Kiyo Sato, 100 – Celebrating Our Centenarians

Life for Kiyo Sato began May 8, 1923. Delivered by a Japanese-American midwife on the Sato farm in Mather Field, she was the first of three girls and six boys of John Shinji and Mary Tomomi Sato. Life on the 20-acre farm was idyllic; their many crops were in much demand. The King and Queen of England requested crates of the Sato’s raspberries as the royals traveled through Canada; the White House ordered 50 pounds of their walnuts.

In the one-room elementary school, Edward Kelley School, Kiyo and 51 other students were taught by Miss Mary Aline Cox, who attended lovingly to them. Kiyo remembers singing operas and nature walks.

In May 1942, Kiyo, her parents and seven siblings were interned at the Pinedale Assembly Center in Fresno and then the Poston Internment Camp in Arizona. Her brother Steve was in the US Army. Kiyo, age 19, taught the young ones. Internees worked to make the children’s lives as good as possible–everything was “for the sake of the children.” She remembers the outhouse with the wood board with 10 holes, five on each side. Using this was agony for a teen longing for privacy at such times.

Kiyo wanted to be a nurse. Rejected for her “background” by nursing schools, she attended Columbia University on a scholarship. She later admonished the nursing schools, and they accepted her. Congresswoman Frances Payne Bolton established the Cadet Nurse Corps, which Kiyo attended with free tuition. She obtained her nursing degree there.

A nurse in the Korean War, she next worked for the County of Sacramento, overseeing the health of mothers and children. She made two lifelong friends, Evelyn Loomis and Marie Jenkins. Traveling with Evelyn for 14 months, they worked their way through 13 countries.

She says her parents were her role models, treating everyone with respect. Kiyo married and divorced. During one marriage, Kiyo and her husband adopted four children: Cia, Jon, Paul and Tanya. Raising children alone was a challenge but they are her life’s great joy, and she’s proud of all of them and her five grandchildren and two great-grandchildren.

Her hobbies include hula dancing, tai chi, and writing. Her first book, Dandelion Through The Crack, won major awards. She’s writing a second. She is active in the Nisei VFW speakers’ group, talking about the internment each year to approximately fifty groups, especially children, to help ensure this travesty of justice never happens again.