Californian Shigeru Yabu grew up in the Heart Mountain internment camp located between Powell and Cody. Nearly 11,000 Japanese-Americans were held there during World War II. One day, Yabu and his friends, armed with homemade slingshots, shot a magpie next out of a tree. They found a chick inside, and Yabu brought it back to the barracks. He raised it as a pet, named it Maggie, and taught it to mimic "Hello Maggie”"The bird not only meant a lot to me, but also to my parents and a lot of other folks, people that came and visited. It gave a lot of people a lot of hope," said Yabu in a story by Ruffin Prevost in today’s Billings Gazette.
A few years ago, Tabo began to transform his childhood memories into a book. To illustrate it, he asked a friend and former Disney animator, Willie Ito. Ito was interned during World War II in Topaz, Utah.
“Hello Maggie!” was published last year, the first project of the duo’s imprint, Yabitoon Books.
Yabu is a director of the Heart Mountain Wyoming Foundation, a group working to finance and build a $5.5 million learning center at the site of the internment camp. He is donating proceeds of the book to the facility.
"A center like that could educate so many people. It's a way of learning from our mistakes so it won't happen again," Yabu told the Billings Gazette.
You can purchase a copy of “Hello Maggie!” from your local bookstore or from the Japanese American Heritage Source web site.
