Alyce

Alyce

June 20, 2014

Alyce was born on June 8, 1922. She who was named by her big sister, Haru, after a neighbor, Alice Chase, who had died when a horse kicked in the window of her car. That neighbor was not only good to the family, but Haru felt that it was better to have an English name since they were committed to a life in America. When their father told them it was a girl, she suggested the name of “Alice.” Alyce herself, changed the spelling some years later so that it would be more distinctive.

She and Tey were very close as the two of them were only two years apart in age and were separated from their older sister by a large gap of time and brothers. Even though Tey was the older of the two, it was always Alyce who seemed to have more spunk. One time, when Tey and Alyce were out walking in a field on a sunny day, they spotted a snake. (Probably a bull snake.) Tey, as we mentioned, was terrified of snakes and let out a typically girlish scream and ran off to let Alyce kill it with a rock.

Alyce attended Oroville High School just as her brothers and sisters all had before her. She had grown into a strikingly pretty young lady. She was more outspoken and self-assured than most of her older brothers and sisters, maybe because she was the baby of the family. Haru had a stronger influence on her than her mother and it was not just her name that was most “Americanized.” It would not have been surprising to find that many of the boys in her high school wished to date her, but this was at a time when miscegenation was considered an evil. Her own family would have frowned on her dating outside of her race. Since there were not a lot of nice Japanese-American boys around, she dated no more than her older sisters had.

She also attended Yuba College before the war started and took her with her family to Tule Lake. As with all the other young people in the camp, she soon got bored with the monotony, and left camp to become a student nurse at St. Francis Hospital in Peoria, Illinois. She left that position to enroll at Hamlin University in St. Paul, where she started dating a bright young graduate student from the University of Minnesota, Roy Ko. In September of 1945, they met at a dance sponsored by a Methodist church established by a group of Nisei who had relocated there. He had a calm, quiet demeanor and was skinnier than Frank Sinatra, but he obviously had a bright future in his field, Chemical Engineering. She was cute, lively, and witty and it did not take them any time at all to get very serious.

Roy’s parents had moved to New York City, so when he asked her to marry him, he suggested they get married at his family’s church in the Union Theological Seminary in New York City in 1946. With only Roy’s parents as witnesses, they were wed on September 10, a full year after they had met. Returning to Minnesota to complete Roy’s studies, they honeymooned at one of the great American traditional honeymoon spots, Niagara Falls.

As with all young couples, the early years were a financial struggle. Alyce quit school so she could supplement Roy’s small salary as a lab assistant. They lived near downtown Minneapolis in a two room flat, sleeping in the living room right near the front door. The kitchen dining room was in the back. Once a week they had to leave the front door open so the ice man could deliver their ice in the morning, often while they were still in bed.

In 1948, Roy was able to get a job right out of graduate school with the Hanford Nuclear Plant in the tri-city area of Washington state. He was originally from Bellingham, Washington, and had attended the University of Washington, so he was familiar with the Northwest. The nuclear industry was a new and exciting one in those days. They also found the house on Butternut Avenue in the growing town of Richland where they would bear and raise their three children, Roy would retire, and Alyce would live out her life over the next 45 years. Such stability, which was once so commonplace, was a rarity in the Tokuno clan as we have seen. Still, Alyce missed her family, so their location in the Northwest would mean frequent long trips to California through those years. They even went to Palermo for Christmas, 1948, even though they had just settled in at Richland and had been in Palermo in October (where Roy and Alyce had been busy helping tie tomatoes to their stakes).

Alyce worked in the Classified files for the federal government before giving birth to her first child, Karen, in 1950 on July third. Suye came up to help her youngest daughter take care of her own daughter. Less than a month later, they all drove down to Palermo to take Grandmother Tokuno home, so Karen started traveling early. Three years later they had a son, David, (born on June 25, 1952) for whom Alyce’s oldest sister Haru was there. She had come back from Japan for a short visit. The arrival of Elaine Ko the day after their 11th wedding anniversary completed their little family.

Alyce held Elaine in a special light, since they were both youngest daughters. Elaine, in turn, was especially attached to her mother, seemingly joined to her at the hip. In early summer days the family would go to the Columbia River lazily meandering through eastern Washington’s rich farm country. There, they would pick asparagus shoots, Elaine always staying close to Alyce.

Alyce’s primary avocation along with nurturing her children was the game of Bridge. She and Roy frequently played duplicate with their good friends, the Drivers, and four other couples The group they founded is still playing after 45 years. Alyce had always enjoyed the challenge of card games and Bridge was the most challenging. She began to take it very seriously, joining the Richland Duplicate Bridge Club and beginning to earn Life Master points awarded by the American Bridge Association. She not only became a Life Master in 1970, but became the Washington State Champion and was clearly one of the top players in the Northwest. In 1986, she and her partner placed first in the North American Championships, the high point of her career.

Roy turned to photography when he wasn’t working or being with his children. He started doing dark room work, making Christmas cards with the kids photos on them to send to all their friends and relatives. They were a popular couple in Richland.

Their children had the good fortune to be in the same neighborhood, same schools, and same friends as they grew up. On the other hand, they never got to spend Christmas at home, because of Alyce’s strong ties to her family, they always had to pack up and go south for the winter and the family’s annual Christmas gathering. This meant that they were close to their cousins, usually spending long periods of time with the Shiro Tokuno family, whose kids matched up almost perfectly, Karen with Shira, David with Tony, and Elaine with Riki. Plus, they usually got celebrate Christmas three times, once at home, getting to open their presents before they embarked, a second time on the road where their parents gave them their stockings, and finally on Christmas Day in Palermo.

The big trip they took in 1962 to Japan ended sadly with their Uncle Henry’s death. On the positive side, it brought Joyce and Karen together. Both of these cousins were also the same age as Shira and when all three of them were together in the mid-60s, there was a lot of mischief played that must have had Tey and Alyce fondly reminiscing over their own childhoods in Palermo. Sadly, Alyce, the youngest, died at the youngest age of any of her siblings, 71, from leukemia on January 29, 1994.

All three children live in Seattle. Karen does good things in social services, while David is a television producer. Elaine works in government. Karen married her husband, Gary, in 1990. David married his wife, Hildy, in 1986. Dave and Hildy have two sons, Alex and Travis, and a daughter, Roxanne.