WASHINGTON - Al Simpson and Norm Mineta shared a bear hug so strong that their glasses almost got knocked off, each visibly moved by the recollection of meeting nearly 65 years ago in the Heart Mountain internment camp.

They were young Boy Scouts then, living on opposite sides of the barbed wire surrounding the camp in Park County, where Mineta's family was forced to live during World War II. They went on to have long careers together as members of Congress, and now they want to draw on their chance meeting and lifetime friendship to give back.

The two men held a reception in the office of Mineta's Washington public relations firm Thursday evening to promote a new interpretive learning center to be built on the site of the internment camp. The 11,000-square-foot center will have exhibits, two re-created barracks living quarters, archives, a library and a reflection garden.

"What we're doing here is to make people remember that it happened, and it could happen again," Simpson told a gathered crowd of supporters.

Mineta and his family had been living in San Jose, Calif., but had to move to Santa Anita after the war broke out. The government had decided to detain all people of Japanese ancestry from the West Coast after forcing them from their homes.

"The Army had commandeered all the county fairgrounds and racetracks to put the Japanese-Americans in, because they all had built-in living quarters - horse stables," Mineta said.

In October 1942, his family had to move to the Heart Mountain camp.

"Being from California, we had no warm clothing, and schools weren't constructed yet, so our camp elders had asked for the Boy Scouts of America and the Girl Scouts of America to send in organizers to put troops together," he said.

Mineta's Scout leader invited the surrounding communities to bring their Scout troops to the camp for a jamboree. The young Wyoming boys didn't want to visit the camp of 11,000 people with its barbed wire, guard towers, machine guns and search lights.

"It was a formidable place," Simpson said. "When you drove past on your way from Powell to Cody, Wyoming, you knew that something bad was in there. I mean, you had to know that was something very, very sinister in that place."

But Simpson's Scoutmaster was "way ahead of his time," and brought the Cody troop to visit anyway, he said.

"That's when I met this kid who had a lot of hair and who was roly-poly," Mineta said, joking about the tall, lanky, balding Simpson. "And out of that friendship, that day, we wrote to each other through junior high school, high school and college."

When Mineta was elected mayor of San Jose in 1971, Simpson saw an article about it and sent him a letter. The two were both elected to Congress that decade. "Our friendship rekindled as if we were still part of that jamboree in 1943 as 12-year-old kids," Mineta said.

Given their early experience, they both worked to pass the Civil Liberties Act. Mineta went on to become secretary of both the Transportation and Commerce departments.

Now retired from government, they are committed to ensuring that the learning center gets built. Simpson said it will be a place to hold the artifacts of that time. People are going to come forward with photographs and "things they have cherished, or feel guilty about, and they're going to say there's a place for that now."

Heart Mountain Wyoming Foundation board member Doug Nelson said fundraising has been going well. Now head of the Annie E. Casey Foundation, Nelson spent a year as a student in the 1970s studying the Heart Mountain camp. At the time, there wasn't so much as a marker to note the camp's history.

"I was overwhelmed by the fact that I was confronting a piece of American history whose complexity and whose depth and whose relevance was, in fact, almost without parallel," he said. "I knew that there was a story here that had a meaning and a depth of meaning that was not fully appreciated."

The board has committed to raise $5.5 million in 36 months, Nelson said, and has already taken in $1.3 million. Backers are reaching out now to private foundations and historic preservation, civil liberties and Japanese-American groups.

He also called on Congress to appropriate funds for the center under a recently authorized grant program for the upkeep of all 10 Japanese-American internment sites.