RUFFIN PREVOST Billings Gazette | Posted: Monday, March 24, 2008 12:00 am
CODY - A children's book about a talking magpie may seem an unlikely fundraiser for an interpretive learning center at the site of the former Heart Mountain internment camp, but it makes perfect sense to one man.
Shigeru Yabu, 75, lived with his family at Heart Mountain for more than three years and has just released "Hello Maggie!," a book he wrote about living in the camp while a boy.
The tale retells the true story of how Yabu made a pet of a magpie chick that later learned to mimic human whistles and phrases, including "Hello, Maggie," his regular morning greeting for the bird.
Magpies can learn to mimic sounds, including a few short phrases.
"The bird not only meant a lot to me, but also to my parents and a lot of other folks, people that came and visited. It gave a lot of people a lot of hope," said Yabu, who lives in Camarillo, Calif.
Yabu recruited a friend and former Disney animator, Willie Ito, to illustrate the book, which they published last year as the first project of their Yabitoon Books.
Ito was sent to a camp in Topaz, Utah, during World War II. His career as an animator and artist includes work on "Lady and the Tramp" and "The Jetsons."
Yabu is a director of the Heart Mountain Wyoming Foundation, a group working to finance and build a $5.5 million learning center at the site where nearly 11,000 Japanese-Americans were held during World War II.
"I know that it's going to be successful," he said of the project.
For nearly 30 years, Yabu worked with Boys and Girls Clubs in Southern California, helping establish and lead the Camarillo Boys and Girls Club.
A children's book seems a natural fit for a man who has spent much of his life working with kids.
Yabu was at Heart Mountain from the time he was 10 until he was 13 years old. Yabu is careful to point out that his impressions of the camp differ from the recollections of many adults at that time, who had a deeper understanding of their situation.
"Hello Maggie!" recalls youthful outdoor adventures, including "sneaking" out through the camp's barbed-wire fence, although guards routinely saw the boys slip out on their trips to the Shoshone River.
"I think the guard was probably laughing at the way we were sneaking out. Where could you go, and as young boy, what could you do?" he said.
"We heard so much about the Shoshone River, so we wanted to go. Especially in the hot summer, we loved to swim," Yabu said.
Boys from the camp made slingshots using inner tubes stolen from the motor pool, he said.
When they shot down a magpie nest, they found a young chick inside. Figuring it would be abandoned by its mother, Yabu decided to take it home. He greeted the bird each morning by saying, "Hello, Maggie."
"One day, when I said 'Hello, Maggie,' the bird said 'Hello, Maggie' back to me. I told my friends, and they called me a liar, but word got around and people started visiting our block, 14-1-C," he said. "Everybody loved the bird."
Yabu hopes to use profits from sales of "Hello Maggie!" to help fund the Heart Mountain learning center, which he said "is something we're doing to make bad come to good."
"A center like that could educate so many people. It's a way of learning from our mistakes so it won't happen again," Yabu said.
After his time at Heart Mountain, Yabu later enlisted in the U.S. Navy, and served for four years as a hospital corpsman. He said he hopes the learning center will tell the story of the many patriotic internees who helped with the war effort.
"We should be so advanced now that we can see the mistakes of the past and go on from there. I think we can use the interpretive center and museums and books as education, as a positive thing," Yabu said.
"We live in a country that's very young. We've made mistakes in the past, and we will make mistakes in future, but this is still the greatest country in the world," he said.