WesternU Hosts Library Foundation Event with Channel 7 Anchor

Pomona, CA (PRWEB) November 07, 2013

The Pomona Public Library Foundation, as part of the Pomona Library’s Together We Read program, will present KABC7 News anchor David Ono and his special report, “Witness: The Legacy of Heart Mountain,” at 9 a.m. Saturday, Nov. 16 at Trendle Auditorium, in the Wineberg Center on the Western University of Health Sciences campus.

Tickets are $15, $5 for students, and can be purchased online at http://www.pomonalibraryfoundation.org. Additional tickets will be available at the door, but seating is limited. Parking is available behind the Wineberg Center, at First Street and Gibbs.

Coffee, tea, and light breakfast items will be served beginning at 9 a.m. The program with David Ono will begin at 10 a.m. The Foundation also will present selected readings from the Pomona Library’s Penley Letters collection, read by students from the Pomona Unified School District.

Together We Read is an annual program of the Pomona Public Library and its community sponsors. Each year, one book is chosen for the community to read and learn more about. The 2013 book is “Farewell to Manzanar,” by Jeanne Wakatsuki Houston and James D. Houston. The book chronicles the author’s time in the Manzanar internment center in central California.

Pomona Library’s Special Collections includes many items from the Japanese internment, especially items related to the Assembly Center at the Pomona Fairgrounds. Among those items is a collection of the Assembly Center newsletter, which was published by the internees during their stay in Pomona. Also included in the collection is the Levina Penley Letters. Penley was a librarian at Mt. San Antonio College, Emerson Middle School and the Pomona Public Library.

While at Emerson Middle School, Penley befriended several of her Japanese students and their families from Pomona. When they were moved to the Assembly Center at the Pomona Fairgrounds, starting in May 1942, she visited them and began corresponding with them. The library’s collection contains nearly 100 of these letters to Penley, and selections from several of them will be read during the program. After leaving the Fairgrounds Assembly Center, most of the internees were sent to the Internment Camp at Heart Mountain, Wyoming (near Cody) where they remained until the end of the war in 1945. Heart Mountain is the focus of David Ono’s report.

Ono is co-anchor for ABC7 “Eyewitness News” at 4 p.m. and 6 p.m. He joined ABC7 in 1996, hosted “Eye on L.A.,” and has co-anchored “Eyewitness News” with co-anchor Ellen Leyva for close to two decades. Ono has won 16 Emmys and three Edward R. Murrow awards, including two for his coverage of the devastation following the January 2010 earthquake in Port-au-Prince, Haiti.

The program also will feature a guest panel including Patti Hirahawa, who was featured in the Ono special reports and whose father and grandfather took more than 1,000 photographs of the Heart Mountain camp; and Mike Hachimonji, who was interned at Heart Mountain as a teenager after being transported from the Pomona Assembly Center. Inland Valley Daily Bulletin history columnist Joe Blackstock will serve as master of ceremonies.

Contributions may be made to the Pomona Public Library Foundation by mail, 101 West Mission Blvd., Suite 101-219, Pomona, CA 91766; by phone at (909) 374-2050; by email at info(at)pomonalibraryfoundation(dot)org; or by using the donate button on the Foundation website, http://www.pomonalibraryfoundation.org.

About Western University of Health Sciences

Western University of Health Sciences (http://www.westernu.edu), located in Pomona, Calif. and Lebanon, Ore., is an independent nonprofit health professions university, conferring degrees in biomedical sciences, dental medicine, health sciences, medical sciences, nursing, optometry, osteopathic medicine, pharmacy, physical therapy, physician assistant studies, podiatric medicine and veterinary medicine. The Chronicle of Higher Education named WesternU a Great College to Work For in 2012 and 2013.

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