House passes memorial bill
It took a year and two trips through the House of Representatives, but a bill that will give federal status to the Japanese American internment memorial on Eagle Harbor has cleared Congress and awaits the president’s signature.
If signed into law, the bill would designate the site of the historic Eagledale ferry dock and the monument being built there, as part of the National Park system, and a satellite of the Minidoka Internment National Monument in Jerome County, Idaho.
On March 30, 1942, 227 islanders of Japanese descent, most of them U.S. citizens, gathered at the Eagledale dock to be taken to internment camps in California – the first in the nation to be detained. Some were later transferred to the Minidoka facility.
The new designation is unlikely to bring any immediate funds to the memorial project, which is roughly $300,000 short of its goal for the next phase of construction and $3 million shy of completion.
But Clarence Moriwaki, chair of the Nikkei Internment and Exclusion Memorial Committee, said acknowledgment from the government was as meaningful as the designation.
“The recognition from the federal government was the most important thing,” Moriwaki said. “Because for the people who actually went through this 66 years ago there was no recognition. Congress was silent.”
Moriawki hopes the monument, already six years in the making, will be completed while the aging members of the interment generation are still alive to appreciate it.
“The project will get done, and it will be a lasting story for our nation and for the world,” he said. “But to me it’s going to be a very sad day if none of the survivors are there to see it open.”
Rep. Jay Inslee of Bainbridge, who sponsored the memorial bill, was frustrated that the bill had been held up in the Senate for so long but gratified by the results this week.
“It is long overdue,” Inslee said on the House floor Tuesday. “We will finally present a monument to a chapter in American history that should never be occasioned again.”
Inslee first introduced the bill in February 2007. It passed unanimously in the house but stalled in the Senate and languished there for the rest of the year without making it to the floor for a vote.
Eventually the bill was packaged with 60 other pieces of public lands legislation in a consolidated Senate bill, which passed April 10. The package won approval in the House Tuesday by a vote of 291 to 117.
Inslee said no one spoke out against the Bainbridge memorial effort specifically, but that there are lawmakers in Washington who don’t feel the monument is appropriate.
“There are still people here that don’t understand that this is not about passing judgment on what people did in the 1940s, but rather a lesson we want to teach our children about not letting fear overcome liberty,” Inslee said Wednesday in Washington, D.C. “But there is a very wide consensus that this is the right thing to do.”
Town Hall on Tuesday night
After strong turnout the first time around, organizers of a second town hall meeting are hoping for similar participation Tuesday at the American Legion post on Bucklin Hill Road.
The meeting starts at 7 p.m.
“A lot of people don’t feel like they’re being heard,” said Adjutant Fred Scheffler. “We don’t have an agenda. We just want to give them that chance.”
The forum was going to address a possible change to the structure of the island’s government, but the theme has been expanded.
Attendees now will discuss how to make local government work better in general.
About 150 people, including the mayor and city councilors, showed up to a similar forum in February.
Wierzbicki named deputy
Planner Chris Wierzbicki was named Deputy Planning Director this week, according to Mayor Darlene Kordonowy.
Wierzbicki joined the city last year to lead the planned overhaul of Winslow Way. He will be deputy to Kathy Cook, who will assume departing director Greg Byrne’s position on an interim basis later this month.
Byrne annnounced his resignation last week after a little over a year on the job.
Get a read on ‘Hall Brothers’
The Feb. 27 1981 edition of the Bainbridge Island Review devoted three column inches of page 2 to Gary White’s research into the Hall Brothers shipbuilders.
The coverage so tickled White that he still has copies; little did he know then that his pet project would eventually lead to a book.
“Basically, what happened is that I got hooked. Literally,” he said.
White will share the story of his head-long dive into a slice of Bainbridge history by reading from that new work, “Hall Brothers Shipbuilders,” tomorrow afternoon at Eagle Harbor Book Co.
Back in the early 1970s, White’s work as a model ship appraiser led him to check out a specimen owned by one Ralph Hitchcock.
The model intrigued White, who was himself interested in constructing a half model of a ship representative of those built in Puget Sound in the late 19th century.
So he asked for Hitchcock’s advice about where to start researching such a design. Who was the most prolific shipbuilder in the region during that time?
“Hall Brothers, bar none,” Hitchcock told him.
White’s initial research into the family and their business led him to the evening and weekend consumption of nearly 20,000 news articles over a period of 35 years.
The three Hall brothers, Isaac, Winslow and Henry, began their work in far-flung locations. It was Isaac who lighted in this region in 1874 to help build the Schooner Z.B. Haywood. With the area’s abundant timber among other draws, his brothers soon followed. Hall Brothers built its sailing ships out of Port Ludlow from 1874 to 1880, and then relocated to Bainbridge in 1881, first in Port Blakely and then in Winslow.
White’s initial archival research led to contact with the Halls’ descendents and family friends and to old-time Bainbridge Islanders, through whom he collected photos and stories to add to his background material. All told, he estimates 300 hours worth of interviews.
He wasn’t initially interested in turning his project into a book.
Then Arcadia Publishing, for whom he’d previously edited a book on maritime Seattle, got wind of the project and pitched the idea. White was game, but at the time didn’t consider the product the be-all end-all.
“My basic love is research. That’s where I really feel I shine,” White said. “Sure, a half ship model might have sparked it, but after that I fell in love with the family, the vessels…it was wonderful.”
Yet, when the book was printed in March and arrived on his doorstep, White couldn’t help but tear up at seeing the beautifully packaged compilation of his decades of labor.
“A lot of people wouldn’t understand that, but it is really an emotional thing,” he said.
White reads at 3 p.m. May 4 at Eagle Harbor Book Co. Call 842-5332 for more information.
