Discovery of World War II internment camp letters brings back post-war Denver memories

"V" is for victory. Alissa Williams holds up a T.K. Pharmacy newspaper ad that was found in a stash of World War II internment camp letters and documents in Denver. AP Photo/Ed Andrieski.

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A young couple renovating an abandoned pharmacy in Denver's Five Points neighborhood found a hidden stash of letters and documents from World War II Japanese-American internment camps.

I missed the AP story about the find when it appeared on Thanksgiving. But saw it today at MSNBC Online. I noticed that the name of the building was T.K. Pharmacy and it was owned by Colorado native Thomas "T.K." Kobayashi. T.K. Kobayashi was my childhood doctor. My mother was a nurse who knew the doctor from her work at Denver's Mercy Hospital. I was born at Mercy, as were five of my brothers and sisters. My mother liked Dr. Kobayashi so much that she hauled us from southeast Denver to his Five Points office upstairs from the pharmacy for check-ups and immunizations and the usual assortment of maladies. If I remember correctly, Dr. Kobayashi was in the U.S. Army during the war, possibly with the famous Nisei 442 Regimental Combat Team. At least one of his partners was also a veteran, a Dr. Momei, who walked with a limp and could be gruff.

Five Points was predominately black at this time, home to the Rossonian Hotel that housed the most famous jazz club between St. Louis and L.A. Count Basie, Louis Armstrong, Dinah Washington and Nat King Cole all performed there from the 1930s to 1960s. They also stayed at the Rossonian, since they weren't welcomed at other Denver establishments.

The T.K. Pharmacy also wasn't far away from the small Japanese-American community located in the area where Sakura Square is now situated. During the war, Colorado's Japanese-Americans were not relocated to the camps, even though there was one, Camp Amache, in the southern part of the state.

According to the AP story, Tak Terasaki, T.K.'s brother-in-law, ran the pharmacy during the war. He was reputed to be involved with group that advocated for internees' civil rights. His wife was secretary to Gov. Ralph Carr, the gutsy Republican who openly invited Japanese-Americans to Colorado during the war. That cost him his political career, but he remains a Colorado hero.

Red-lining kept people of color out of white Denver neighborhoods until the late 1960s. That was the case for both housing and businesses, which is why the T.K. Pharmacy was located in Five Points. It was a thriving business -- the waiting room was always filled. In 1960, our family moved from Denver to Moses Lake, Washington, where my father built ICBM silos. Dr. Kobayashi and his colleagues eventually bought an office building across from Mercy Hospital in City Park South. They were only happy to take the rent money of white folks, many of them physicians.

So it goes.

Dr. Kobayashi made house calls. Not unusual in the 1950s. One night in the dead of winter, I awoke in agony with a pain in my groin. My mother was a nurse but this was beyond her skills. She called Dr. Kobayashi and he came to the house. My father was not pleased, as he was a World War II veteran and, well, "Japs" had been the enemy during the recent worldwide conflagration. To his credit, he didn't interfere when the doctor came to call. I had an strangulated inguinal hernia. Not sure what the Doc did, but whatever it was, the pain stopped. A few weeks later, I went under the knife and he visited me as he made his rounds at Mercy Hospital. My mother was on duty, too, along with one of the nursing nuns. I got ice cream, I remember that. Not sure of the Doc prescribed that or if my mother gets the credit.

That wasn't the last time I was attended by Dr. Kobayashi. I had two more operations and was in the hospital twice with pneumonia before I turned 10. I was a sickly kid, but haven't spent a night in a hospital since.

What's going to happen to the letters, documents, newspapers and catalogs unearthed at the T.K. Pharmacy? Alissa Williams and her husband offered them to the Japanese American National Museum in L.A. Seems like they should stay in Colorado where they've resided the past 80 years or so. A testament to the good doctors. That's the name of one of the stories in my first collection. "The Good Doctors." It was based on the three Nisei doctors with the busy walk-up office in Five Points.

Read the AP story by Colleen Slevin here.

