Life and Times in Leschi
The Army Camp: A Researcher’s Odyssey Part 3
Soon after my second search through school district papers for references to the army camp at Garfield’s playfield, I was invited by chance to a reading from a new book, “We Are Not Strangers,” by local artist and writer Josh Tuininga. It’s the story of a friendship between Sam Akiyama, a Japanese American, and Marco Calvo, a Sephardic Jew in Seattle who was a great-great uncle of the author. When Mr. Akiyama and his family, along with most other Japanese Americans in the western US, were taken away to concentration camps in 1942, his Jewish friend offered to look after the family’s business and property. At the end of the war, the family returned to Seattle and found all of their possessions and affairs intact. This was unusual; Japanese American property was often stolen or ruined, sometimes by people who had pledged to care for it.
The surname Calvo was familiar to me. Back in the 1970s I had been friends with a fellow around my age with that family name, and I knew he was Sephardic. We hadn’t seen each other in decades, but I knew how to find him because of our common interest in hydroplane racing, so I called him out of the blue. We remembered each other well. When I told him that I was interested in learning more about the relationships between Japanese Americans and Sephardim, he offered to introduce me to some community elders.
Before long, he connected me with a circle of nonagenarians, actual eyewitnesses to the army camp: people who had lived within walking distance of it.
Several of the old-timers told me that they saw a searchlight in a “nest” surrounded by sandbags. The Garfield camp was a spotting location for anti-aircraft brigades. There was great fear of bombing by Japanese planes, especially attacks targeted on Boeing, shipyards, and Seattle’s port. Searchlights scanned the night sky for enemy bombers for at least three years. There were tents for the company of about 30 soldiers, with water piped to the site for makeshift showers. A fellow who was a pre-teen at the time and lived directly across the street recalls that soldiers would visit his family to take indoor showers, and officers would sometimes be invited to dinner. Housewives brought cookies to the army men. After the soldiers left, their tents remained for a while. My informant told me that he would climb into tents and find “girlie magazines” left behind.
No one, however, has repeated the notion that the camp was there to spy on the Japanese community. It was not a suitable location. The Japanese American district was centered from Yesler to Jackson up to about 14th Avenue, much closer to downtown in what is still known as Nihonmachi, or Japantown. And it is now evident that the camp was an installation for spotting enemy bombers, not a spy center, based on the observations of contemporary eyewitnesses. My supposition is reinforced by the school board minutes regarding Franklin and West Seattle: the Army’s request came from its Anti-Aircraft Division.
Once I had learned that I was looking for documentation on anti-aircraft installations, I got back in touch with the National Archives. The specialist there on pre-1960 military records found something of interest.
But before returning to the Archives in Maryland, I followed up on another lead the Archives provided: a HistoryLink story entitled “Guns force children from city parks in 1942.” The article reported that, in January 1942, army anti-aircraft guns took over city parks to defend Seattle from aerial attack. Troops of the 63rd Coast Artillery Regiment (Anti-Aircraft) installed guns and searchlights. My search of Seattle Parks Department archives produced 56 pages, which further revealed that in April 1944, the army contacted the Parks Department, noting that the military’s occupancy of numerous parks had been covered by a variety of informal agreements, and that it would be in the interest of both the government and the Parks Department to formalize the arrangements. The Parks Board requested and obtained from the City Council an ordinance (#73374) ratifying the Army’s use of the parks. But I have found no such documentation for the school district.
Camp, marked by arrow a bit north of the floating bridge. (Present-day Powell Barnett Park).
On my return to the National Archives, I searched an index for documents mentioning Seattle or searchlight. I combed through several boxes of folders without finding anything helpful, until I was just about at the bottom of the pile. Folded and taped into the back of a binder was an 11” x 17” piece of tracing paper with what looked like a hand-drawn map. It was evident that trying to remove the tape would damage the paper, so I went to the help desk. My problem was escalated through the bureaucracy, finally ending up in the hands of the document conservation office. The job of Archives is to make information available to the public, and they were happy to do what would be necessary, but it was going to sit on someone’s desk for a few weeks till it reached the top of the queue.
I paid a $20 fee, and eventually I received a good-quality scan of the whole drawing. It showed the location of every searchlight defense installation in Seattle and vicinity from December 14, 1941 (a week after Pearl Harbor was attacked) to September 1944. And sure enough, one of them is marked right where Powell Barnett Park sits today.
After a while, a helpful staffer at the Wing Luke Museum reached out to one of Sally Tsutsumoto’s daughters, who reported that Sally is in fact alive but doesn’t remember the playfield being used as an army camp. Eventually the daughter invited me to meet Sally. It was true, Sally no longer recalled the army camp, but it was delightful, finally, to close the circle and meet the person with whom the whole story had begun. What I don’t know, and probably never will, is what Sally actually said to her interviewer. It’s possible that Sally and others believed that the Army was spying on their community. But she might have been misunderstood or misinterpreted. The key quotation: “While Japanese-Americans isolated themselves within their homes, military troops established stations to monitor Japanese activity.” Note that “Japanese” activity was to be monitored. In the context, it sounds like that refers to Japanese American activity. But perhaps Sally really knew what it was about: the searchlights, looking for Japanese bombers.
~Roger Lippman
The author writes monthly about Leschi history and his experiences over his 48 years in the neighborhood.
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