Ralph Lazo, Interned With His Friends

LOS ANGELES - Ralph Lazo, whose loyalty to school friends spurred him to become the only non-Japanese-American interned in a World War II relocation camp, has died at age 67.

Mr. Lazo, who served with the Army in the South Pacific and earned a Bronze Star for heroism after leaving California's Manzanar Relocation Center, died of liver disease on New Year's Day.

Of Mexican and Irish descent, Mr. Lazo was 18 when he voluntarily entered the desolate Owens Valley camp in 1942. The mass evacuation of Japanese on the West Coast was ordered after Japan attacked Pearl Harbor in Hawaii.

"He wanted to be with his friends," said Mary Kinoshito of Sun Valley. "He was very loyal."

"I think he just said, `If my friends are going, I'll go too,' " said Sam Mayo, dean of academic affairs at Valley College, who helped Mr. Lazo make a videotape chronicling his experiences at Manzanar. "That's the way he was."

The North Hollywood resident, a retired educator, was honored Tuesday at a memorial service in Kagel Canyon, north of Los Angeles, attended by fellow Manzanar internees.

Mr. Lazo was stunned at the internment of fellow Americans, said his sister Virginia Lazo. She recalled one classmate telling him, "Ralph, what are you going to do without us? Why don't you go along?"

"So he did," Virginia Lazo recalled. "He just came in one day and told my dad, `I'm going to camp.' "

In a 1981 interview, Mr. Lazo explained: "These people hadn't

done anything that I hadn't done except to go to Japanese language school." Government officials discovered Mr. Lazo was not Japanese-American when he was drafted in August 1944.

After the war, Mr. Lazo taught high school and worked as a college counselor. He also maintained his ties to the Japanese-American community.