From a Classroom Assessment to the Topaz Museum

From a Classroom Assignment to the Topaz Museum

By Jane Beckwith

Looking back, 1982 seems as if it were just a few blinks ago, punctuated by a whole bunch of high school graduations. Life is like that for a high school English teacher. Just when you talk a class into liking poetry, doing a little research, or laughing at lame jokes, they graduate! But sometimes, if you are lucky, you can get students interested in a bit of local history with national significance. That’s what happened in my journalism classes at a small public school, namely Delta High, in 1982, when we embarked on an oral history project about the Japanese American internment camp that was located sixteen miles outside of Delta during World War II.

Delta was a boomtown in the 1980s, when construction of the Intermountain Power Plant attracted workers from all parts of the United States and Sweden. The streets were packed with trucks with Los Angeles Water and Power logos on their sides. Pick-ups from Texas were just as prolific. The city had to install a stoplight to allow people on the north side of town to get to the post office without taking a five-mile detour. Another elementary school was built on the south side of town. The new trailer park was full, as were all of the motels. Naturally, the high school was crowded with students who fell into two groups: those whose families had lived in the area since 1913 or so and those who had come into town on Tuesday. Instead of just one journalism class with ten students, I had two classes with about thirty-six students. It was all the editor of the school paper and I could do to think up fresh stories to assign them.

Right after homecoming, I knew I had to branch out and find stories outside of the school for them to write about. Another problem in class stemmed from the “two groups of students”— the newcomers did not like being in Delta. Too small, too boring, too far from anything. The more they complained, the more the students with deep roots in the community seemed apologetic for the town. And since I was a teacher with deep roots in Delta, I, too, was tired of hearing the kids whose dads worked for Bechtel say, “When I lived in the Philippines” or “Saudi Arabia is a nicer place than this place.”

They had no idea of the struggle it must have been to tame the Sevier River, deal with the terrible clay soil left from Lake Bonneville, endure the wind, give birth in a tent, or make a house from railroad ties! My grandparents had driven into the flat, lured by the Carey Land Act, just threescore years and ten before 1982.

Growing up after the war, I had always been fascinated by hearing my parents talk about Harry Yasuda, a man held in Topaz whom my dad hired to work in his newspaper office. Since that had occurred just forty years earlier, it seemed ideal to send those thirty-six budding journalists out in the community to interview people from Delta who had worked at the camp.

Wendy Walker was the editor of the school paper, and her enthusiasm for the project included asking her father, who had been a Navy pilot, to speak to the class. His story of returning home after many near-death battles in the Pacific ended with this question: “How could they ask me to lay my life on the line when the very things I was fighting for were being violated in my own backyard?” After hearing that, the students brought in artifacts and stories every day. In March many of them attended the University of Utah’s conference on “Japanese American Relocation and Redress.” There we met Leonard Arrington, Sandra Taylor, Dean May, and several people who had been in Topaz and had primary accounts that fascinated all of us. The Japanese Americans who embraced our work were the key to moving the project forward.

By the end of the year members of the class had won the right to compete in the National History Day event in Washington, D.C. But graduation harvested most of the students, and

Martha Knight’s class of 1944–1945, Topaz Relocation Center. (Utah State Historical Society, MSS C 239, box 6, no. 65.)

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