Day 4836: Bob Fletcher, A Hero & Japan's Shinkansen.

                 

"Confessions": junk torn paper collage.

  

Want music?

    Click: Marilyn McCoo, One Less Bell.

 

2GN2S

Bob Fletcher, A Hero

 

While neighbors were imprisoned in camps, he tended their farms for free, saved their profits, and faced death threats. They returned home to blooming orchards.

In 1942, the trains began leaving California's valleys, carrying thousands of Japanese American families toward fenced camps under Executive Order 9066. Homes were boarded up. Orchards went silent. Signs on fences read: "Evacuation Completed."

Bob Fletcher, a young agricultural inspector in Florin—a small farming town south of Sacramento—stood by the roadside and watched his friends and neighbors vanish behind barbed wire.

Most were farmers. Third-generation strawberry growers, fruit orchardists, vegetable producers. Hardworking people whose families had cultivated California soil for decades. Their only crime was ancestry—Japanese heritage in a nation gripped by fear and racism after Pearl Harbor.

When their fields were left behind, weeds began creeping over carefully tended soil. Resentment filled the air as white neighbors eyed the abandoned land with a mixture of opportunity and vindication.

While others saw a chance for profit, Bob Fletcher saw an obligation.

He volunteered to manage the farms of three families—the Tsukamotos, the Nittas, and the Okamotos—promising to keep the trees alive, the fields producing, the land cared for until they came home.

If they came home.

Bob worked eighteen hours a day. Pruning fruit trees. Irrigating fields. Harvesting crops. Maintaining equipment. Doing the work of multiple families alone.

And he did it while facing the cold glare of neighbors who whispered—and sometimes shouted—that he was "betraying his own," that he was a "Jap-lover," that he should let the land go to rot like the families "deserved."

Some threats were more direct. He received anonymous warnings. People slashed his tires. Vandals damaged equipment. The hostility was real and constant.

The interned families, grateful and desperate, offered Bob their houses—comfortable homes with running water and electricity. "Please, stay in our house while we're gone," they urged.

Bob refused.

Instead, he slept in the rough bunkhouse where migrant workers had stayed during harvest season—a bare-bones structure with no amenities, cold in winter and sweltering in summer.

Even after marrying Teresa Cassieri in 1943, he stayed in that bunkhouse. Together, they worked the fields side by side under the California sun, tending someone else's land as though it were their own.

Teresa was essential to keeping the farms alive—partner in labor and courage, though history often forgets her name.

Here's what makes Bob Fletcher's story even more extraordinary: he could have taken every dollar the orchards earned.

No one would have blamed him. The owners were gone, imprisoned without trial or due process. Wartime conditions made oversight impossible. Many farm managers did exactly that—pocketing profits, selling off equipment, letting the land deteriorate.

Bob did the opposite.

He divided every profit in half—keeping only what was fair payment for his labor and depositing the families' share in bank accounts at local banks, saving it with interest for their return.

If they returned.

For three years, Bob Fletcher worked those farms. Through harvest seasons and dormant winters. Through rationing and labor shortages. Through the loneliness of being ostracized by his community for choosing conscience over tribalism.

In 1945, the war finally ended. Executive Order 9066 was rescinded. Japanese American families began the long journey home—many to find their properties sold, stolen, or destroyed. Their possessions gone. Their savings vanished. Their life's work erased.

The Tsukamoto, Nitta, and Okamoto families stepped off trains in Florin expecting the same.

They arrived expecting ruin but found their orchards blooming.

Their homes intact, exactly as they'd left them.

Their equipment maintained.

And bank accounts waiting—containing three years of profits, carefully saved, with interest.

Bob had kept every promise.

Al Tsukamoto, who was a teenager when his family was taken to the camps, later said: "Bob Fletcher was the greatest man I ever knew. He saved everything we had."

Bob didn't seek recognition. He returned quietly to his work as an agricultural inspector and later joined the California Department of Food and Agriculture. He and Teresa raised their family. He rarely spoke about what he'd done during the war.

When people asked, he would shrug and say simply: "It was the right thing to do."

Decades later, as Bob entered his 90s and then passed 100, the Japanese American community began ensuring his story was told. Oral histories were recorded. Newspapers published features. The Tsukamoto family farm, which Bob had saved, became a historic site.

Bob Fletcher died on June 3, 2013, at age 101.

His funeral was attended by children and grandchildren of the families he had helped—people who existed because Bob Fletcher had refused to let hatred destroy their parents' and grandparents' livelihoods.

They came carrying photographs of the farms as they looked in 1945—blooming, thriving, saved.

Proof of what survived because one man refused to look away.

Bob Fletcher's story isn't about heroism in battle or grand gestures captured by cameras. It's about conscience in peacetime, decency in the face of hostility, and the choice to do right when doing wrong would have been easier, legal, and profitable.

While 120,000 Japanese Americans were imprisoned without trial, while their property was stolen and their lives destroyed, while a nation turned its back on its own citizens, one man in a small California town said: "Not these farms. Not on my watch."

He didn't save the world.

He didn't end Executive Order 9066 or overturn systemic racism.

He saved three families' farms—and in doing so, he saved a measure of humanity.

He proved that even in America's darkest hours, even when the government orders injustice and society embraces hatred, individual conscience can still choose differently.

Bob Fletcher slept in a workers' bunkhouse for three years so Japanese American families could come home to their own beds.

He split every profit fairly when he could have taken everything.

He faced threats and ostracism when silence would have been safer.

And when it was over, he asked for nothing except to go back to his regular life.

"It was the right thing to do."

Five words that contain everything we need to know about moral courage.

Not heroism. Not martyrdom. Not glory.

Just decency. Just conscience. Just one person refusing to participate in collective cruelty.

Bob Fletcher lived to 101—long enough to see Japanese American families thriving again, long enough to be honored by the community he'd protected, long enough to know that his choice mattered.

The orchards he saved still bloom.

The descendants of the families he helped still remember.

And his story still asks the question that every generation must answer:

When your neighbors are taken away, when their property is forfeit, when society says it's acceptable—what will you do?

Bob Fletcher showed us one answer.

He tended their farms. He saved their money. He kept their homes.

And he slept in a bunkhouse, refusing comfort built on another's suffering.

That's not just a good story.

That's a road map for how to be human when the world has gone mad.

 

Just a quick note, two fluffy-tailed squirrel just chased each other around, and up and down this big tree trunk. Our rain had passed and everything is still wet, but cleaner, greener, sparkly even. I decided to get a picture for you ...

Can you see them? Me neither, they are now higher up and  laughing at my slow camera skills. ;op

Michael Bates, Jake Spielberger, Nick Bernstein, Taylor Hobberlin, Cheyenne Lopez, Jordan Lawson, Robert Williams, Kasey Hobberlin

I have always said that kids (or my "crazies") who train in karate, have more fun. They develop deep friendships like extended families, and though they tease each other, and have so much fun, they have a bond that lasts. I took this picture one day after class in 2003. They are adults now, some with school, jobs, families, but I am betting they remember this day?

  

 

A 3+ minute video, Pipe dreams, here

 

  

 

Just because ...

Jabiru

 

Thursday's Smiles ... 

 

 

  

    Hoping you feel the good things in your day today.