An Infamous Date

Anyone moderately familiar with American history knows that Franklin Roosevelt, in announcing war with Japan, described December 7, 1941, as "a date which will live in infamy." People are less familiar with another infamous date, also related to Roosevelt and Japan, and the subject of our most recent camping trip.

Seventy years ago today, February 19, 1942, just two months after the attack on Pearl Harbor, Roosevelt signed Executive Order 9066, which authorized the government to remove residents and citizens of Japanese descent from their homes on the west coast and imprison them indefinitely in internment camps. Ostensibly this was done to "protect" them from prejudice and retaliation, but in reality, this WAS prejudice and retaliation.

More than 100,000 residents, two-thirds of whom were citizens born in this country, were given mere days (if that) to sell their homes, businesses, and belongings, and to pack two suitcases to take with them to...somewhere. They were then placed in hastily and inadequately built camps as close as Southern California and as far as Arkansas. Due process was thrown out the window.

I had always been interested in the internment camps, and a couple months ago, after studying about Pearl Harbor, I introduced the topic to Elias. It's a hard subject to explain to a kid, but I had a couple children's books on the camps, which made it as approachable as possible for a 7-year-old.

A couple weeks later, when deciding where we should go on our next camping trip (Oliver's first!) I decided we should visit Manzanar, site of one of the internment camps, located in Middle of Nowhere, California.

We hadn't yet visited such a somber location as a family, but I felt it was important to see, especially while Elias was so interested.

So last weekend, we packed up and drove the five hours to Lone Pine, just a few miles from Manzanar. The drive was long and took us through landscape that can only be described as desolate. It was easy to imagine the bewilderment of Japanese-Americans trying to make sense of where they were being sent after having been forcibly removed from their homes.

Today, not much remains of Manzanar, yet it was an enriching, if sobering, experience. Manzanar is now designated as a national park. An auditorium built toward the end of the internment period now houses a modern, interactive, and informative museum. You can follow a driving tour of the grounds. A few structures remain, and some others (a guard tower and a couple barracks) have been recreated, but most of the former buildings' locations are marked with just a plaque. The government plans to eventually recreate more of the camp, but for now, it consists largely of overgrown brush. An obelisk in the cemetery area stands in honor of those who died in the camps.

If you live in or are visiting Southern California, Manzanar is definitely worth a trip. It's history that more people should know, and that we should never forget.

Here are some photos from our visit.

Site of the ironically-named camp newspaper:


Home plate:


Anna and Elias in a reconstructed barrack:

Moving On...Again?

Wow, it's been a while. (Seems like I start every post that way now!)

If we're friends on Facebook, you might have seen that a couple weeks ago I alluded to big news, so here it is:

We're selling the house again. Hopefully. Again.

As you may recall, things didn't go so well last time. Perhaps I really should have taken the freak-summer-in-Southern-California-thunderstorm-while-signing-listing-documents as an omen. We kept lowering the price, but eventually it got to the point that we weren't going to be able to sell it for what we wanted.

So, what has changed? Can we sell it for what we want now? Hahahahahahaha! No! But we have determined that if we sell now, we might be able to avoid a short sale.

See, our most recent plan was for Steve to retire around this time next year, at which point we would rent this place out and move somewhere else, likely Illinois. Then I was talking with a friend of mine who is very up on the real estate market and other financial stuff, and he said that unless we were making money on the house, it wouldn't be worth it. I said that we would probably lose money, but we would have additional tax write-offs and whatnot. He said it would take so long to get back to the point we want (basically, what we paid for it), that we would be crazy to hold onto it. He said we'd be hemorrhaging money to save what's already lost. That's when I had my a-ha moment and realized he was right.

The market also isn't showing signs of recovering at all here, so, as I said, selling now means we might avoid a short sale. Waiting a year almost guarantees we won't.

The house has been on the market for a week now, and we have had a lot of traffic and positive comments. If we sell for the asking price, we will just about exactly break even after commission. Our down payment and all we've put into the house will be gone, but at least we won't continue to lose money on it.

If we don't get our asking price, then we're looking at a short sale that could drag out for months.

Our next step is still up in the air, and depends a lot on how soon the house sells. We might rent a place around here until Steve is ready to retire, or Steve might become ready to retire sooner than he planned. In any case, we will likely be gone from Southern California by or around this time next year. It likely will not involve full-time RVing, but might involve some significant part-timing, depending on how things go. Of course, things rarely go as we plan, so who knows.

In other news, we took Oliver out for his first camping trip in the Jupiter Too last weekend. I'm going to work on a write-up of that in the next couple days.