Health and philadelphia magazines among many other publications. G he as a recipient of the German Marshall Fund of the United States marshall memorial fellowship whichdy took him to europe to studydy media on the continent. He grew up in hyde park, new york, and now lives in philadelphia with his wife and two children. The eagles of heart mountain is his first book. Please give a g warm savannah welcome to bradford pearson. [applause] thank you so much fore intro and and thank you all for for coming today. It really means a lot to me. This book originally came out in january of 2021. So this is actually the first inperson book event that ive been able to do in the year and 13 months. Excuse me, the 13 months that this book has been out this this is my debut book and it means a lot to me to actually be able to sit in front of people as opposed to just a very tiny camera on my laptop in my kitchen or in my basement or in a small corner of my living room wherever my two children arent are the five year old and a two year old so finding space to do book events where i had one at the japaneseam National Museum in la where our four year old at the time actually ran in and sat on my lap and said, who are you talking to and then said is this another one of your boring book events . So thats her favorite term as dad doing another boring book event. So i want to thank you for making sure that this is not one of my boring book events and actually being in person. So i really appreciate that. Yesterday i had the opportunity speaking of being in person. I had the wonderful opportunity to be able to speak with some sixth graders at one of the local Charter Schools here. And i i originally i was going to talk start this talk in a different way, but i wanted to share one small thing that these very precocious savannah sixth graders that you should all be very proud of told me about first of all, the first question they asked me was does a writer make a lot of money . And i said not a writer like me but there are lots of writers that do make a lot of money. So maybe you should become kent krueger or someone else david. About you who stands on the big stage and then the very last question that i got from one of the kids was. If someone else wrote this book and you read it, would you still think it was good . And i i, you know, i guess that ive been doing these presentations and book events for about 13 months now and it was one of the very few times where i had no answer and i had to sit there and sort of think about it for a second and i had to reflect and be like, thats the best question. Ive gotten over the past year and maybe id change a couple things, but i still think its pretty good. So anyway, so im actually gonna start by just reading a very very short section and then maybe you can answer that young girls question and still let me know if its good. This this very small scene takes place in the second game that the heart mountain eagles ever played in in 1944. The teams lined up under 78 degrees sky and the Carbon County kicker sent the ball deep khichi took the ball the 10 yard line and ran diagonally across the field heading to the left side line babe faked as a blocker then sprinted toward keychee. The pitch was flawless babe cradled the ball looked down field and saw nothing, but open dirt. Arms pumping as the dust kicked up beneath him. He was gone gone from that field gone from that camp gone from wyoming removed the barracks in the barbed wire in the military police add some bleachers and sketch in the Roosevelt Hotel looming over the field replaced the stones with grass color in the green of the palm trees and the white of the wobbly Hollywood Sign watching from mount lee the place all the bad with all the good and for those seconds. He can be just a boy doing what he loves most babe strodened into the end zone untouched. The eagles of heart mountain is the true story of the Best High SchoolFootball Team in the history of the state of wyoming which is a group of incarcerated japaneseamerican teenagers during World War Two. These kids have been pulled from their homes in los angeles and seattle and San Francisco have been sent these kids were sent to this corner of northwest wyoming brother kids have been sent to dry adviva beds and idaho swamps in arkansas 110 degree deserts in arizona. The book itself is about 90,000 words and every single. Of them grew out of my own personal embarrassment about how little i knew about this subject. In june 2013. I visited Yellowstone National park for another store that i was working on and one of those days i was able to visit the heart mountain interpretive center, which is a small museum that sits for the former heart Mountain Camp was i walked in the museum thinking that i had a pretty good handle on the subject. I grew up in hyde park new york, which is Franklin Delano roosevelts hometown. I studied history in college and i really thought oh, this is a subject and this is a history these camps that i understand really well and as i walked through the museum i realized that i knew about maybe 1 of the amount of information that i should know about these i knew nothing about the camp conditions the racism behind the governments decision to form these camps or the brave men and women who resisted these camps both before the camps opened and within the camps. Well, i was walking through and thinking about you know, how inept my education and history was on this subject. I saw one very a display in the museum and i still think to this day. Is probably the only time or the first time that ive read all the way to the very end of the Museum Display and thats something that ive changed since then because i got a whole book out of it. So so heres the three sentences that were on this display. Football and basketball were Popular High School