Ida Alkire

Personal

Vocation

Family

Japanese-American community activist born after her father and nine older siblings were sent off to the internment camp on May 18, 1942, even though the parents had been US residents in Seattle for more than 20 years. The family were devout Roman Catholics. Her mother was retained at the Puyallup, WA relocation center because she ws pregnant. The military tried to force the birth, giving the mother Theresa castor oil and pills, and she tried to cooperate by running around and taking alternately cold and hot showers, shoveling her own coal to heat the water. The morning after she arrived, little Ida and her mother were packed off on a train to Camp Minidoka near Hunt, ID where they were reunited with the other 10 members of their family. A sickly baby, Ida was hospitalized with bronchial pneumonia at only a few months old. Her younger brother Vincent was born while the family was interned at Camp Minidoka. Eventually all nine of the sons in the family served in the US military, two before WWII was over. After the war, the family was allowed to return to their lovely middle-class home in Seattle but their home had been stripped of everthing, including the light bulbs. With the government compensation of $250, the family bought a refrigerator. A serious child, Ida seldom smiled, perhaps having absorbed the family sorrow, the lack of privacy and the physical hardship in which she spent her early years. Her mother had two more children after their return from the internment camp, for a total of 14 children (one died in infancy before the parents left Japan). Eight of the boys and Ida graduated from college. She joined the Peace Corps in North Africa, married an architect and settled on Mercer Island in WA. She became a community activist, working toward the betterment of Seattle's neighborhoods. As mother of two boys and a girl, she became active in school activities and later worked part time as a food publicist, and is a partner in a fledgling import business. Active in the Japanese-American Citizens League, she supported a bill that asked President Ronald Reagan to issue a government apology and compensation to the Japanese-Americans who had been interned during WWII. Ida's father died in 1967. Her mother has lived well into her 80s.