by David Izu
On Father’s Day, a son reflects on his dad’s legacy, including a black box: both literal and figurative.
My father was still a stick-thin kid of 18 on a multi-year military-mandated “relocation” from both his California home and his civil rights as a citizen when he was drafted. He was part of a three-family caravan of related Japanese Americans who had hastily fled the West Coast, narrowly avoiding incarceration in an ethnic confinement camp.
There was no time for preparation. For the duration of the War, nomadic through three interior states, the families survived by becoming migrant field workers wherever the local people would tolerate them.
So how does a poor dirt-farming kid end up with a camera–not just any camera, but an expensive specimen of high-end German optics, a Weltini folding pocket camera? The same US government that had judged my father, Douglas Izu, a national security threat by simply existing within 150 miles of the Pacific Ocean saw fit to draft him and put him in charge of a two-man mortar unit.
He was sent to Italy, where he met his Weltini, the name a play on words, a nod to the fabulous escape artist Harry Houdini who could disappear as a bound man and then miraculously reappear free of his chains.
As happens in times of war, social class barriers crumbled. The exclusive camera was a product of pre-war Dresden’s Welta workshop, a factory noted for its precision quality. It had been converted from producing cameras to provisioning the military with rifle scopes and artillery optics. An Italy bludgeoned by combat must have been a bargain basement bin for GIs.
The camera became an immigrant in America in the hands of a native who had been treated as an alien in his own land, as devalued as his camera.
Dad eventually prospered, becoming a rocket scientist, hot stuff for his era. Like Houdini, he was mute about what had happened before his emergence as a science-educated middle-class citizen in the mid-1950s. Like his silent folding Weltini, stories about traumatic times in Arizona, Nevada, Utah or even Italy disappeared into some random pocket of history. A vanishing act with no denouement. No curtain call.
About the contributor: David Izu is a San Francisco Bay Area-based artist. His mother was incarcerated at Poston, AZ; his father escaped imprisonment in a family caravan to Utah, where he was drafted to serve in the U.S. Army in Europe. Dave has taught at Stanford, UC Berkeley, the SF Art Institute and the California College of the Arts. His work is in the permanent collection at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art as well as other institutions.
Copyright David Izu, 2021. All rights reserved.