Car and Motoring Festival

The car show at McPherson College is run by the C.A.R.S. Club. That acronym stands for College Automotive Restoration Students. Any student enrolled in the college can join. Their big event every year is the car show in the spring. It’s the reason for our trip.

This year, 507 cars were entered, so it’s quite a large show. To compare, the Colorado Concours d’Elegance draws a bit over 300 cars. The Barrett-Jackson Auctions I attended years ago drew over 600 autos. The emphasis at McPherson is on domestic autos – there were no Lotus, for example. I’m going to go out on a limb and say that there was only a single representative of any given marque. Okay, okay, there were a lot of BMWs and a few Porsches. There were two cars there from the Soviet Union: a 1982 Zaporozhets and a 1988 Moskvitch. Both of these were student cars. I overheard the owner of the Zaporozhets saying he was still able to get parts, but only from Ukraine.

It was nice to be able to take a look at the classrooms/workshops that the students worked in. The college continues to be the recipient of large donations, and this year, they unveiled their plans for significant upgrades in this building, resulting in about twice the floor space. There are about 300 students enrolled in the program.

There were quite a few cars there that I’ve never seen before, including a trio of Cadillac concept cars. Concept cars are where the designers are showing off their wild ideas and aren’t particularly interested in actually putting them into production.

Quite a few antique cars were on display. I was looking at one of the student projects when I realized why we call the trunk of the car the trunk. Most of these early autos had no storage space at all, so there was a rack where you could carry your luggage. Specifically, a steamer trunk. Trunk! Get it? I finally did.

In the run-up to our trip, I was thinking this would be a one-and-done thing. It’s a long way to go over boring roads for a car show, and we’ve picked the low-hanging fruit when it comes to additional sights to see. But I’ll admit to pondering the possibility of going again in a couple of years just for the show. Can I do a “blitz” trip – drive the day before, enter my car in the show, and drive home immediately after the awards ceremony? Hmmm.

We ran into LoCo members Steve and Julie, and after the show, met current LoCo member Mark and former member Doug for beers at Three Rings Brewery.

And that was it for Saturday

By roughly noon on Sunday, our Kansas sojourn was over – we had made it back to Colorado. Not that the roads or scenery became much different when we crossed the border; we still had a few hours of dull driving. But first, we arrived at our last attraction.

Amache

Let’s get this out of the way up front. I think most people, when they hear the term “concentration camp” immediately think of Auschwitz. There is a huge difference between a concentration camp, such as the Granada War Relocation Center (now designated the Amache National Historic Site), and Auschwitz. Amache was a concentration camp, and Auschwitz was a death camp. Here’s one popular dictionary’s definition:

Concentration camp (noun): A camp where persons are confined, usually without hearings and typically under harsh conditions, often as a result of their membership in a group the government has identified as suspect.

— The American Heritage® Dictionary, 5th Edition

Amache fits the definition perfectly. Executive Order 9066, signed by FDR on February 19, 1942, authorized the removal of more than 110,000 Japanese-Americans from the West Coast to camps like this one. There were no trials. These people lost their homes, businesses, and freedom. This part of eastern Colorado sees temperatures over 100°F in summer and below 0°F in winter. There are no trees, and the soil is not conducive to cultivation. They were moved here solely due to their race. The stated reason was to defend against sabotage and espionage, but none of them was ever even accused of these crimes.

The various exhibits here have conflicting data. One said 10,000 people were imprisoned here, another said 7,500, and a third said 7,300. I may have misread the high number. It may be that there were 7,300 imprisoned and more than 2,000 people to run the place. In any event, this barren landscape was transformed overnight into the tenth-largest community in Colorado. Much of the land used for the camp, and the fields surrounding it, subsequently farmed by the residents, was confiscated from local landowners by the government.

It struck me as a bit odd, using that phrasing: tenth-largest community. Why not say “city” or “town”? I wonder if it’s worded that way so that it includes somebody who might be left out of statistics for some administrative reason, like reservations. Also, “tenth-largest” surprised me. According to FRED, the population of Colorado in 1941 was 1,124,000, with about 324,000 in Denver. Colorado had a much more rural population back then, as is obvious to anyone who drives through the small towns. I’m surprised that Amache was the tenth-largest community in the state, but I don’t doubt it.

One of the exhibits (sadly, I neglected to take a photo) discussed education in the camp. Authorities had difficulties recruiting teachers. Who would want to move to the middle of nowhere? This exhibit tells us that the curriculum attempted to eliminate the teaching of Japanese culture and customs and inculcate American values like freedom. Let that sink in for a moment. We want to teach people who are held without trial on confiscated land about how much America values freedom.

The camp covered 10,000 acres, mostly for cultivation, with a square mile inside the wire. Something like 250 barracks were built. The foundations were poured on top of the ground. That is, no trenches were dug – they just put the forms on the ground and poured the concrete. The barracks were uninsulated and heated only by cast-iron stoves. The place is windy all the time.

Today, there are replica buildings: the recreation center, a barracks, a guard tower, and a water tower. The cemetery was outside the wire; it’s the only place that’s green – trees to shelter from the wind, and a green lawn.

I never learned about these camps in school. The Executive Order was mentioned in class, and we heard about camps in the California desert, but not that there was one nearby. I first heard about Amache from a friend whose parents were there. As a World War II buff, I knew about the 442nd Regimental Combat Team, comprised of men from the camps and the most highly decorated unit in U.S. military history.

After the camp was closed, there was no attempt to preserve anything, just like at any other similar sort of camp. I’d like to visit the site of a camp where we held German POWs, but the same is true with them. What’s to preserve? All that’s left of what was there in 1945 are the foundations, crumbling.

Will Alligator Alcatraz get preserved when (if?) it closes?

Should our school curriculum include the study of Executive Order 9066 and these camps? A common feeling among Americans today is that we should teach only the good things from our history. Many feel that teaching about, say, slavery or the Trail of Tears, will only make students “feel bad” about being an American. We should teach “American exceptionalism”, our support of democracy, and freedom. To me, this is a bit like having a doctor who won’t give you a diagnosis of diabetes because it’ll “make you feel bad”. The result is you just get sicker. To put it another way, what would most Americans think of education in Germany if the Holocaust wasn’t taught there?