sports at heart mountain while the Boys Basketball team traveled the state the girls Basketball Team played all but one game at home and the Football Team was never allowed to play in a way game. The Football Team won all of its games in two years, but one a close 19 to 13 loss to casper in november 1944. I reread this display a couple times to sort of make sure i understood what this thing was actually saying the sport this location the success and i went home to texas where i lived at the time and i wrote the story about yellowstone and and went on to work on lots of other stories for magazines and newspapers, but i really couldnt stop thinking about those three sentences that that team and and the conditions that they must have faced and months would pass and then a year would pass and i really couldnt get that out of my head. Who were these young men . Why were they so good and and what led to incarceration to begin with . And every journalist knows that if youre working on a story, but you cant stop thinking about another story that thats probably the story. You should actually be spending your time on as opposed to whatever youre doing with your day to day so i got to work. I reached out to the people at the Heart Mountain Foundation who sent me a physical cd with every copy of the heart mountain sentinel newspaper on it when they open the heart Mountain Camp, there were 13,000 people had been sent there from mostly from los angeles and some other communities up and down the west coast. So if you had a community i was 13,000 people in the 40s it basically operated as a small city. So that means that they had a from my perspective a pretty fantastic weekly newspaper, and i was really lucky in that this weekly newspaper was staffed with real journalists and was led by an editor from seattle who was was really an incredible editor and went on to work at the denver post and the Des Moines Register and really instilled this sense of at this paper. And because of that this newspaper also had a sports section and id stay up every night reading these these these newspapers on this disc and you know, i had a day job and i would come home and this was right after my wife and i had had our first daughter and she was six months old and my wife would be up feeding her and then i would stay up and and read through these papers and eventually i tried to read every single page and every story of all these papers that have been sent to me to sort of really understand the full scope and the full picture of what was going on at this camp. Lucky for me this camp the newspaper had a fantastic sports section and every week that the team played a game. Theyd run four separate stories on the team. They would run a preview of the upcoming week review of the last weeks game a column and then a huge fat box score and when youre a journalist and youre looking for information, especially about something that happened, you know, 75 years ago Something Like this is just a real treasure trove and it helped me not only to be able to deter who these people were but to determine the arc of the season determine who the best players were but more importantly it showed me the impact that this team had on the camp. So there were 13,000 people at a peak in the camp and four or five thousand people would come out to every single one of the games that these guys played there were no bleachers. They would stand vined six eight ten people deep they would back up farming trucks to the field. So people could stand in the tailgate and on top of the cab to really get a sense and get a scene of what these players were doing. Where the heart Mountain Camp was built it was the first time that theyd ever been a permanent settlement in Human History on that piece of land in wyoming. So thinking about four or 5,000 people watching this Football Team play meant that that was the first time in Human History that that many people had been on that piece of land doing something together and sort of thinking about that on the scale of who we are and who we are as a people. It really meant a lot to me and it showed sort of the emotional resonance of this team. As i read the stories that were in the paper, i started building out a hierarchy of who i thought were the best players on this team when youre writing a book or when youre writing a magazine story or a newspaper story. You dont only want facts and figures but you want characters and you want important and you want impactful characters and from the very first game. I knew that the main character this book was going to be a young man named babe namora. Before he was taken from his home and sent to camp babe was a starting running back for a Hollywood High School in los angeles. He was a multisport star. He started second base. He was a shortstop. He played point guard. He was a triathlete. Excuse me a decathlete at the time japaneseamericans, especially in los angeles werent allowed to play in white leagues. So japanese americans out there had to form their own leagues, which they formed as the nissan Athletic Union and these teams operated in seattle and San Francisco and san diego la sacramento and every community that had japanese americans in it and even as a young boy by the time he was 14 or 15 babe was really dominating these leagues. He was dominating in baseball softball track any sport that they threw at him babe was really fantastic. He had great hands incredible instincts and he ended up competing against men that were in their 20s and 30s and all these sports and being handily in retrospect and i think people at the time thought and defend this belief as well. That babe was the best japaneseamerican athlete of his generation in the United States, and it just so happened that his family got sent to a camp in northwest wyoming that i visited on a whim