The absence of former U.S. Sen. Al Simpson at the Heart Mountain Interpretive Center’s annual pilgrimage to Wyoming’s World War II internment camp, turned Smithsonian affiliated memorial and museum, was heartfelt by hundreds of guests — including many of the few remaining former internees in attendance.

Simpson’s lifelong friendship with former U.S. Transportation Secretary Norman Mineta, who himself was a detainee at Heart Mountain, started at the camp decades ago and was recently honored with the grand opening of the Mineta-Simpson Institute at the center. It only makes sense that the inspirational relationship will be forever remembered at the camp where the two met during a baseball game as preteens.

As the flag was raised over the center Saturday morning, Sue Simpson-Gallagher, daughter of Al and Ann Simpson, found the tears welling in her eyes as she recited the Pledge of Allegiance. It was incredibly hard to face the special day without her father — triggers to memories were everywhere. Later that morning she spoke to the crowd during the awards ceremony.

“I know how much I’ve loved and appreciated my dad. And I feel your love for him, too,” she said, unable to hold back her tears.

Her father made the interpretive center both a home away from home, as well as his top charitable priority long before the Mineta-Simpson Institute was even a dream.

“Heart Mountain meant a lot to my dad. The mountain itself is a symbol of home, of place, and the camp is a symbol of injustice and racism and fear and where those things can take us. It’s a lesson we can learn from, and we must work together to make sure what happened does not happen again,” Gallagher said.

Sitting across from her, David Mineta, son of Norm Mineta, was wearing a familiar blue plaid short-sleeved shirt and bolo tie; his father’s shirt and tie preference to help bring his presence to the emotionally charged event.

“I just found out that not only is this dad’s shirt — one that he wore here — but Deni [Mineta] bought it at Anne’s thrift store,” David said.

Still mourning the loss of his father, who never lived to see the Mineta-Simpson Institute’s door swing wide open, David said losing Simpson opened old wounds.

“The day that Al passed, it was like losing dad all over again. And, you know, it’s hard ... as grateful as I am for both of them I definitely feel their loss this year,” he said.

The loss of the two larger-than-life celebrities, benefactors and fundraisers has been felt across Wyoming communities, but possibly none greater than at the camp built to incarcerate Japanese immigrants and American citizens of Japanese descent during a period of fear and mass hysteria. Mineta and Simpson’s children, David and Sue, have now taken on leadership roles at the center as the newest members of the board.

“I don’t think there’s an expiration date [for the board position],” David said. “It was time for us to step up.

Shirley Ann Higuchi, chair of the Heart Mountain Wyoming Foundation, took time to memorialize the friendship during a special world premiere of the youth led project “Heart Mountain Voices” to foster understanding as the great majority of internees have since passed away. The results of a 20-year project to produce “Hello, Maggie,” an animated feature produced by former Heart Mountain incarceree Willie Ito and Director Tony Tarantini is about a boy incarcerated at Heart Mountain who develops a friendship with a magpie.

If there was a time to purge tears being held back as a group, the cartoon, based on a true story by former Heart Mountain incarceree Shigeru Yabu, gave everyone a chance to let the tears flow Friday in the darkened Wynona Thompson Auditorium at Cody High School.

“That’s what we meant to do,” said Ito while signing autographs Thursday before a standing-room only crowd to hear the story of his passion project. “It’s important people know how we lived here.”

Both projects were supported financially by the Heart Mountain Wyoming Foundation. Yet future funding might be a bit of a pinch due to the possible loss of grants used to continue building the popular facility.

Root cellar

The largest project at the center, currently in its 10th year of development, is the restoration of the immense root cellar built by inmates to help store fresh vegetables grown at the camp for the more than 14,000 people held under armed guard and behind barbed wire fences.

“The impact of the Heart Mountain agricultural program is the camp’s most lasting legacy on the Wyoming landscape today, and the root cellar is the most powerful vehicle we have for shedding light on that legacy,” said the foundation’s Executive Director Aura Sunada Newlin during the first public tours of the construction project in 2024.

Food security was an early and pressing challenge for Heart Mountain incarcerees, as false reports of food hoarding fueled political pressure to stop food support to the camp. Incarcerees from many walks of life helped to establish the farms at Heart Mountain, leading to an unprecedented success once known locally as “The Heart Mountain Miracle.”

Once open to the public, this restored root cellar will be the most evocative aspect of the site, and one of the nation’s most tangible monuments to Japanese American incarceration history. Hidden beneath the wooden air vents that can be seen standing out of kilter near farmland where the Heart Mountain camp once stood, the cellar is a vast underground structure approximately 35 feet wide and 312 feet long, according to Sol Martin, lead contractor for the project.

Women drove tractors, teenagers helped harvest, and engineers drew up plans for two cellars, each over 300 feet long, to store the produce from the fields. With access to a sawmill in the nearby National Forest, incarcerees cut the timbers used to construct the cellars. They transported the logs back to the camp, where workers used their single excavator and hand tools to dig the cellars that stored 2.1 million pounds of produce in 1943 and 5.1 million pounds in 1944. The project, in the end, was completed entirely with Japanese American labor.

A local family, the Joloviches, donated two root cellars and the surrounding land to the Heart Mountain Wyoming Foundation in 2013. The Heart Mountain Interpretive Center opened in 2011. Martin also worked to preserve the smokestack at the former internment camp.

The root cellar facility is a difficult project to bring to the public as Martin and his small crew from his Montana company, Zoula Masonry Services, struggle to keep the structure as original as possible and yet meet federal regulations. It hasn’t been easy as the root cellar sinks into the soft dirt near the railroad tracks.

“So they were definitely using really kind of seconds, like, what they could find. Because, I mean, if you think about all the lumber they were making was going for the barracks, this was built kind of using what they could glean,” he said.

When Martin first saw the root cellar, he wondered if saving the structure was even possible.

“When we first got down here, before we started doing any work, all the vents had fallen through, and there was trash everywhere,” he said. “To be able to walk in here now and just have a dance floor is just kind of amazing. I can see the end and that’s just a really encouraging feeling to have.”

If he didn’t realize the importance of the facility, former incarcerees reminded him of the monumental achievement by the prisoners.

Funding challenges

The project stalled last year as the center waited for promised federal grants to arrive. Work continued after a $852,000 grant by the National Park Service through the Japanese American Confinement Sites (JACS) program arrived. But now they are realizing federal funding may dry up this year, challenging the center to find fresh sources of revenue.

“We were honestly afraid that we weren’t going to get the funds we were promised last year,” said Museum Director of Interpretation Cally Steussy. “They did come through, which is why we have Sol here, but we were all sweating over that one. But I’m expecting that we are not going to get any of the grants we applied for this year, moving into the future.”

Steussy said grants, the center’s primary and best source of funding, are not expected to be authorized for “a couple years at least,” she said.

Norm Mineta and Al Simpson were great fundraisers for the center — they had phone lists of the most influential leaders and benefactors, David said.

“Al had access to everybody in Washington, D.C., and not everybody could just walk into the office of the president and say, hey, I want to talk to you about something. But Al Simpson could,” said Deni Mineta.

Yet, with their passing and their children taking their seats on the board, it will become imperative that the center raise more private donations to continue their work from sympathetic donors.

Ann Simpson made pleas to increase private donations in her Saturday speech in front of those attending the awards banquet in a massive tent erected in the center’s parking lot.

“You need to spread the word about Heart Mountain because they can’t operate on bread crumbs,” Simpson said. “Al had a saying; he said, ‘be comforted, the money is here. The problem is, it’s all in your pockets,’” she said to nervous but vigorous laughter.

For more information: heartmountain.org.