Tammy Ayer
Tammy Ayer lives in Yakima, Wash. and is features/reader engagement editor at the Yakima Herald-Republic. She has held various positions in her journalism career, including features editor, assistant city editor and night city editor, but has continued to write while working as an editor because her true love is telling people's stories.
Updated May 2017
Stories from This Author
Family keepsakes tell the story of Japanese-American life in Yakima Valley
Jan. 15, 2019 • Tammy Ayer
YAKIMA, Wash. -- Yoshiko Hide Kishi gazed at the small buckskin moccasins in her cupped hands as she recalled her early childhood in rural Toppenish. Her father and mother, Mantaro and Kiyo Hide, were farmers with five children, Yoshiko their youngest. Her father raised several crops and Kiyo helped him amid her household duties, which included making dresses for Yoshiko because money was tight. The moccasins came from their landowner, George Adams, a citizen of the Yakama Nation in White …
75 years after Japanese internment: Poetry tradition ripped away from Yakima Valley along with creators
May 3, 2018 • Tammy Ayer
Eight Japanese men gathered at the Tamagawa Tei restaurant on First Street in downtown Yakima to recite their poems and judge the others. On this fall day in 1912, members of the Yakima Ameikai — Yakima Croaking Society — met for the first time. All seasonal farm workers, they wanted something more than just gambling, smoking and drinking sake during their time away from work in the fields. They wanted companionship and culture. They wanted to express their feelings in …
Uprooted and interned
April 10, 2018 • Tammy Ayer
Kara Matsushita Kondo was born in Wapato, a town with a thriving Japanese population. There were Japanese-owned businesses and schools, a Buddhist church and a meeting hall. The Wapato Nippons baseball team won a pennant and a following beyond its local fan base. But she knew that her life would change in the aftermath of Dec. 7, 1941. “We were very uncertain what would happen to us, and we realized it would never be the same,” Kondo recalled in a …
Yakima’s Japan Town no longer there, but rich history remains
March 29, 2018 • Tammy Ayer
YAKIMA, Wash. -- Karen Lee has lived in Yakima since 1973. In that time, she never heard of Yakima’s Japan Town, a downtown block packed with a variety of businesses operated by Japanese-Americans. “I figured there was a Japan Town in Wapato,” Lee said of the Lower Valley community where Japanese immigrants first moved to the Yakima Valley in the 1890s. They cleared sagebrush, dug canals, farmed and ran thriving businesses, schools and churches in Wapato and Toppenish. Lee was …
Valley families recall ancestors' difficult stand against treatment of Japanese neighbors
March 14, 2018 • Tammy Ayer
Esther Short Boyd was working as usual at the R.R. Short Hardware store in Wapato when a man walked in and identified himself as president of one of the local Granges, a national fraternal association for farmers. “You went to the Tolan Hearing,” he said. That’s correct, she replied. “Then we can’t trade with you,” he added, reflecting the anti-Japanese sentiment running high in the wake of Pearl Harbor. She told him that was his privilege. “It was my privilege …
From Sumo to Baseball, Japanese Americans in Yakima Valley Embraced Sports
Feb. 23, 2018 • Tammy Ayer
WAPATO, Wash. —Growing up in Hawaii, Frank Iseri mastered the physically challenging responsibilities of a farmer. He rigorously honed that fitness in his spare time. “My dad was awful strong,” said his son, Eddie Iseri of Zillah, noting one competition his father relished. “In Hawaii, they would have a race (where participants would) carry a 100-pound sack of rice.” The hard work continued after Frank Iseri, who was born in 1904, moved to Wapato as a young man. He operated …
Yakima Valley's Residents of Japanese ancestry found ways to thrive at Heart Mountain
Feb. 6, 2018 • Tammy Ayer
Esther Boyd received the Western Union telegram the morning of Sept. 1, 1942. “Arrived safely in Wyoming ten am Monday conditions satisfactory regards Shiz Harada,” it said. Harada would write Boyd in Wapato several times from the Heart Mountain Relocation Center about 14 miles east of Cody, where he and more than 1,000 Yakima Valley residents of Japanese ancestry would live for the next three years. Tosh Umemoto, another Valley resident, recalled arriving as a teen with his parents and …
Mochitsuki—A Long-Standing Tradition for Yakima Valley’s Japanese Community
Jan. 22, 2018 • Tammy Ayer
The dense aroma of steaming rice filled the narrow stairway leading to the basement of the Bussei Kaikan, the big brick gymnasium near the Yakima Buddhist Church. In a warm corner lit by small windows stood a large steel kettle filled with boiling water and topped with three stacked wooden boxes. Lined with porous bamboo mats, each box contained a few pounds of mochigome, a short-grain rice soaked for 24 hours and drained in preparation for mochitsuki: mochi making. “When …
Portland pilgrimage an opportunity to reflect after 75 years
July 3, 2017 • Tammy Ayer
The sun was already high in the morning sky when the train slowed to a stop at the Portland Assembly Center north of Oregon’s biggest city. It was 6 a.m. on June 5, 1942, and 520 Yakima Valley residents of Japanese ancestry had arrived at their home for the next three months. Hundreds of onlookers watched as families stepped off, children, parents and grandparents, mothers with sleeping babies and sleepy toddlers, women whose husbands had been taken months earlier by …
Japanese-American community continues a Yakima Valley tradition
June 23, 2017 • Tammy Ayer
Irene Goto stood in the sunlight at Tahoma Cemetery as members of the Yakima Valley’s Japanese-American community gathered near the graves of their ancestors. “We are forever striving for permanence in the midst of what is transitory,” Goto, a minister’s assistant at the Seattle Buddhist Church, said Sunday morning. Goto traveled to Yakima on Memorial Day weekend to continue a Japanese tradition that began in the Valley decades ago — that of placing peonies at ancestors’ graves and honoring them …
