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A constituent recently wrote to me, “I for one would be interested in knowing about your upbringing and the influence your parents played in making you interested in local politics.”
My father’s parents came from Japan. My grandfather landed with the proverbial fifty cents in his pocket and went to work as a farm laborer in the sugar beet fields of Washington State. After a time, my grandmother joined him as a “picture bride.” They worked hard, and eventually they started a grocery store in California. By the beginning of World War II, they had several stores in Oakland and Berkeley. Then they lost it all.
After Japan bombed Pearl Harbor, our country “relocated” people of Japanese extraction from the West Coast. “Relocated” sounds better than “imprisoned,” but the fact is, my father’s family was forced to sell everything for a small fraction of its value and move to an internment camp surrounded by barbed wire in the Utah desert.
From there, my father volunteered for the Army. Friends asked him, “Why would you serve the country that is doing this to us?”
His answer was that there were greater evils to fight, that the war had a purpose worth fighting for, in spite of the injustice he had suffered. And so he joined the 442nd combat regiment—the Japanese American unit that became the most highly decorated regiment in U.S. history.
Meanwhile, my mother immigrated from Germany with her family; she was eleven at the time. Both of her parents were social activists who recognized what Hitler was up to and decided to get out. They took to heart the American ideals of liberty and justice for all and fought for those ideals all their lives.
My mother’s father was an engineer who built one of the first computers in the U.S.; he also founded the Society for Social Responsibility in Science, based on the idea that scientists must take some responsibility for the ways their discoveries and inventions are used. (How relevant this seems today with the opioid crisis and the explosion of vaping.) He was extremely proud that Einstein was a member.
So my interest in politics really comes out of the commitment to public service I learned from my parents and grandparents. I see elective office as an important way to try to make the world a better place. That idea drives me to work long hours as First Selectwoman, to listen to all my constituents, and to pull people together for the common good.
I ask for your vote on November 5 so that I can continue to do that work.
Cathy Iino
Killingworth, Conn.
Very poignant family history. Killingworth has been fortunate to have Cathy as First Selectman in the past and hopefully will have her at the helm in the future.
As everyone who knows Cathy knows that this is the daughter of a Nisei warrior who regardless of what her opposition says or does has learned from the absolute best how to fight for all of us. Not just the elite not just the rich but all of us. Her record speaks for itself. Cathy is hands down bar none the best First Select person this town had ever had.