As if poultry farming is not difficult enough, the FBI's questioning of vaccinating hens in the chicken coop seems unnecessary to most people.

But not Karl Yoneda, Penngrove rancher.

As a long-term political activist, he was used to living under surveillance, including military service during World War II, for which he was awarded the Gold Star Award.

Carl enlisted in the army on December 7, 1942, the day after the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor a year later. At that time, he was imprisoned in Manzanal along with his wife and three-year-old son, one of 10 concentration camps that held 110,000 Japanese Americans during the war. The camp is located in the high desert of Owens Valley near Mount Whitney, 200 miles north of Los Angeles, where Carl, the son of Japanese immigrants, was born in 1906.

After his father was diagnosed with tuberculosis, his family decided to move back to his hometown near Hiroshima when he was 7 years old. Carl spent his years of growing up in Japan, during which time Japan was transitioning to a modern industrialized colonial empire. By the early 1920s, trade unions and various socialist, communist, and anarchist activists were holding public demonstrations demanding economic and democratic reforms and protesting the rise of Japanese militarism.

Idealist and capricious, Carl organized his first strike when he was in high school, and launched the strike of the Hiroshima messenger on the grounds of low salary. At the age of 16, he came to Beijing, where he studied with the blind Ukrainian anarchist and Esperanto teacher Vasily Eroshenko for two months.

After returning to Japan, he devoted himself to the life of fighting social injustice, participated in several major strikes in Japan, and published a magazine for poor farmers. In 1926, to avoid being drafted into the army, he boarded a freighter to San Francisco. Upon arrival, immigration officials classified him as kibei-nisei-born in the United States and educated in Japan-and kept him in the immigration detention center on Angel Island for two months. After his release, he went to Los Angeles, where he found a job as a dishwasher and window cleaner.

Because the American Federation of Labor rejected people of color at the time, he joined the Japanese Workers' Association as their publication director. To commemorate Karl Marx, he changed his name from Goso to Karl. He also began to cooperate with the Union Education Union affiliated to the Communist Party to organize migrant workers in the Central Valley and Fresno.

In 1931, during a demonstration calling for unemployment insurance in Los Angeles during the Great Depression, Karl was beaten and thrown into prison by the notorious "red team" of the police department. The police did not want them to have a corpse in their hands, so they called the International Labor Protection Agency, which calls itself the "working-class legal department", to bail him.

Elaine Black, a young woman who just started working for ILD the day before, paid Carl's bail and took him to the hospital.

In their initial meeting, sparks apparently flew.

A year later, after Elaine was assigned to the ILD office in San Francisco, Karl appeared in her office and worked as an editor for the Communist Party’s Japanese publication Rodo Shimbun in the city. The couple ignored California’s anti-intermarriage laws against mixed couples and moved to the city’s Japantown.

Elaine grew up in the Lower East Side of New York City and is the daughter of Jewish immigrants Mollie and Nathan Buchman. She is an instigator who mixes her moral anger against injustice with a sense of fashion. After Nathan was conscripted into the Tsarist army, the Marxist activists Buchmann and his family fled their native Russia. In 1920, the family moved from New York to Southern California.

After being accidentally involved in a brutal raid on the Red Team, the angry Elaine found a job in IDL and joined the Communist Party. His surname was Black, who was initially used as a pseudonym during police questioning. Conservative newspapers called her the "tiger woman." Activists called her the "red angel" because she worked tirelessly among the strikers, providing them with food, accommodation and bail.

In 1934, Elaine and Carl participated in the West Coast dockers' strike. Elaine was the only woman on the strike committee. Carl led an effort to discourage Japanese workers from crossing the picket line. Both were sentenced to jail-Elaine went to jail four times, including making inflammatory remarks and wandering while she went to court to bail other activists.

The strike eventually led to the unionization of all ports on the west coast.

In the fall of 1934, Carl made California history and became the first Japanese-American to run for the state legislature. He failed to campaign on the platforms of racial equality, unemployment insurance, and living wages. Shortly before election day, the red team arrested him in a campaign speech, accused him of wandering, and ensured that the newspaper emphasized his immoral living arrangements with the Tiger Girl.

