It’s been a long time since I wrote about the journeys of women. I haven’t figured out exactly why, because there are millions of amazing stories out there to write about. I think I stopped because most of the stories I know about are already told somewhere, and I felt like I was rehashing them for little purpose.
Last night, however, I found a story that reignited my passion for sharing the journeys of women. My friend Sarah had invited me to join her at the Asian Celebration, a local festival. We ate good food, wandered the art exhibits and artisan booths, and watched Taiko drummers and Balinese dancing. But the highlight for me was the Minidoka Swing Band. It’s exactly what it sounds like, a big band playing ’30s and ’40s jazz standards, but with a twist. It’s dedicated to the Japanese-Americans who were interned during WWII, and named after an internment camp in Idaho. Some of the members were interned there or other places, and others are the descendants of people who were.
I’ll highlight here one of the vocalists, Nola Sugai Bogle. Her official band member bio can be found at http://www.minidokaswingband.com/index.php/meet-our-minidoka-swing-band-musicians/ I learned only a little about her from the concert, namely that she had been interned at Minidoka. But her bio tells much more about her journey. She was born in 1938 in Detroit, Michigan to a Japanese American father and Chinese American mother, and grew up loving music. Then her family was interned at Minidoka in Idaho, where she remembers hearing big band music over the radio. It doesn’t say where she lived after that, but in the late ’50s she won a talent/beauty contest in Ontario, Oregon, and moved to Boise, Idaho, where she moonlighted as a drummer/vocalist. She later moved to Portland, Oregon, and married pianist/jazz club owner Sidney Porter. Years after he died, she married Dick Bogle, the first African American TV news anchor in the Northwest (among other things; his fascinating bio can be read at https://oregonencyclopedia.org/articles/bogle_dick_1930_2010/#.XGnkuehKjIU ) She has been performing in a variety of groups and places all along aside from when she took time off to stay home with her children, and joined the Minidoka band in 2008.
She and her son took turns being the vocalists for several of the songs performed by the band last night. They were both fantastic. After the concert, I thanked her for sharing her voice with us. She said I was sweet, and proceeded to pack up the band things. I’d have loved to talk to her more, but didn’t want to keep her. So I’m grateful to find her online bio and see a bit of her story.
I love to hear stories like hers, because even though her journey was forced, unjust, and shouldn’t have happened, it was part of her story, and part of what makes her who she is. And she found something beautiful (music) to keep her going, which is a huge part of her life. Granted, this is all what I am reading into her story by what little I saw and read about her. But from what I saw, that’s what I felt she would say. That and to learn from history and never let mistreatment of an entire ethnic group happen again in our country.
I wish very much that I had recorded the stories told to me by some amazing people that I met years ago when working at a school in Salem. Like Chella, a Holocaust survivor, who came to speak to my students when I was an instructional assistant in Salem. I got to pick her up and take her home to her apartment in Portland, where she showed me the three photographs that survived her childhood. Then there was Channary, a Cambodian woman whose amazing and heartbreaking story I heard bits and pieces of from other fellow coworkers at that same school, and the custodian from Laos who told me a bit of his story too (I know; he’s a man and this blog is focused on women, but his story deserves to be mentioned just the same).
These journeys were not by choice, and had traumatic aspects to them. But they all share something: courage and hope for a better future. Their stories need to be told and retold. Because sometimes our life’s journey includes places we don’t intend to go, but they can still bring us to places of beauty if we have the courage to go on. And of course, to fight for justice and peace in the world so people can choose the journeys they take.Nola Sugai Bogle is on the left, singing with heart and soul. Photo by the blog’s author.