They say a picture is worth a thousand words. Sometimes, though, a picture doesn’t tell the whole story. Take this one:
At first glance, an idyllic scene showing a crowd watching a baseball game, some years ago. Beyond that, just an interesting photo.
Adding another couple of pieces of the puzzle is that Ansel Adams was the photographer, and it was taken in 1943. You might be able to guess that the mountains in the distance are in California, which they are — the Sierra Nevada).
Seeing those buildings in the background, if you know California or US history during WWII, might enable you to fill in the rest of the story: this was taken at the Manzanar Relocation Center in the Owens Valley, a euphemistic name for the Japanese-American prison camp located there from 1942-1945. As the Wikipedia article on Manzanar says:
On February 19, 1942, President Franklin D. Roosevelt signed Executive Order 9066, which authorized the Secretary of War to designate military commanders to prescribe military areas and to exclude “any and all persons” from such areas. The order also authorized the construction of “relocation centers” to house those who were to be excluded. This order resulted in the forced relocation of over 120,000 Japanese Americans—two-thirds of them were native-born American citizens, the rest were prevented by federal law from becoming citizens. Over 110,000 of those were imprisoned in the ten American concentration camps.
Some 11,000 were held at Manzanar. The photo above doesn’t say anything about the weather in the Owens Valley, which varied between scorching summers and deadly-cold winters, nor much about the internees’ lives which, suffice to say, weren’t as idyllic as the photo.
Thanks to the Shorpy photoblog, which posted “At Bat: 1943″ today.