Pam Tajima Praeger’s ties to Pacific Oaks College start at birth—when her mother named her after a bright student at The Children’s School. As Japanese Americans, Praeger’s parents were interned at Gila River, Arizona, or deported inland during World War II. When they returned to Pasadena after the war, anti-Japanese sentiment was still virulent.
“Pacific Oaks hired my mother, Setsuko Frances Itow Tajima, as a teacher,” she says. “Part of my fondness for the college and children’s school comes from their relationship with Quaker principles. The Quakers were instrumental in helping the people of Japanese descent during a very, very tough time.”
After initially minimizing her Japanese heritage, Praeger remembers writing a research paper in high school on the incarceration camps, which would have been the first time most of her classmates had heard of that never-discussed chapter in U.S. history.
She doesn’t recall what inspired that moment of consciousness, but by the time she enrolled at Pomona College, which she describes as being in 1965, a “radical, open liberal arts college,” the seed of activism that had been planted inside her bloomed in full.
“I was involved in quite a few anti-war protests and teach-ins,” Praeger says. “We were anti- a lot, which maybe made us pro- something.” Still, there was a lot of talk among the students of Pomona that they were living in an ivory tower, and the assassination of Robert Kennedy and Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. in 1968 inspired Praeger to become more involved in a real way.
At first, she wasn’t sure which direction she wanted to take. “At the time, I was 21. I was naive and full of it,” she laughs. Though she loved children, a streak of independence made her not want to be a teacher like her parents. She thought about the Peace Corps but saw it as an extension of a U.S. foreign policy she opposed.
Praeger settled on VISTA, a Kennedy administration initiative founded in 1964 that stood for Volunteers in Service to America. She was sent first to South Carolina and then to Florida, where she trained volunteers, many of them fresh-faced fraternity and sorority members from the University of Florida, to work with poor communities in the area. Her work experience in training and managing a program at a young age laid the groundwork for the rest of her career.
She married a fellow VISTA worker and moved back to Pasadena. Her husband worked at a free clinic that was sponsored in part by All Saints Episcopal Church. The congregation also operated a day school where her mother taught and where Praeger also worked for a time as a teacher. Like her mother, some of the other teachers had previously taught at Pacific Oaks and much of the teaching philosophy was reflected in their teaching. “That’s where I thought, ‘OK, I really love young children. I need to learn more about that school,’” she says.
She applied to Pacific Oaks’ education program, was accepted, and studied with renowned faculty members including Elizabeth Jones and Louise Derman-Sparks, who wrote the anti-bias curriculum. Praeger was chosen to be a teaching fellow in the Children’s School and taught in the same years where her mother had 20 years early.
After graduating, Praeger moved to eastern Washington state and became the director of a child care center. Putting into practice what she had just learned in school was exciting, but she was pregnant and decided she was better suited for an organization in which she had more direct interactions with children and their caregivers.
Praeger was hired by North Idaho College Head Start, which she saw as a perfect fit because it meant returning to the anti-poverty work she had done in the ‘60s. This began an almost 50-year career in leadership of Head Start programs and community colleges in the Pacific Northwest, during which she oversaw and pioneered programs in ESOL, GED, continuing education, and extended learning.
There were difficult times. She and her husband divorced, and she lost her daughter to cancer, a devastating blow given how close they were, but her guiding principle was always to base her professional choices on opportunities to do the most good for her community. She retired as president of Spokane Falls Community College.
“As you get older, you start reflecting on what was very important in your life,” Praeger says. She credits her career success to her Japanese heritage as influenced by the polity of her family’s Presbyterian faith. “A lot came from beliefs I learned about at Pacific Oaks,” she says.
She was also influenced by her family’s love for the Quaker peace organization American Friends Service Committee, which published a booklet of the last sermons delivered by her grandfather, Rev. Kengo Tajima, and uncle, Rev. Don Toriumi, and other Japanese pastors before their congregations were loaded onto trucks.
“A school, the Ted K. Tajima High School, was named after my father. He and my mother were extremely influential in education,” Praeger says. “I’m at the age where I have the money to be able to donate. So much of what Pacific Oaks did is so ingrained into my value system. My time at the college and children’s school gave it words, gave me a push to action, gave me a vision.” Through her gift, Praeger hopes to help create a pathway for Latinx students from East Los Angeles to come to Pacific Oaks.
“Pam has a very inspirational story,” says Dr. Jack Paduntin, president of Pacific Oaks. “It shows that people like her may spend only a short time here, but the impression Pacific Oaks makes on them lasts for a long time—as does the impact they make in their communities.”
As one example, while a student at Pacific Oaks, Praeger met a group of women from the Hopi tribe in Arizona. The Gila River internment camp was built on reservation land, and they described what the Japanese people had left. The Japanese Americans and Japanese farmed the land, developed agricultural systems, and made furniture. When the camp closed, they left behind what they couldn’t carry with them as they were scattered across the country. The Hopi women talked about the legacy of the camp and the importance of what the Japanese left behind them.
“There are such connections to be found when we put people together,” Praeger says.
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