Grace Giese

The following information about Frances Kumazawa  was abstracted from a 1945 Reed College document "Created Free and Equal?" 

The family moved in the late 1920s to a small farm at Scappoose, Oregon, where the mother and children raised a garden and poultry kept a cow or two, rabbits, and a growing kennel of foxes. The father worked for the railroad company. The children attended the district school, where they were the only Japanese members; Grace entered Scappoose High School, and the family was well on the way to successful establishment. But in 1935 the father was killed falling from a trestle. The family, of course, was eligible for industrial compensation, and as soon as the news found its way back to Japan, the male relatives there immediately brought pressure to bear upon the widow to return with her children. Since there were no relatives here, the mother was finally persuaded that she could do better going back to Japan, but from the first Grace opposed the idea, saying that her father would not want it that way, for he had desired his children to grow up to be "Americans -- without an accent!" The girl consented to go to Japan as a visitor only, and she was firm in her determination in the face of pressures from her Japanese relatives and the ultimate tears of her mother. After less than seven months in Japan, during which time she had not only puzzled but antagonized her relatives, she departed on her return to the United States, completely contemptuous of the sacred folderol of Japanese customs and conventionalities. The best she could say for Japan was that the place was "quaint."

Upon her return to Oregon she took a job as household helper and entered Lincoln High School where she was graduated in June 1940. During her summers she went into the fields to work for the Japanese farmers around Gresham, and being a strong and skillful worker, she was able to amass a small bank account and was at all times well-clothed, properly supplied with books and school equipment, and did not behave any differently from the average girl who has money for a coke after school and a movie on Saturday afternoon

In the fall of 1940 she entered the University of Oregon. She was supplied with a pretty and suitable wardrobe (which she had designed and made herself, and she had a job as household assistant in a professor’s home in Eugene. During her first year in college she picked up odd jobs of typing and maintained such a high standard of excellence in her scholarship that in her second year she was made a lab assistant in the department of biology. She was making a name for herself in the science department.

NOTE 11 - Pfc. Grace Giese (nee Kumazawa) enlisted in the WAC last June upon her graduation from the University of Missouri where she had majored in bacteriology. Back of her graduation, a fact which she accomplished with high standing and entirely at her own expense, lies a miniature classic success story, the sort with which the history of the United States of America is replete.

Grace Kumazawa was born in Sherwood, Oregon, on December 2, 1920, the oldest child of an intelligent Japanese farmer and his picture bride. The father had been in the United States since 1890, had worked at all sorts of jobs up and down the Pacific coast, had acquired an education, and with it a high regard for the American way of doing things, a regard which he instilled into his children along with the philosophy that "In the United States you can get as much education as you want and make a fine and successful life for yourself if you are willing to work."

Grace is a girl with a high order of intelligence, boundless good health, and a thoroughly independent mind. This latter fact she demonstrated at the age of sixteen.

When in the spring of 1942 came the order for evacuation. It was a bitter experience to leave the beloved university and enter an "Assembly Center."  Life there as almost unbearable for this ambitious and high-spirited girl, and when, within three weeks of entering, there came from Eastern Oregon a call for volunteers to work in the sugar beet fields, she and her younger brother and sister (who had followed her from Japan) volunteered. They spent the summer and until late fall crawling between the beet rows under the blistering sun. Undaunted, they went on to onions, lettuce, potatoes, fruit. The work was hard, the heat terrific, the living conditions in the "labor camp" uncomfortable; but there were compensations; there was freedom from the barbed-wire enclosure, and there were good wages. In the fall of 1942 Grace entered the College of Idaho at Caldwell as a junior. She won respect, admiration, and friendship there, and she would have remained to graduate except that the courses in science were limited. Investigation showed that the University of Missouri had the courses she desired and they would accept her. After another summer in the fields, she entered the Missouri U in the fall of 1943, as a senior in bacteriology. She was happy at Missouri, made many friends there, and it was there also that she met Ralph Giese, an aviation cadet from Cleveland, Ohio. They were married on Christmas Eve, 1944. Here we have one of the despised "mixed marriages." Whether it succeeds or not only time can tell. In the meantime Pfc. Grace Giese serves as chief serologist with the WAC Medical Detachment at Camp Crowder, Missouri.