BY MARGARET R. CHRISTIAN
HE 1993 FILM SCHINDLER'S LIST WON Academy Awards for Best Picture and Best Director, bringing attention
to the hitherto- obscure German war profiteer Oskar Schindler, who saved more
than 1,100 Jews from death in Nazi concentration camps. Schindler has now received
his due, but few are aware that during the same years of World War II several
smaller-scale Schindlers operated in the United States. Among them was Dr. Augustus
H. Foster, of Brawley, California.
After the bombing
of American naval bases at Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941, and the United
States' declaration of war, fear was widespread that Japan would launch an invasion
of the U.S. mainland. People also worried about how Japanese immigrants and
their American-born children might respond. Would they defend their new country
or assist the invaders? Many Japan-born individuals were quickly arrested because
of their "suspicious" affiliations or occupations.
Anxieties about
a Japanese invasion also gave rise to the notorious Executive Order 9066, which
sanctioned the internment in barbed-wire enclosed camps of all Japan-born residents
and Japanese Americans living within 1,000 miles of the Pacific Ocean. These
camps were in isolated areas from California to Colorado to Arkansas.1
"Subversive
Enemy Aliens"
Not all Americans were caught up in the panic and paranoia, and not all Japanese-Americans
ended up in relocation camps.
At the time of
the bombing of Pearl Harbor, Dr. Foster lived and practiced medicine in Brawley,
an agricultural community of about 12,000 in California's Imperial Valley. He
owned and operated the Brawley Medical Dispensary and a small hospital, and
also delivered babies in his office.
"The story
was that he would deliver babies on the front lawn for 50 bucks apiece,"
recalls longtime Brawley resident Leon "Andy" Anderson. "There
were two or three other doctors in town, but he was more willing to take care
of people-he was the kind of person who wanted to take care of everybody."
Anderson remembers in particular Dr. Foster's commitment to caring for Mexican
families; similarly, for "the Japanese families living in the vicinity
of Brawley, . . . the name of no other doctor comes to mind," writes Patrick
Sano.2
With the bombing
and declaration of war, Dr. Foster's patients were suddenly under suspicion,
viewed as "subversive enemy aliens" by their government and many of
their neighbors. The Monday after Pearl Harbor, Mr. Takahashi, owner of the
Union Drugstore for 21 years, was arrested and jailed. On the same day, Matilde
Honda, fresh from her training as a public health nurse at the University of
California, at San Francisco, was fired from her job at the Los Angeles County
Health Department and had to return home to Brawley. Early in January the Kikuchis,
a Japan- born farming couple, were shot to death in their home, allegedly by
a Filipino ranch hand in retaliation for the Japanese invasion of the Philippines.3
On February 19,
1942, the very day Executive Order 9066 was issued, Mr. Sano, whose ranch was
adjacent to the Kikuchis', was arrested. The Sanos' pastor, Rev. Kuwano, and
Mr. Uchida, a truck farmer who taught judo at the Japanese community center,
were also arrested. "Hysteria caused by the war affected everyone. . .
. It did not feel safe to be living in the area during that time," recalls
Florence Sano Izumi.4
What
to Do?
Dr. Foster had taken care of these families. He sent all his patients to Mr.
Takahashi's pharmacy. He made a house call to the Sano ranch in 1933 when Mr.
Sano almost died of blood poisoning and again in 1939 when Sano and his son
Patrick had eaten some spoiled cream puffs. He had treated the Uchidas' youngest
son for pneumonia-unsuccessfully-and attended his funeral. He had seen Mrs.
Fujimoto through a difficult pregnancy and the birth of her fourth child in
1941, and was concerned that she was still in delicate health.
Even though war
had broken out, Dr. Foster knew that these families were not his enemies. He
was not afraid of them; rather, he still wanted to take care of them. He was
able to hire Matilde Honda to work the night shift at the dispensary, but letters
he wrote to vouch for Mr. Takahashi's character failed to effect his release.
And it was rumored that all persons of Japanese ancestry would be evacuated
that spring. No official information was available, but the summary arrests
of Mr. Takahashi, Mr. Uchida, Mr. Sano, and Rev. Kuwano were hardly reassuring.
Dr. Foster feared
the worst, "that there would not be adequate food in the camps where we
were supposedly being sent," Mrs. Izumi recalls.5 He was afraid that Mrs.
Fujimoto would not be strong enough to survive the harsh conditions. He was
worried about her baby, Linda, and briefly toyed with the idea of fostering
her in his home in Brawley if her family were relocated. In any case, "life
in camp would not be desirable for youngsters."6
Keeping 6-month-old
Linda would certainly have meant running afoul of the law, a risk Mrs. Foster
was not enthusiastic about taking. Nor would Mrs. Fujimoto have left her behind.
