In the summer of 1959 my mother heard about the Oregon Centennial and was determined that we would go to Portland to see the exposition. She had her own memories of the 1939 World’s Fair at Treasure Island, and she wanted us to have a similar experience.

So the six of us set off in my dad’s Oldsmobile. We each had our designated seats in the car for family trips: as the youngest and scrawniest, I was sandwiched between my mom and dad in the front seat. (This was before bucket seats were invented.) Kathy sat behind my dad, Joan behind my mom, and Susan, as the second youngest, in the middle.

My dad brought along “ge-ge” bags — triangular pouches of thick, waxed packing paper, as Kathy was prone to car sickness. The bags were a set, from large to small, and to this day I don’t know if they were really created specifically for that purpose or if my dad just improvised and decided they would do the job. I immediately commandeered the smallest one as a hammock for Spike, my little stuffed Scottie that my dad had brought back for me from one of his business trips to Japan, and Spike rode to Oregon in style, dangling from a dashboard knob in his traveling case improvised from a “ge-ge” bag. (Give me a break — I was only six.)

My sister Joan claims that I must have just learned to read, because the entire way up to Oregon, I sat alertly between my parents and read aloud every single highway sign we passed — especially the posted speed limit — much to the annoyance of my dad, who had a tendency to speed.

We had never traveled so far north before.

We stopped for the night in Crescent City, where Joan opened her mouth and was unable to shut it for what seemed like an eternity. The rest of us found it quite refreshing, Joan unable to talk, but she was freaking out and making open-mouthed sounds of distress as my parents tried to soothe her. Finally, her jaw relaxed and she was able to close her mouth. Such excitement! To this day, in the unlikely event that someone should mention Crescent City, the image that springs to mind is of Joan’s distressing brush with lockjaw.

Our next destination was the Oregon Caves. I didn’t know what to expect, but we donned striped coveralls and were led into the cold interior. At one point, all flashlights were extinguished and it was so dark we couldn’t see our hands in front of our faces. I remember learning what stalagmites and stalagtites were.

We then spent the night at Crater Lake Lodge. Crater Lake was (and still is) one of the most picturesque volcanic lakes on earth. My most enduring memory of Crater Lake was being awakened at 5 am by my dad so that we could see the spectacular sunrise. (And we have the blurry snapshot to prove it!)

In Portland, we stayed at the City Center Motor Inn. The best part of the expo, in my opinion, was the shootout in Frontier Village. Stuntman “Alamo” Worrell became our newest hero, and we nursed crushes for the rest of the summer. The following year he would go to Hollywood to be a stuntman in the John Wayne movie, “The Alamo,” where, according to his web site, he realized that Hollywood stuntmen had padding to land on when they fell off roofs!

We would not be a Japanese-American family if we didn’t look up acquaintances when visiting from out of town. One afternoon, we made a detour from sightseeing to visit Mr. Tokoro at his store in Portland.

Maybe it was the way that the internment dispersed whole communities; my parents and others of their generation seemed to make a special effort after the war to try to maintain contact with Japanese-American acquaintances. Or maybe it was that they now needed to make that effort; whereas before the war, everyone lived in close proximity and community was like the air we breathed, omnipresent and ineluctable.

When I recently discovered this drawing in my mother’s basement, I couldn’t figure out what it was. Fortunately, I had titled it on the back: “Multnomah Falls.” I’d been looking at it sideways.

Aside from visiting Mr. Tokoro and exploring the expo, we also went to Portland’s Rose Garden, Multnomah Falls, and Bonneville Dam, all of which I enthusiastically portrayed in crayon upon my return for a school report.

For me, it was a thoroughly memorable trip, what with the lockjaw, the ge-ge bags, Alamo Worrell, sunrise over Crater Lake and caves. My mother admitted, many years later, that she had been disappointed by the exposition. She held as her standard memories of the 1939 Treasure Island Fair. Nothing would ever come close to that magical Art Deco jewel in the middle of San Francisco Bay, a celebration of technological achievement (the Bay Bridge and Golden Gate Bridges had opened in recent years) and the Pan-Pacific cultures of San Francisco. It was a showcase for a nation poised for a new era of discovery — much like my mother, who in her early twenties at the time, had recently graduated from U.C. Berkeley and for whom life was full of possibilities. Japan and China were already at war, but at Treasure Island the two cultures’ showcase pavilions (the Chinese one locally sponsored) coexisted side by side. The Treasure Island Fair happened at the golden peak of dreams for Pan-Pacific harmony that would come crashing down two years later.

All images © R. A. Sasaki. All rights reserved.