Alissa Williams holds up a an advertising flyer from T.K. Pharmacy at her home in Denver. The flyer from the early 1940s was found with other documents and letters during renovations at a former Denver pharmacy owned by Japanese-Americans. Some letters arriving from Japanese-American internment camps during World War II were very specific, asking for a certain brand of bath powder, cold cream or cough drops. Others were just desperate for anything from the outside world. AP Photo/Ed Andrieski. By: Colleen Slevin, Associated Press DENVER (AP).- Some letters arriving from Japanese-American internment camps during World War II were very specific, asking for a certain brand of bath powder, cold cream or cough drops — but only the red ones. Others were just desperate for anything from the outside world. "Please don't send back my check. Send me anything," one letter said from a California camp on April 19, 1943. The letters, discovered recently during renovations at a former Denver pharmacy owned by Japanese-Americans, provide a glimpse into life in some of the 10 camps where 110,000 people of Japanese ancestry, including U.S. citizens, from the West Coast were forced to live during the war. They were written in English and in Japanese, expressing the kinds of mundane needs and wants of everyday life, such as medicine as well as condoms, cosmetics and candy. About 250 letters and postcards, along with war-time advertisements and catalogs, came tumbling out of the wall at a historic brick building on the outskirts of downtown. The reason they were in the wall and how they got there are a mystery, particularly because other documents were out in the open. The letters haven't been reviewed by experts, though the couple that found them has contacted the Japanese American National Museum in Los Angeles to gauge interest in the missives. It wasn't unusual for internees to order items from mail order catalogs or from the many companies that placed ads in camp newspapers, selling everything from T-shirts to soy sauce, said Alisa Lynch, chief of interpretation at the Manzanar National Historic Site, which was the location of a camp south of Independence, Calif. They earned up to $19 a month doing jobs at camps and some were able to bring money with them before they were interned, Lynch said. The building where the documents were discovered had been vacant for seven years when Alissa and Mitch Williams bought it in 2010. The T.K. Pharmacy was originally owned by Thomas Kobayashi, a native Coloradan of Japanese descent, but during the war it was run by his brother-in-law, Yutaka "Tak" Terasaki, who died in 2004, according to his younger brother, Sam Terasaki of Denver. Sam Terasaki was in the service then and doesn't remember his brother talking about taking orders from internment camps. He said his brother may have gotten involved because of his longtime participation in the Japanese American Citizens' League, a national group dedicated to protecting Japanese-Americans' civil rights. He said his brother's wife worked as a secretary to Gov. Ralph Carr, who took the politically unpopular stand of welcoming Japanese-Americans to the state. Some writers noted seeing ads for the pharmacy. One letter from a man who said he arrived at the Poston, Ariz., camp "half dead" addressed his letter directly to "Tak" and asked for chocolate. "I had to wait twenty hours in the middle of the desert at (illegible) Junction, no place to go, just wait," he wrote. The other camps the letters came from included Heart Mountain in Wyoming, Gila River in Arizona, and others in McGehee, Ark., Topaz, Utah and Granada in southern Colorado. Japanese-Americans who lived in Colorado and elsewhere in the interior West weren't interned. The relatively small but stable Japanese-American community that began taking hold in Colorado in the 1880s provided a support network for those forcibly moved from California to the state camp, state historian Bill Convery said. Internees at that camp were able to leave with permission and could visit Denver as well as a fish market near the camp opened by two men of Japanese ancestry. It was relocated to Denver after the war. Convery said the pharmacy could have been one of the few Japanese-American owned pharmacies in the West, since business owners on the coast were interned. It could offer products favored by internees — who had one week to pack up two suitcases and sell any assets — and they might have felt more comfortable dealing with a Japanese-American-owned company, given tensions during the war. Internees couldn't bring much to camp and they didn't know where they were headed or how long they'd be gone. "So as much as anything could soften the blow of that unimaginable situation, those businesses did what they could," Convery said. Alissa Williams has been poring over the letters and wondering about the stories behind the polite orders, including one for diabetes medicine. Her grandmother, aunt and uncle suffer from the disease and she wondered what they would do without medicine. The mother of a 2-year-old, she also thought about how she would cope in such a camp. "I can put myself in their place, they're having kids, they're sick and they can't get what they need," she said. "... But no one is complaining."

