Two months after the bombing of Pearl Harbor, President Roosevelt signed Executive Order 9066. It placed Japanese citizens and Japanese-Americans in internment camps for the duration of the war. But John Newcombe says people who suffered from lung disease couldn't go to the camps.

"You know La Crescenta used to be known for sanitariums."

Newcombe, whose documentary is "Rancho La Canada: Then and Now," says there were more than two dozen sanitariums in town.

"And one of them was called the Hillcrest Sanitarium at the top of Lowell. And the government sent a lot of the Japanese interned who were suffering from lung disease to La Crescenta."

A retired Quaker missionary named Herbert Nicholson volunteered at the sanitarium as a language interpreter. He ended up delivering items from pillows to pianos to the people there. After the war, the former detainees invited Nicholson to their reunions.

(Airdate: 5/9/2009)