But this suggested a different tactic: if the Fujimotos and other Japanese-Americans
had to leave in any case, why not move as many as possible out of the "military
area"-in advance of their forcible relocation-to a destination of his and
their own choice?7
As long as he
could manage it before any legal deadlines materialized, all that Dr. Foster
needed to implement his own operation was a network, a twentieth-century underground
railroad. He found such a network in the Seventh-day Adventist Church and its
institutions.
Not the Camps,
but an Academy
Mrs. Fujimoto and the children were members, along with Dr. Foster's family,
of the local Adventist congregation, and a former pastor, Elder Shaw, had taken
a pulpit in the Denver area. Shaw agreed to sponsor the family-Mr. and Mrs.
Fujimoto, Ernest, Jr., Irene, Allen, and baby Linda-and thus Dr. Foster's protective
instincts resulted in their relocating to Denver.
The Hondas, Kuwanos,
Uchidas, and Sanos were not Adventists. Could the same network be mobilized
on their behalf?
After the summary
arrests of February 19, Dr. Foster called on Mrs. Kuwano and Mrs. Sano to ask
permission to send their daughters Rose and Florence to a school either in Florida
or Colorado in advance of the rumored evacuation of Japanese and Japanese-Americans
to relocation centers.8 He gave the mothers the names of two other girls he
was also sending to school: Clara Uchida9 and Georgiana Honda.
As official edicts
appeared to justify Dr. Foster's fears, Pastor Shaw was able to make the local
arrangements to enroll the girls in Campion Academy, a boarding high school
in Loveland, Colorado, about 50 miles from Denver. Accordingly, on the evening
of March 29, 1942, the last day for voluntary evacuation, Dr. Foster drove the
four girls-Rose, Florence, Georgiana, and Clara-to the railway station at Niland,
California, to board the train for Denver. Matilde Honda and Mr. Fujimoto (his
family already having made the trip) accompanied them.10
In a sinister
indication that Dr. Foster was not the only one taking an interest in them,
when the young people arrived in Denver two strangers met them on the platform
"who instructed us to follow them," Mrs. Izumi has written. "Then
two other men appeared (one who introduced himself as Elder "Sniffle"
Shaw, saying he had a cold), and informed the first two that they were there
to take us to Campion Academy. . . . It brought to my awareness that the FBI
was monitoring Dr. Foster's activities."11
Denver Isn't
Safe
When Mr. Fujimoto joined his family in Denver, he found they were suffering
harassment. "We had trouble with the other kids," Irene, now Mrs.
Nakamoto, recalls. "Not the Adventist kids, but kids in the neighborhood-they
would shout things at us." She has memories of being escorted home after
school by Denver Junior Academy12 students massed around her and her brothers,
shielding them from the other kids who threatened them. "I still think
that is amazing, that children would do that for newcomers-they weren't any
older than we were."
A rock thrown
through a window of the family home seemed more ominous and resulted in another
move. Dr. Foster and Pastor Shaw thought the family would be safer "out
in the country," so the Fujimotos also went to Campion. Mrs. Nakamoto remembers
their new landlady, "Grandma Turner," churning her own butter and
insisting that the children faithfully practice the piano.
Adjusting to the
move from the California desert to the Colorado Rockies was difficult for the
Fujimotos, but Rose, Florence, Clara, and Georgiana, now living in the girls'
dormitory on the campus of Campion Academy, had the rigors of residence-hall
life to cope with as well. The "dean . . . and faculty members were extremely
helpful," Mrs. Izumi recalls, but "the indoctrination took awhile."
There was an incident
that will ring true with any student in an Adventist academy of that era. "We
went into the town of Loveland with a group of students, the usual Friday afternoon
activity before sundown. A comic book was found in our possession, and the four
of us were reprimanded by being given a washtub to fill with the dandelions
growing on the lawn in front of the school."13
And they were
homesick. The "care packages" of cantaloupe (perhaps from Mr. Uchida's
or Mr. Sano's ranch) and the letters arriving from Brawley and the internment
camps reminded the girls just how far they were from home and loved ones. Indeed,
in the fall of 1942 Rose's and Florence's mothers withdrew them from Campion
to join them in the Poston, Arizona, camp.14 But Clara and Georgiana stayed
at Campion until graduation several years later, as did Ernest and Irene Fujimoto.
Why
Risk It?
Why did Dr. Foster go so far? How was it that a letter of reference for Mr.
Takahashi turned into a one-man evacuation project that, for five families,
offset to some extent the officially imposed injustice and hardships of a dark
period of American history?
