Friday, January 8, 2010

The Hat Lady Returns

I picked up a bus in Santa Monica today and there was the hat lady from my neighborhood whom I haven't seen in months.But instead of a homemade grocery store hat she was wearing a store bought thing I can only describe as something a Victorian woman would have worn on a tiger hunt in India.She did not seem to know who I was today so I did not mention to her the rather strange headgear.

Sunday, January 3, 2010

Farewell to an old friend

I received an email last night about an old friend that passed away in early Sept down in the North County San Diego area.Suzy was our bookeeper for years and had retired some years back and moved back south to her home area.She was born in Brawley CA in 1920 and lived in St.Louis,Paris and Los Angeles but she was also Japanese American and she and her family were interned at the Poston,Ariz war relocation center.Poston was three camps with 17,000 people which made it the third largest city in Arizona at the time.Irony of Irony it was designed by Del Webb who went onto fortune building retirement"resorts" in Ariz but Suzy was a prisoner in her own country for doing nothing wrong.The camp was built on the Colorado Indian Reservation over the objection of the tribal council but approved by the BIA.What is sad is that the same thing could happen today given the hate filled rants of folks like Rush,Ann,Glenn,Sean etc who use the "Illegal Aliens" as the bogeyman.Suzy was a fascinating woman who did not mention very often her treatment at the hands of a right wing sentiment gone overboard much like they still preach today with of late more invective.I have never been to Poston but I have been to Manzanar up in the Eastern Sierra a few times and it is a haunting place to think they kept loyal American citizens prisoner because they wern't white anglos.