Casper (WY) StarTribune
May 1 2007
WESTCHESTER COUNTY, N.Y. – Former Worland resident Mary Ujifusa, 86, died April 15, 2007, of complications following hip surgery at the Westchester Medical Center near New York City. She was born Mary Okugawa, the daughter of a machinist on the Santa Fe Railroad, on April 9, 1921, in La Junta, Colo.
On Dec. 1, 1940, she married Tom Ujifusa, whose family had been working on the railroad and farming in the Rairden/Durkee area north of Worland since 1904. Her children, Grant and Susan, were born in the old Worland hospital in 1942 and 1946.
During the 1950s and 1960s, she was a PTA leader, taught Sunday school at the Worland Methodist church and was an especially devoted 4-H Club leader. In 1986, she and her husband moved to Westchester County, N.Y., to be near the families of their two children.
The valedictorian of her class, she never had a chance to go to college. She made sure that her children did. Her son, Grant, governor of Boys State, graduated from Harvard and her daughter, Susan, governor of Girls State, graduated from Wellesley. Mary was even more proud of her grandchildren’s academic achievements. One graduated from Annapolis, another from Berkeley, and two from Harvard.
Upon her death, Ryozo Kato, the ambassador from Japan to the United States, wrote, “I mourn the passing of Mary Ujifusa. She was an immensely proud Japanese American and committed to equal rights for all Americans. A woman of fierce academic and practical intelligence, she had great impact on her son, Grant. And so it is my feeling that without her, redress for the internment of Japanese Americans during World War II might not have enjoyed the success that it did.”
Survivors include her children, a younger brother of Osaka, Japan; three younger sisters in the Denver area; five grandchildren, including an adopted child still in high school and one great-grandchild.
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Wikipedia Entry
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Japanese American Pioneers of the Bighorn Basin
Mar 31, 2021 — Shuichi Sam Ujifusa. Many Japanese Americans took up farming and ranching after settling in Wyoming, but few came here for those reasons.
From Labor Shack to Harvard Law
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High School Football
In Wall Street Journal Top Ten:
The Best Nonfiction of 2012
A Man and His Ship
By Steven Ujifusa (Simon & Schuster)
William Francis Gibbs (1886-1967) was one of the master builders of the ocean liner, obsessed with winning the Blue Riband for fastest Atlantic crossing. The design and construction of his greatest ship, the SS United States, is at the heart of this book, which like the best biographies becomes the portrait of an entire age. Steven Ujifusa’s work, our reviewer noted, is ultimately a compelling “history of the passenger ship, whose great days coincided with Gibbs’s lifetime.”
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Steven Ujifusa on CSpan, A Man and His Ship
Historian Steven Ujifusa recounts the life of naval architect William Francis Gibbs and his creation of the SS United States, a passenger liner…
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Andrew on PBS News Hour
What Clinton and Trump say about school vouchers, Common Core and free college tuition, Sep 20, 2016
See Video
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Return to Okayama Oba-chan, Be Proud of Me
June 22, 2013
JNTO – Japan National Tourism Organization
Read
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Speech at the annual dinner of the Harvard Class of ‘65
I grew up on an alfalfa and barley farm 90 miles from Yellowstone in Wyoming. My wife Amy grew up on the Upper East Side of New York.
After we were married, I took her home to meet friends. Three of my teammates entertained her with a play-by-play of our football championship season. After which she told me that she was never, ever coming back to this place, and then had the strength of character to keep that promise to herself for 30 years.
But four years ago she returned to watch a geologist friend tap on a rock to expose a perfectly formed sea shell that he said had not seen the light of day for 60 million years. She became a fossil hunter at that very moment.
I asked my friend how old the dirt was on our farm. He said it has been the way it is for 20 million years — wash and fill that had come down from the Big Horn Mountains 35 miles away. Classmates, we now have a precise meaning for the expression “Older than dirt.”
Someday Amy and I will become part of Wyoming dirt, covered perhaps by a foot or much more of volcanic ash from the Yellowstone Caldera, now 36,000 years overdue. The entire prospect is not one altogether unhappy for us. One of 70 one-minute speeches given by the 70 members of the class attending.
