Ever heard of Bob Fletcher? Me neither. He is someone people should know about:
Bob Fletcher 'never did agree with the evacuation'. Of his actions during the war he said, 'I don't know about courage... It took a devil of a lot of work.'Bob Fletcher, a former California agriculture inspector who, ignoring the resentment of neighbors, quit his job in the middle of World War II to manage the fruit farms of Japanese families forced to live in internment camps, died on May 23 in Sacramento. He was 101.
His death was confirmed by Doris Taketa, who was 12 when Mr. Fletcher agreed to run her family's farm in 1942, the year she and her extended family were relocated to the Jerome War Relocation Center in Arkansas.
"He saved us," Ms. Taketa said.
After Japan bombed Pearl Harbor on Dec. 7, 1941, the United States government forced 120,000 Japanese-Americans on the West Coast out of their homes and into internment camps for the duration of the war.
Near Sacramento, many of the Japanese who were relocated were farmers who had worked land around the town of Florin since at least the 1890s. Mr. Fletcher, who was single and in his early 30s at the time, knew many of them through his work inspecting fruit for the government. The farmers regarded him as honest, and he respected their operations.
After President Franklin D. Roosevelt signed an executive order in February 1942 that made the relocation possible by declaring certain parts of the West to be military zones, Al Tsukamoto, whose parents arrived in the United States in 1905, approached Mr. Fletcher with a business proposal: would he be willing to manage the farms of two family friends of Mr. Tsukamoto's, one of whom was elderly, and to pay the taxes and mortgages while they were away? In return, he could keep all the profits.
Mr. Fletcher and Mr. Tsukamoto had not been close, and Mr. Fletcher had no experience growing the farmers' specialty, flame tokay grapes, but he accepted the offer and soon quit his job.
For the next three years he worked a total of 90 acres on three farms - he had also decided to run Mr. Tsukamoto's farm. He worked 18-hour days and lived in the bunkhouse Mr. Tsukamoto had reserved for migrant workers. He paid the bills of all three families - the Tsukamotos, the Okamotos and the Nittas. He kept only half of the profits.