In 1935, Carl and Elaine were worried that their "separation" together was a political responsibility, so they boarded the train to Seattle, where they could legally marry. In order to avoid being accused of violating the Mann Act, the Act criminalizes the unethical act of transporting someone across state boundaries by riding in different train cars.

For the remainder of the 1930s, Carl and Elaine pursued their political activism. Carl established a cannery workers’ union in Alaska. The two of them were picking Japanese cargo ships on the San Francisco docks. These cargo ships were carrying scrap iron to make Japanese military equipment. In need of a stable income during the Great Depression, Carl became a dock worker. In 1939, Elaine gave birth to their son Tom. A few months later, she failed to run for the San Francisco Board of Supervisors, calling for cheap housing, free childcare services and civil rights for working women.

Two months after the attack, President Roosevelt succumbed to xenophobia, racism, and unfounded fear of espionage and signed Executive Order 9066, which resulted in the imprisonment of 110,000 Japanese descendants, including American citizens and immigrants.

Carl and his 2-year-old son Tommy were sent to the camp in Manzanar. Elaine had to break in and became one of the only seven white men to practice there. Carl initiated a petition at the camp to allow young Nisei — immigrant parents born in the United States — to volunteer for military service. Eight months later in Manzanar—during this period they often received death threats from a small group of pro-Japanese fascists known as "black dragons"—Carl was enlisted in the army, and Elaine and Tommy were allowed to return to San Francisco.

Carl was assigned to the Psychological Warfare Team of the Military Intelligence Agency along with the other rising stars, whose motto is "Go For Broke". He was deployed to India, Burma, and China, drafting and editing propaganda to be dispersed in the Japanese army, and transmitted by radio, usually deep behind enemy lines. Carl is usually accompanied by white soldiers not only to protect him, but to prevent him from falling into enemy hands by shooting him when necessary.

At the end of the war, Carl reunited with Elaine and Tommy, and briefly returned to his original job at the San Francisco Pier before a health problem made him unemployed. A group of Jewish chicken farmers in Petaluma knew Karl and Elaine in their socialist circles, and they urged them to try to raise poultry. With the financial help of Elaine's family and the help of GI loans, the couple was able to purchase a 6-acre ranch on Petaluma Hill Road in Penngrove. Elaine's parents soon joined them from Los Angeles.

Dedicated to the hard work of raising meat birds, Carl and Elaine also took time to participate in the local community. Carl joined the board of directors of the Petaluma cooperative hatchery, and Elaine served as the chairman of the Civil Rights Convention County. During the Red Scares of the McCarthy era, they were often observed by the FBI-as mentioned earlier, the FBI even found it necessary to question Karl when he was vaccinating chickens.

Their son Tom graduated from Petaluma High School in 1957. A straight-A student, he lettered in basketball, football and track, and was elected student body president, winning the Petaluma B'nai B'rith Frankel-Rosenbaum Award for outstanding scholarship and An academic scholarship from Stanford University.

By 1960, Petaluma's role as the world's egg basket was severely declining due to the rise of factory farms elsewhere. Carl and Elaine sold their chicken farm and moved back to San Francisco, where Carl resumed his job as a temporary dock worker. Elaine went to work in the office of the International Wharf and Warehouse Union.

They are still activists. They traveled to Tokyo as representatives of the Nuclear Disarmament Conference, participated in many anti-Vietnamese protests, and wrote articles and speeches on labor history. The San Francisco Board of Supervisors celebrated their 50th anniversary in 1983 and paid tribute to them because they gave their lives to improve the lives of others.

Elaine died in 1988, and a day later he and Jesse Jackson participated in the Nicaragua peace demonstration in San Francisco.

In 2011, Carl’s members of the All-Japan Military Intelligence Agency won the National Congress Gold Medal, the highest civilian award in the country.

Jack Withington is the author of "Historic Buildings in Sonoma County", and John Patrick Sheehy is the author of "The Home of the Winding River."

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