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Alissa Williams holds up a an advertising flyer from T.K. Pharmacy at her home in Denver. The flyer from the early 1940s was found with other documents and letters during renovations at a former Denver pharmacy owned by Japanese-Americans. Some letters arriving from Japanese-American internment camps during World War II were very specific, asking for a certain brand of bath powder, cold cream or cough drops. Others were just desperate for anything from the outside world. AP Photo/Ed Andrieski. By: Colleen Slevin, Associated Press DENVER (AP).- Some letters arriving from Japanese-American internment camps during World War II were very specific, asking for a certain brand of bath powder, cold cream or cough drops — but only the red ones. Others were just desperate for anything from the outside world. "Please don't send back my check. Send me anything," one letter said from a California camp on April 19, 1943. The letters, discovered recently during renovations at a former Denver pharmacy owned by Japanese-Americans, provide a glimpse into life in some of the 10 camps where 110,000 people of Japanese ancestry, including U.S. citizens, from the West Coast were forced to live during the war. They were written in English and in Japanese, expressing the kinds of mundane needs and wants of everyday life, such as medicine as well as condoms, cosmetics and candy. About 250 letters and postcards, along with war-time advertisements and catalogs, came tumbling out of the wall at a historic brick building on the outskirts of downtown. The reason they were in the wall and how they got there are a mystery, particularly because other documents were out in the open. The letters haven't been reviewed by experts, though the couple that found them has contacted the Japanese American National Museum in Los Angeles to gauge interest in the missives. It wasn't unusual for internees to order items from mail order catalogs or from the many companies that placed ads in camp newspapers, selling everything from T-shirts to soy sauce, said Alisa Lynch, chief of interpretation at the Manzanar National Historic Site, which was the location of a camp south of Independence, Calif. They earned up to $19 a month doing jobs at camps and some were able to bring money with them before they were interned, Lynch said. The building where the documents were discovered had been vacant for seven years when Alissa and Mitch Williams bought it in 2010. The T.K. Pharmacy was originally owned by Thomas Kobayashi, a native Coloradan of Japanese descent, but during the war it was run by his brother-in-law, Yutaka "Tak" Terasaki, who died in 2004, according to his younger brother, Sam Terasaki of Denver. Sam Terasaki was in the service then and doesn't remember his brother talking about taking orders from internment camps. He said his brother may have gotten involved because of his longtime participation in the Japanese American Citizens' League, a national group dedicated to protecting Japanese-Americans' civil rights. He said his brother's wife worked as a secretary to Gov. Ralph Carr, who took the politically unpopular stand of welcoming Japanese-Americans to the state. Some writers noted seeing ads for the pharmacy. One letter from a man who said he arrived at the Poston, Ariz., camp "half dead" addressed his letter directly to "Tak" and asked for chocolate. "I had to wait twenty hours in the middle of the desert at (illegible) Junction, no place to go, just wait," he wrote. The other camps the letters came from included Heart Mountain in Wyoming, Gila River in Arizona, and others in McGehee, Ark., Topaz, Utah and Granada in southern Colorado. Japanese-Americans who lived in Colorado and elsewhere in the interior West weren't interned. The relatively small but stable Japanese-American community that began taking hold in Colorado in the 1880s provided a support network for those forcibly moved from California to the state camp, state historian Bill Convery said. Internees at that camp were able to leave with permission and could visit Denver as well as a fish market near the camp opened by two men of Japanese ancestry. It was relocated to Denver after the war. Convery said the pharmacy could have been one of the few Japanese-American owned pharmacies in the West, since business owners on the coast were interned. It could offer products favored by internees — who had one week to pack up two suitcases and sell any assets — and they might have felt more comfortable dealing with a Japanese-American-owned company, given tensions during the war. Internees couldn't bring much to camp and they didn't know where they were headed or how long they'd be gone. "So as much as anything could soften the blow of that unimaginable situation, those businesses did what they could," Convery said. Alissa Williams has been poring over the letters and wondering about the stories behind the polite orders, including one for diabetes medicine. Her grandmother, aunt and uncle suffer from the disease and she wondered what they would do without medicine. The mother of a 2-year-old, she also thought about how she would cope in such a camp. "I can put myself in their place, they're having kids, they're sick and they can't get what they need," she said. "... But no one is complaining."

More Information: http://www.artdaily.org/index.asp?int_sec=11&int_new=59112#.ULQw3HaGFF4[/url]
Copyright © artdaily.org