Based on one soldier’s opinion, the Christmas dinner served up by Army cooks at Vancouver Barracks in 1941 was pretty darned good.
That meal was part of a Columbian story a month ago, when we looked at holiday menus printed for Thanksgiving and Christmas dinners at Vancouver Barracks.
Those booklets weren’t just lists of familiar holiday food. They included unit rosters, including the men of Company E, 18th Engineers. Thanks to search engines, some of them still have stories to share. And the echoes from one story are now playing out in a new Broadway musical.
It helps to search for distinctive names, such as Henry Tyvand. A letter Tyvand wrote home in 1941 was reprinted in the Butte, Mont., newspaper. In a digitized version of the newspaper story, the Army private told his mom that he gained 10 pounds after he was drafted. The food at Vancouver Barracks was good, and there was lots of it, Tyvand wrote.
He mentioned that there were several Asian-Americans in the 18th Engineers, “including two Japanese and one or two Chinese. They are fine chaps and seem to be as patriotic as anyone.”
One of them was Takashi Kiyomura, listed in the Company E roster as an Army corporal. You can find him online, too. Kiyomura was one of many U.S. soldiers whose Japanese-American families were sent to internment camps. His family was sent to the Rohwer War Relocation Center in Arkansas. And that’s where actor George Takei (Sulu on “Star Trek”) and his family were interned in 1942.
The experiences of Takei, who was born in 1937, and his family inspired “Allegiance.” Takei is part of the Broadway musical’s cast.
It’s serious stuff, but an online history of the Rohwer center includes an incident that could almost be part of a comedy. A Japanese-American work crew was clearing forested land to help build the camp when a group of gun-toting locals showed up and marched them all to the local jail. The Arkansans thought that the internees were Japanese paratroopers.
Off Beat lets members of The Columbian news team step back from our newspaper beats to write the story behind the story, fill in the story or just tell a story.
