. After one Sunday chicken dinner, everyone got diarrhea, with long lines at the latrine all night.
• A Japanese American woman did their laundry, another gave piano lessons, and the camp beauty parlor did their hair each week.

The Japanese Americans she met were gracious, warm and friendly. With only three white teenage girls in camp the first year, Joan joined the Japanese American Girl Reserves, went to plays and concerts put on by incarcerees, and even attended a Japanese American wedding.

What she understood then

At first Joan did not think much about why the Japanese Americans were there — it was just how things were. She was told some might be traitors and there was no way to tell who. Later, after reading Betrayal From the East, a wartime book about Japanese spying, she thought she understood the government's fear. To her, the worst of it was that so many lost their property.

Context, not from the booklet: a federal commission later found that the incarceration was not justified by military necessity, and the United States formally apologized to Japanese Americans.

School and friends outside

White children went to school outside the camp, in Independence, by bus from the guard station. Joan joined a Girl Scout troop there and met Mary Brady, who became her lifelong best friend — and later introduced her to her husband, Bob Beyers. Most Saturdays the family drove to Lone Pine to shop, eat at the drugstore and see a movie.

The "Manzanar Riot"

The family was stunned the night of the "Manzanar Riot" — a demonstration in which two incarcerees were shot dead by military police. Through a cracked door Joan saw people marching with torches and chanting; they did not seem threatening. The next morning staff families were moved out and spent several days in a small, cold jail cell in Independence — not locked in — before returning.

Staff housing

In summer 1943 new staff housing was finished, with a living room, two bedrooms, a kitchen and a bathroom. Camp director Ralph Merritt had a bigger unit, perhaps the only one with air conditioning.

With better housing and more staff families, Joan began to like Manzanar. Three more girls arrived, among them LaPriel Strong, and they became close friends:

• hide-and-seek, teen parties in a classroom, softball, a wood shop class and movies at the outdoor theater;
• a big Christmas dance with soldiers from a nearby Army camp, and square dances;
• swimming at the "Sand Trap," and a picnic by a mountain stream — on the way out, an MP invited them up into a guard tower to look around. The MPs were friendly and polite, and gave the girls jeep rides.

Incarcerees tended the staff's victory gardens, and formal Japanese gardens beside some barracks were amazing in the desert.

Leaving

By summer 1945 so many incarcerees had left that the camp school would not reopen, so the family moved on. Her mother took an eighth-grade teaching job in West Covina; they sold the old house and bought one in Azusa. In her new high school Joan met a Japanese American girl she had known at Manzanar. They did not talk about camp, and the girl soon grew distant — perhaps, Joan thought, because her parents did not want her friends with anyone connected to Manzanar.

Visiting in the 1960s, she found little left of the camp. "Although it is sad that there was a Manzanar," she said, "it was mostly a good experience for me." Her mother's savings in war bonds sent both girls to college, and Manzanar taught Joan to accept change — even to look forward to it.

Sources

Based on "Joan Beyers," 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." The note on the incarceration's later official assessment is added for context and is not in the booklet.