February 19, 1942 – President Franklin D. Roosevelt signs Executive Order 9066. This action leads to the forced removal of all those of Japanese ancestry living on the West Coast and to their imprisonment in ten confinement sites across the western United States.
During the early days of World War II, immediately following Pearl Harbor (December 7, 1941) the United States government was very concerned about possible Japanese air strikes on the west coast of America. In order to “protect” the country from possible sabotage, a great injustice occurred – with every American citizen of Japanese descent who was living on or near the west coast was ordered to surrender homes, businesses and belongings, and then be relocated to ten different make-shift internment camps set up in the western mountain states of the United States.
One such location was Heart Mountain, Wyoming, named for the heart-shaped mountain peak located in the plains of Wyoming directly east of Yellowstone National Park. I share this story because Heart Mountain, Wyoming is where my mother – a teacher from Trenton, Missouri, and my father – a U.S. Army Staff Sargeant from Wayland, Iowa – met in 1944.
My father, George E. Boller, was absolutely appalled at what he found when he first arrived at Heart Mountain in September 1944. While the soldiers had fairly comfortable barracks to live in, the living conditions given to Japanese-American citizens was atrocious. In a letter he wrote in 1994, George described his experience this way, “It was a shock to me. This was nothing but a hell-hole – with tar-papered covered barracks, central dining areas, and latrines.”
In an effort to make this atrocity in American history more palatable to the public, the U.S. Government hired other American citizens to help make this make-shift community more livable. One such person was my mother, Dixie Lee Boyer, who after graduating from the University of Colorado in the spring of 1944, was offered a teaching job that paid $2,400 per year, plus room and board, working with hundreds of young Japanese-American children. Her stories of teaching on a daily basis – in temporary classrooms filled with innocent American-born children – break our hearts.
Sadly, this whole sad story of what Uncle Sam did to thousands of Japanese-American citizens during the war was pushed under the rug until the 1960’s. My parents stayed in touch with a handful of men and women they met at Heart Mountain, celebrating with them when some finally won some form of retribution for this terrible “war crime.”
READ MORE ABOUT THIS IOWA STORY HERE.
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For more information about the internment camps and their postal history I recommend “Detained, Interned, Incarcerated” by Louis Fiset and published by the Collectors Club of Chicago. I still may be available from them at . I appreciate seeing the Iowa postal history material you show.
Thank you, Kenneth. I’ll check it out!