i Record-Courier
9
THURSDAY, JANUARY 29,2015
Part V: Baker’s Japanese Community, 1900-1942 BUSINESS
DIRECTORY!
By Gary Dielman (To contact the author e-mail tubingen@eoni.com)
Kajikawa/Kobayashi Family
In the April 1942 edition of Myrtle Lee’s
WWII newsletter, which was sent to Baker
County men and women serving in the U.S.
armed forces all over the world, Lee wrote,
“There is, as you know, no race prejudice,
nor war bitterness in our High School. Yukio
Yano is vice-president of the Senior Class
and rates high (academically). He plans to
be a Chemical Engineer. The highest rated
girl in the class is Grace Kobayashi and her
sister, Ruth, is third. Martha Oxnard is a
close runner up of Grace’s place and, since
the Japanese families are moving to a farm
near Vale, it will leave Martha at the head of
her class.”
According to ninety-year-old Grace
Kobayashi Shigeno, whom I’ve interviewed,
her mother, Masako (1901-1992), was the
driving force in seeing that her children suc
ceeded in Baker’s school system. And suc
ceed they did! Within five years (1938 to
1942), Masako saw four children graduate
from Baker High School: Haruko “Ethel” Ka-
jikawa in 1938, Masaaki “John” Kajikawa in
1939, and Kiyoko “Ruth” Kobayashi and
Toyoko “Grace” Kobayashi in 1942. During
their senior year at BHS, Grace was Presi
dent and Ruth Vice President of Torch
Honor Club, to which their brother John had
belonged earlier; sisters Ruth and Grace
were co-editors of the BHS yearbook
“Nugget”; and Grace was in first place and
Ruth in third place in academic rankings in
their senior year. Also during those five
years, Masako gave birth to her last two
children, Susumu “George” in 1938 and
Sachiye “Carol” in 1941.
Masako married twice. Her first husband,
Tomokichi “Tom” Kajikawa (1883-1927)
when he first came to this country worked
for a railroad company, probably Northern
Pacific, in Montana. He returned to Japan
in 1918, married Masako, and came back
to Washington with his bride. They settled
in Fife, near Tacoma, where Tom had a job
at a sawmill. The couple had four children:
Ethel, born 1919; John, 1921; Ruth, 1923;
and Grace, 1924. Their father, Tom, died of
pneumonia in 1927.
Masako's second husband was Susumu
“George” Kobayashi (1893-1970). He was
15 when he came to this country. He found
employment in Seattle as a houseboy,
working for a senator in the Washington
State legislature. The senator sent him to
high school to learn English and Spanish as
he hoped to work for. a railroad company.
George found employment in Montana
working for the same company as Tom Ka
jikawa.
Widow Masako married George in 1929.
George had met Masako through his friend
ship with Tom. (George later adopted
Masako’s four children.) George moved
Masako and children to La Grande, where
he was employed as a railway section boss
of an all-white crew, except for one Black
worker. Grace says that she attended
grades one through three in La Grande, al
though part of the third grade was spent in
Japan.
John & Ethel Kobayashi
In December 1933, Masako took the chil
dren—Ethel, John, Ruth, and Grace—to Hi
roshima, Japan, to visit their ailing maternal
grandmother. “We ran all over the ship,"
Grace remembers. In Japan they attended
a Japanese school. While the family was
away, the Depression in the U.S. led to lay
offs, which resulted in George being
bumped to Telocaset, a desolate railway
crew camp on the Union Pacific line about
twenty miles south of Union, Oregon. When
Masako and children returned from Japan,
they joined George at Telocaset.
Grace says she loved living at Telocaset.
Her family lived in company housing with a
yard where Masako planted a big garden.
Ethel and John rode the bus to Union High
School and Grace and Ruth attended the
one-room Telocaset elementary school.
Grace says she loved her teachers, espe
cially Mrs. Hays, who advanced her into her
sister Ruth’s class.
