A Buried Past: Uncovering EO 9066 at the Fairgrounds

Executive Order 9066 - Issued by President Franklin Roosevelt on February 19, 1942, the order authorized the forced removal of all persons deemed a threat to national security from the West Coast to "relocation centers" further inland – resulting in the incarceration of approximately 120,000 American citizens and legal residents of Japanese ancestry.

I was eight months old at the time Executive Order 9066 was signed into law.

Fast forward to the 1960s. I was a young college kid helping to set up the sports car road racing course for the annual Cal Club/SCCA (Sports Car Club of American) races that encircled the parking lot of the Los Angeles County Fairgrounds in Pomona (now called the Fairplex).

One of our jobs was to set up nearly three miles of temporary wooden snow-fence around the inside perimeter of the race course which acted as the physical demarcation of the safety area between the fast-moving sports cars and the spectators.

The hundreds upon hundreds of five-foot long, two-inch diameter steel pipes that we used to support the snow fence and long, rolled-up bales of the fencing itself were stored in a tired-looking, musty building near the east side of the track.

(There were great rolls of nasty, rusted barbed wire stored in that holding building as well;, I remember joking about using the stuff for crowd control.)

That building was something like two hundred feet long and about forty-fifty feet wide. It was windowless (only small vents along the top edge of each side) and had a set of double doors at the front and only one small door at the rear.

At first, and from the outside, we all thought that the old building might have functioned at one time as a stable for the horse racing that the Fair offered during it’s traditional early Fall run.
Inside, along each wall, there were row upon row of rusting frames and broken springs that once had been very small triple- high bunk beds. I never counted but there must have been well over two hundred such “beds” in that building.

At one end, there were about twenty or so wash basins (cold water only) and, right down the middle of the building, there was a double row (back to back) of some forty or fifty toilets just sitting there with no dividing screens or walls. The toilets were just the bottom part of a modern toilet, without water tanks. Of course we never used them, but the guess was that they were most likely plumbed from below for flushing (of courseT the mental pictures that we got could hardly be avoided).

This is where where hundreds upon hundreds of people of Japanese descent (two-thirds of which were American citizens and one-third legal residents) were held against their will in stark concentration camp conditions while they were “processed” like war criminals to be sent to crude, remote “relocation centers” across the country.

They were allowed to take only what they could carry-on suitcase. They lost their rights, their homes, their businesses, their friends, their way of life, and their children lost their childhoods.

Hastily-converted horse stables at Santa Anita Park in Arcadia were another locally-sourced holding facility for over 18,000 SoCal residents and hundreds of Japanese American families. The Pomona facility that temporarily housed 5500 included Japanese from South LA, Monterey Park, Silverlake – but mostly of Japanese Americans from Whittier/Monrovia east to Pomona. - Doug Stokes

The author is a Senior Editor with LA CAR / LACar.com and was the long-time Communications Director for the late Irwindale Speedway. An extended version of this story includes the 2016 dedication of a memorial plaque at the Fairplex (A Buried Past: When the SCCA Uncovered EO 9066).