Two Sacramento Women

Two women born within a year of each other living in Sacramento.  They lived a little over 2 miles apart as the crow flies.  However, especially, at the time, it would take a fairly long ride to get between the two places.  They did not know each other, lived very different lives.  

The upper is Kiyo Sato (portrait date unknown), a respected author and nurse.  We read her book "Kiyo's story" in the Citizenship class I am taking this summer.  The book is a portrait of her family and the hard work they did to develop a farm in the 1930s outside of Sacramento next to the then abandoned Mather airfield.  The book also centers their forced internment 1942-1944.  They came back to find their farm in ruins but, through extremely hard work, were able to restore it.

The lower picture is group picture of my family in 1962.  My mother upper left.  Living the suburban life with her husband and three children.  A committed volunteer and Girl Scout.

The upper picture (without as much detail as I would like) is a map showing where they both lived.  My family had two houses in the Arden Park/Wilhaggin area marked with purple circles towards the upper left.  The Sato's farm is marked in an aqua circle center right.  It was 20 acres somehwhere near there.

I wrote a short essay about this:

Kiyo’s Sacramento

Kiyo Sato (born 1923) was about the same age as my mother Claire Baumann Ginsburgh (born 1924).  Claire moved to Sacramento around 1956 with her husband Allen and two young children, Sandy and Charlie.  I’m the oldest born 1952.  They stayed until 1970 when my father’s job was transferred to Fullerton in Southern California and I went off to college.  I again lived in Sacramento 1974-1977.

Kiyo’s Sacramento seemed a very different place from the place I inhabited.  My parents chose to live in the newish suburbs north of the American River.  They wanted ‘good schools (ie white). My father, an Ivy League trained engineer, worked for Aerojet near Nimbus past Mather Air Force Base on the other side of the river.  Like many of my friends’ fathers.

But not so different!  When I look at the map, Kiyo’s family farm is only 2 miles (as the crow flies) from where I lived.  Though it longer to travel there; the farm was on the other side of the American River.  During my childhood, the Howe Ave bridge (1969) and the Watt Ave bridge (2003) across the American River had not been built yet

The Ginsburgh family 1962 Sacramento

While I grew up nearby, Kiyo’s family returned from the internment camp and was busy building back (at great effort!) their farm near the Mather airfield.

I’m quite sure that common knowledge about the Japanese internment had not hit in 1962 (or even 1972).  I certainly didn’t know about it as a child.  They never talked about in school even though the internment directly impacted Sacramento families.  My parents didn’t speak of it.  I’m sure they didn’t know and likely would not have concerned themselves with it.  Anyway, before their time in Sacramento.  In their 30s, they cared about raising their children and providing for their family.  They loved the suburban life and they wanted themselves and their children to look good.  They knew few, if any, Japanese people.  Nor did they know anybody who farmed in or near Sacramento.

Though before my birth, that Japanese internment took place right there in Sacramento.  Somehow that had never occurred to me.  The government forcibly moved families like the Satos who lived not two miles from the site of my home in Arden Park.  The wartime authorities allowed people to ransack the farms that Japanese had built with great effort, steal their land and equipment, ruin their houses.  The Sato family lost much of their crop-producing plants and likely their dogs starved to death.  They didn’t get any compensation until much later.  And not much respect. 

This mirrors another project I’m working on.  Despite my parent’s denials, we had relatives who died in the Holocaust from 1942-44 in the Auschwitz and Sobibor death camps.  In October, family members and I will travel to Amsterdam to place a memorial (called a stolpersteine) in front of the places they last lived.  Certainly the Japanese internment on the west coast pales before catastrophic fate of the European Jews.  But it’s two sides of the same coin of violence, assault and theft.