Not that anything
he did was illegal: a visit from an FBI agent (perhaps after the young people's
arrival in Denver) ended with the agent declaring, "Everyone should do
what you're doing."15 Nor was his financial outlay necessarily very large,
at least after the initial flurry of long-distance phone calls and perhaps some
assistance with travel expenses and school deposits, since Campion Academy and
Madison College both had active work-study programs.
But Dr. Foster
did what few others managed to do. As the threat of war became a reality, his
Christian conviction that he was his "brother's keeper" allowed him
to rise above widespread suspicion and hysteria and imaginatively enter into
the challenges facing those regarded as "enemy aliens." To him, they
were the "stranger . . . within thy gates," and protecting them was
his duty. He put his resources and his habits of thought-the priority he placed
on education, his strong identification with his church-at the service of his
neighbors in an emergency.
A phrase from
a letter he wrote to Florence during those first months at Campion illuminates
both Dr. Foster's motivation in helping others and the lasting, widening influence
of his investment in young people and their education: "He wrote that we
would be 'jewels in his crown.' I know for certain that Dr. Foster received
immeasurable joy in helping others. . . . For me, the 'jewel' is the love of
God that he instilled in my life. . . . It all came about because Dr. Foster
had manifested God's love by helping me toward attaining my lifework. I am left
with the desire to pass this love to others as he had done for me."16
Daryl Luthas,
Clara Uchida's son, agrees: "By Dr. Foster taking the risk of helping others
in a time of fear and paranoia, he set in motion positive, godly inertia that
has blessed many, many people for many decades. It is still in effect as the
children and grandchildren [of those he helped] impact this world in more positive
ways."17
Mr. Takahashi
became a baptized Seventh-day Adventist during his time in the internment camps.
Clara joined the Adventist Church during her time at Campion, as did her sisters
while they were at Madison. Their parents studied the Bible with Dr. and Mrs.
Foster back in Brawley after the war and were baptized as well. After graduating
from Campion, Clara studied nursing and then earned a master's degree in counseling.
Ernest, Allen, and a younger brother, Byron, who was born in Colorado, all became
physicians; Irene became a nurse and later earned a master's degree in English,
while her sister Linda took a degree in social science.
_________________________
1 Bill Knott,
"Prisoners of Hope," Adventist Review, Sept. 28, 2000, pp.
8-13; "Surviving Injustice," Adventist Review, Sept. 28, 2000,
pp. 14-17.
2 Personal correspondence with the author, June 14, 2001.
3 Patrick Sano quotes a story from the Brawley News dated Jan. 2, 1942,
in his correspondence.
4 Personal correspondence with the author, June 3, 2001.
5 Izumi correspondence.
6 Iwao Peter Sano, One Thousand Days in Siberia: The Odyssey of a Japanese-American
POW (Lincoln, Nebr.: University of Nebraska Press, 1997), p. 207.
7 A move to central or eastern Colorado or any state farther east would take
Japanese-Americans out of the "military area" that fell within approximately
1,000 miles of the West Coast.
8 Izumi correspondence. Patrick Sano recalls that Dr. Foster had raised the
subject with both parents before Mr. Sano's arrest.
9 Dr. Foster arranged for Clara's older sister Mamie to take dietetics at Madison
College in Tennessee during the war; she went on to teach social work at La
Sierra College. After the war Clara's second sister, May (who stayed in the
camp with her mother), also earned a degree in nutrition at Madison College
and later became a nurse.
10 In her correspondence (July 10, 2001), Matilde Honda Taguchi writes, "Dr.
Foster had contacted a Seventh-day Adventist church group and arranged my employment
at Porter Hospital as a staff nurse." She later took a position at Colorado
General Hospital (now the University of Colorado Health Science Center) and
still lives in the Denver area.
11 Izumi correspondence.
12 Now Mile High Adventist Academy and located in southern Denver near Porter
Adventist Hospital. In those days it was nearer to downtown Denver.
13 Izumi correspondence.
14 Dr. Foster made contact with Florence again in 1946 and sponsored her in
prenurse's training at La Sierra College.
15 Conversation with Dr. Augustus H. Foster, Jr. A request for files under the
Freedom of Information Act was fruitless, as no "records . . . indicate
that [Dr. Foster had] ever been of investigatory interest to the FBI."
Apparently, as the informal questioning his son remembers revealed no wrongdoing,
no official investigation was ever launched.
16 Izumi correspondence.
17 Personal correspondence with the author, May 22, 2001.
_________________________
Margaret R. Christian is an associate professor of English at the Berks-Lehigh
Valley College of Penn State University. She never met her great--uncle Gus--Dr.
Foster--but the family stories intrigued her and led her to contact those involved.
Dr. Foster died in Florida in 1984 at the age of 92.