and you know, unfortunately babe died in 2011 and when youre writing a story about people who are mostly dead you run into a lot of obituaries. And sometimes those can be dead ends, but from reporting standpoint, they can also be really enlightening and theyre usually written by family members, but she means that you dont necessarily get you get some the nuts and bullets you get their jobs and you get their family members names if you get a real sense of who they were as a person you get a sense of, you know, beyond the nuts and bolts of their life you get a sense of what their family members thought about them and what they cared enough to remember them for but it also lists survivors and for me that gave me the first person who became the linchpin of this book, which is the woman named jan morey who was babe named moores daughter after some frantic and a bit. Haphazard of googling. I found jans email address on a dead Linkedin Profile page and center an email that just sort of said hey, you know you have no idea who i am, but ive been sort of surreptitiously at night researching your fathers life, and id really love to talk to you a little bit about it. I dont know what this project is. I dont know if this project is ever going to be anything, but id really like to talk to you a little bit about about your dad and your dads life and his time at the at the heart Mountain Camp that was in may of 2017 and and my book came out in uhuary of 2021. And the reason i bring up is that i think a lot of times. In this profession and then in all of our professions and in our personal lives, sometimes we procrastinate on things that are very easy things to do and there are things that we want to do and there are things that sometimes we dont know if we can do but for me writing this book was a sign that anyone anyone in this room can do what i did today as maybe its not necessarily writing a book, but its finding stories and you know talking to people and remembering, you know on a grand scale. Maybe its just capturing your familys story and maybe its capturing your neighborhood or a churchs story, but everybody here has the tools to do that. Ill get off my tiny little soapbox there. But so i talked to jan one day on the phone and probably rambled on for too long about my thoughts and for the team and you know for whatever reason she agreed and said sure you can you can come out to my house in anaheim, and we could talk about my dad we could talk about his life years later. I found out that she had reached out at time. I was the the editor of southwest infight magazine and i didnt know this but she had reached out to them to make sure that i was legit and i wasnt making up who i was so as i was checking in on her family. She was apparently doing a full background check on me before before she let me into her home which i appreciate and so im in our house in anaheim and when babe died jan did this this great thing for for the family and you know for for her family and for the folks who came to babes funeral and that she created these binders of babes whole life. To create a binder that was his early years his High School Years his time in. And and his time afterwards and you know for me it was it was amazing to sort of watch. This mans life unfold personally and then as a reporter, i was like, oh my gosh, theres all this great stuff that shes collated and put in binders for me to sort of go through and ill never forget the the most affecting thing for me that day and i was you know, flipping through pictures some of the photos appear in the book from one babe was a little boy and but the most affecting thing for me was flipping through a binder. I came across this sort of maybe eight by eight size felt letter and it was an h and m in bright blue and white and it looked brand new and i realized that it was babes varsity letter from the heart mountain eagles Football Team. And you know for anyone whos played High School Sports you remember getting a varsity letter you remember what that meant whether it was, you know, soccer or baseball basketball field hockey, whatever that may have been i dont know where mine are right now, but im sure theyre in one of the any boxes my parents keep asking me to remove from their attic and move to my own home, but seeing that there was this varsity lighter from this american concentration camp just meant so much more to me than any other writer than i could have received. You see the Camp Administration gave this team very little money. They gave everybody in the camp very little opportunity to thrive. So that meant that the people in the camp had to do what they could to make life better for themselves and especially for their kids and for the younger generations there. Um the money for this team was raised by other african, excuse me other japanese americans in the camp the uniforms were pennies that had so little money that they couldnt afford thigh pads. So instead they would shove cardboard into their pants and tape it up with athletic tape. So to see this varsity letter meant to me that this community cared enough about these kids to pool their own money to pull money that very few of them had you know, they had to sell their house. Chinese on the dollar when the federal government had sent them to these camps any savings that they had was was dwindling while theyre in the camps. But to me these people wanted to give these kids some semblance of their old life and in that small instance that meant just making these little varsity letters to give to these kids who played on a Football Team who brought a lot of joy to people where there was very little joy jan was helpful in a lot of ways in terms of helping me learn more about her fathers life, but she also opened up completely the world of japanese American Life in los angeles to me. I left mes