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doesn't matter what race they are. Also, we all did songs from the great black blues musicians and singers.
That being said, I can honestly say I have no idea what black people went through back then. None of the books and none of the conversations could give me the true, visceral feeling of what it was to be black or brown in America.
Oh wait. In college I met Barbara Yoshida and we went together for awhile. She became a lifelong friend and we're still in touch. She was the first to give me a true picture of racial stereotypes because her family had been put in an internment camp in Idaho during World War II. Remember that war? When we fought the Germans, Italians and Japanese? Well, there were Germans, Italians and Japanese in America at the time but guess who got put into camps!
Barbara's dad was a farmer, very poor, living in Beaumont, Idaho, with his wife, Michi. Barbara did tell me a couple positive stories about the imprisonment of the Japanese. A guy in their town bought all the stuff the Japanese had to sell before they left and kept it for them. How cool is that? Also, some of their neighbors would hollow out watermelons and smuggle stuff into the camps for them. So there were some good people in those communities but the internment was terribly wrong.
I think Barbara's older sister was born in the camp.
When they got out, her dad went back to farming but all three kids made it into college and that's where I met Barbara. Her brother, Bruce, is a stockbroker and manages my vast stock portfolio. He must make fifteen or twenty bucks a year in commissions. Barbara married Ed Berthiaume, who became a Boeing executive and they lived for ten years in Singapore. It was there they introduced me to the watch man.
This has nothing to do with race, but it was fun. These were the first days of fake Rolexes and Guccis and all the rest but I'd never seen one. It was like a spy novel. I went to their apartment and Barbara called a cut-out number and hung up. Another number called her back and a few minutes later a guy showed up with a briefcase full of fake watches. Excitement! I bought three or four for about 30 bucks each. 30 bucks for a Rolex! Those were the days when you could tell they were fakes because the second hand jumped instead of rotating smoothly. I gave one of those Rolexes to John Powell, my manager, and he wore it for years. I told him it was a fake, but he loved it anyway.
So Barbara filled me in on racism against the Japanese.
Want a happy ending? Late in life her mom, Michi, went into real estate. Here was this little grandmother who knew everyone in that part of Idaho and she sold a lot of real estate. They went from her dad dragging irrigation pipe to a nice life on the money Michi brought in.