LaPriel Strong Bush: A Staff Child's Memories of Manzanar

LaPriel Strong Bush was not incarcerated. Her father worked at Manzanar, and she lived there as a child among the incarcerees and staff.

Coming to Manzanar

LaPriel was 11 when Japan bombed Pearl Harbor. Even as a child she saw the headlines warning of Japanese submarines off the California coast, and the fears of an attack on the mainland and of spies — the mood, she said, that led to the idea of moving Japanese Americans to inland camps.

Her father, Dr. W. Melvin Strong, became director of adult education at Manzanar. He wrote a pamphlet, "Why Relocate," explaining to white staff and Nisei alike what it meant to start life over in the Midwest and East.

• The family sold their house and most of what they owned — all but an old piano, which came with them and which she still had decades later.
• They rode a bus across the Nevada desert from Salt Lake City, expecting a great adventure and a chance to help the war effort.
• Her first sight of the camp: the rock-walled entrance station, the guard towers, the barbed wire — and above all the mountains rising on every side. "It was a stark, but spectacular setting."

Camp life

• Her father insisted she go to school outside, in Independence, though some adults said she should attend the camp school with the Nisei because what was happening there was "so historic."
• Summer evenings meant free movies and games of kick-the-can — under the eye of armed guards in the towers.
• The family socialized with everyone, from Nisei residents to camp director Ralph Merritt, and she was struck by how peacefully and productively everyone got along.
• Her father once offered to introduce her to a visiting photographer. She declined — and later regretted missing Ansel Adams, there to make his famous photo essay on the camp.
• She loved the flower and vegetable gardens tended across the camp, the mess hall food, and exploring every corner.
• The family drove the switchbacks up to Whitney Portal for picnics, and posed on a giant glacial boulder with carved steps.

As the war went on and the panic faded, she said, the reasons for the camp "began to evaporate." Her father found a new job and the family moved on — for her, another adventure.

Going back

For years she heard nothing was left of the camp. In 1988 she returned with her husband, her son and his family. Approaching the same rock-walled entrance in the afternoon light, with the mountains towering nearby, she was overcome with emotion.

To her, Manzanar meant childhood adventure. She did not doubt it was a great tragedy for many Nisei, but felt it had to be understood in the context of its time.

Sources

Based on "LaPriel Strong Bush," 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."