In 1937, George used his seniority to
bump the section boss at the Pleasant Val
ley station located twelve miles southeast of
Baker, so that the children would be closer
to a bigger high school. Ethel, a senior, and
John, a junior, rode the school bus to Baker
High School. Ruth and Grace attended
eighth grade at Pleasant Valley School, a
stone building, now a private residence, a
half mile west of Pleasant Valley. The next
year Grace rode the bus to Baker to attend
Junior High School. Ruth went to Walla
Walla, Washington, to be a companion to a
Nisei girl whose parents operated a variety
store there. (Nisei is a Japanese bom in the
U.S. of Issei parents, i.e., parents born in
Japan.) About a year later Ruth was back
with her family in Pleasant and attending
BHS.
While living at Pleasant Valley, Masako
had two more children, George in 1938 and
Carol in 1941. George was born at St. Eliz
abeth Hospital in Baker, but Carol was not.
As time for her birth drew near, Masako
traveled from Pleasant Valley to Baker to
stay with the Kuratas at the Crabill Hotel, lo
cated just a half mile from St. Elizabeth Hos
pital. As it turned out, the hotel was not close
enough. Masako gave birth in the Kurata’s
hotel apartment with Kuni Kurata and her
teenage daughter, Hod, assisting. Hod, after
receiving instructions in English from hospi
tal staff via phone, translated them into
Japanese, and relayed them to Kuni and
Masako, who spoke no English. The happy
result was a healthy baby girl.
Grace says that in Baker there was no in
terracial dating. The Japanese students so
cialized together, including traveling to
Ontario to play basketball with Japanese
students and those students coming to
Baker. Baker’s adult Japanese residents
also socialized together.
After graduation from BHS in 1938, Ethel
Kobayashi went to Seattle to study sewing
and tailoring. John graduated from BHS the
next year and followed Ethel to Seattle,
where he attended the University of Wash
ington.
In February 1942, George Kobayashi lost
his job as foreman of an all-white railroad
maintenance crew, a position he had held
at Pleasant Valley since 1937. The reason
for the layoff, said management, was fear
that Kobayashi’s white crew members might
harm him, due to racism toward Japanese
that surfaced as soon as the war broke out.
But Grace says her father had good rela
tions with his white crew. And local farmers
helped her mother when it came time to
butcher her pigs. The more likely reason for
George losing his job was the U.S. govern
ment’s not allowing persons of Japanese
descent to work around railway transporta
tion.
The family had to leave company housing
immediately, Grace says. For a while they
stayed with the Hayashis and Kuratas in
Baker, while their father went to the Vale
area to find a farm to lease, which he did
with the help of a farmer for whom son John
had worked during summer vacation from
college. Then Masako and Grace followed
him. Ruth remained in Baker until gradua
tion in May staying with the Francis and
Elaine Schmidt family, for whom she had
been working as nanny and housemaid.
(The Schmidts owned The Bootery, a
women’s shoe store.)
In 1943 Ethel Kobayashi (1919-2003)
married Ben Tsukamaki (1919-1996). Ben
was born at Orillia, Washington. After re
turning to Japan for a while, in 1936 Ben’s
family moved to Caldwell and Notus, Idaho,
where Ben farmed with his father and broth
ers growing onions. Later for many years
Ethel and Ben operated Ontario Market in
Ontario. Ethel and Ben had three children:
Carolyn, Ethel Ann, and William Ben.
The connection between the Kurata and
Kobayashi families continued twenty-three
years after Carol Kobayashi’s birth in the
Crabill Hotel (see Part IV). In 1964, thirty-
eight-year-old Haruyo “Hod” Kurata Koda,
who had married William Koda (1923-1996)
in 1949, was fatally injured in a car and train
collision that took place on the way to Vale
after the birth of their last child, Julie. All oc
cupants were injured, but Hod arrived back
at Holy Rosary Hospital in Ontario in the
worst condition and died three days later.
Coincidentally this was the first day on the
job for newly-registered nurse Carol
Kobayashi. Carol found herself attending to
Hod, who had assisted at Carol’s own birth,
as related above. Julie Koda Clark, fifty
years after surviving the car accident that
killed her mother, is today owner-operator
of the Outdoorsman store in Ontario. Her
husband, Mark Clark, is chief of police of
Payette, Idaho.
In the spring of 1942, when John was at
tending the University of Washington in
Seattle, he avoided internment by returning
to Baker to help his family move to Vale,
where he farmed for
several years. To
ward the end of the
war,
John
was
drafted and was sta
tioned
in Tokyo
working in a quarter-
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masters unit. After discharge from the army,
with the assistance of the Gl Bill, John con
tinued his education at the University of
Washington, from which he graduated with
a degree in marketing. He ended up in Cal
ifornia working for Northrop Corporation
(later Northrop Grumman) in the purchasing
department. He and his wife, Masako, had
one son, Kelly. John Kobayashi died in 2007
at age 86.
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After graduating from Baker High School
in 1942, Ruth Kobayashi (1923-2013) at
tended Boise Junior College in Boise,
Idaho. In 1946 she married Thomas Tanaka
(1924-2014). Thomas was a 1941 graduate
of Jefferson High School in Portland. From
1942-1945 he was interned with his family
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sons of Japanese descent. Ruth and Tom
settled in Seattle, Washington, where Tom
earned a chemical engineering degree from
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In 1948 Grace Kobayashi married
Charles K. Shigeno (1924-2007), whom she
met when he was working for her family
driving tractor after discharge from the army.
In 1942 Charlie was living in Auburn, Wash
ington. As a Japanese resident he was sent
to the assembly site in Puyallup, Washing
ton, followed by internment, first at the
Pinedale and then the Tule Lake relocation
camps, in California. From there he volun
teered to work on a farm in Montana. But
soon after arriving in Montana he was
drafted into the army and ended up in Italy
in the famed all-Japanese 100th Battal-
ion/442nd Regimental Combat Team.
After they married, Grace and Charlie
found work in Boise, Idaho, then in Denver,
then back to Boise, where they raised two
girls, JoAnn and Rosemary. Charlie worked
for the Northrup-King Seed Company and
Grace worked in law offices and at home
typing transcripts of court reporter record
ings. Tn 1976 they moved to Manson, Wash
ington, near Chelan, where they raised
apples, until selling their orchard in 2001.
Charlie died in 2007 at age 83. Today
Grace, age 90, resides alternately in the
homes of her daughters in Kent, Washing
ton, and Redmond, Oregon.
George and Masako farmed in the Vale
area, then in about 1948 moved to Payette,
where they farmed. Their two youngest chil
dren, George and Carol, finished their
schooling in Payette. In 1966 the parents
moved to Ontario, where George died in
1970 and Masako in 1992.
George Kobayashi, Jr. (1938-2010), grad
uated from Payette High School in 1956,
then attended the University of Washing
ton, where he earned a PhD degree. He
spent his whole career working for Boeing.
George and wife, Frances, had one child,
Sheryl. George died in Seattle at age 72.
In interviews of Carol Kobayashi Wininger
(1941- ), the youngest of the Kobayashi
children, she says her earliest memories
are of living on a farm near Vale helping her
mother tend the garden. Carol graduated
from Payette High School in 1960, then ob
tained a nursing degree in Spokane, Wash
ington. After several months as a nurse in
rainy Seattle, Carol returned to Eastern
Oregon, where she spent her whole nursing
career at Holy Rosary Hospital (today St.
Alphonsus Hospital) in Ontario, and retired
in 2014 after fifty years as a nurse. Today
Carol volunteers at Four Rivers Cultural
Center and Museum, Presbyterian Commu
nity Care Center, and Children’s Relief
Nursery, all located in Ontario. Carol has
two children, son Jeffrey and daughter
Nicole.
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