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Marissa Ohara and Charles Lyons are freelance musicians working in the casino orchestras in Las Vegas in the 1970s. They are among a handful of classically trained string players in the bands that backed the popular singers of the day: Frank Sinatra, Dean Martin, Sammy Davis Jr., Bob Goulet, Shirley MacLaine, etc. The bands were basically Big Band, and the added strings produced rich symphonic sounds to enhance these idols’ spectacular shows. Marissa and Charlie form a close friendship that eventually leads to marriage. The reader is taken behind the scenes of the workplace—backstage and the band rooms—to see the interaction between the players and the stars who were idols in the then-flourishing music business. In 1970 Las Vegas was just a budding desert town. It had a small branch of the University of Nevada where Charlie enrolled as candidate for a doctorate in Nevada history. He supported himself while in college by continuing to play in the Strip orchestras. Marissa lived with him and worked full time in the casino bands for the big stars who appeared nonstop for two decades. Marissa Ohara is not Irish, as her last name might suggest. Rather she is full-blooded Japanese, but thoroughly American by birth and upbringing. Marissa’s father, George Shigeo Ohara, a second-generation American, was in his senior year at the University of California at Berkeley when Pearl Harbor was attacked. Through Charlie’s knowledge of history Marissa becomes aware of her parent’s wartime subjugation. She also learns about the life of the Japanese immigrant in California in the early 1900s: how people of her parents’ and grandparents’ generations came to America, and how they were denied social and economic advancement available to their white fellow citizens. This book also tells of the 120,000 innocent Japanese-American men, women, and children uprooted from their homes during the war, with details about the evacuation and the three years they were forced to live in barbed wire camps. These stories are drawn from the writer’s own experience as one of those internees.

5.5×8.5 • 212 pages • $9.00

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ISBN 978-1935530732

Helene Honda (nee Eiko Yoshizato) was born in San Francisco, California, and grew up among artistic people whose comings and goings gave her home a colorful Bohemian atmosphere: news reporters, European and Oriental poets and artists, violinists, opera singers and Hollywood actors. Helene began violin lessons at age seven. During World War II, when Japanese-Americans were forbidden to live on the West Coast, she studied at the Juilliard School of Music in New York City under Toscanini’s concertmaster, Mischa Mischakoff. After graduating, she traveled the country with the Metropolitan Opera Touring Company and the American Ballet Theatre orchestras. Since circa 1970, when Las Vegas became known as “The Entertainment Capital of the World,” Helene played for 25 years in the showrooms of every major Las Vegas hotel – for superstars such as: Elvis Presley, Tom Jones, Smokey Robinson, Cher, Michael Jackson, Janet Jackson, Dean Martin, Tony Bennett and Frank Sinatra.

Customer Reviews

• Interment and the Rack Pack: Growing up in the 50’s I, knew lots about Frank Sinatra (a Jersey Boy). I lived in Atlantic City. He played there often and opened the great show in Las Vegas, which my parents longed to see. Even though Sinatra reverberated throughout my house, there was not a word about a Japanese interment ever happening in the 40’s. My Dad had been in a prison camp in Germany but I had no idea there were prison camps in the US–through my parents, or my history classes through the end of college. This book not only reveals the shame of Roosevelt and Earl Warren’s locking up US citizen in horse stalls, taking their property, pride and freedom but does something more. It shows the dignity and drive of the Japanese citizens to survive and thrive by propelling the protagonist out of her bleak high desert camp to Julliard, and ultimately Las Vegas playing with the very Sinatra, who filled my living room with sorrow with “Only the Lonely”. The heroine is not isolated but achieves triumph over national prejudice and fear.A great book and very timely as Allegiance, with Star Wars George Takei, about the same Japanese American indignity, is coming to Broadway. (by Cathy Jo Cress on February 20, 2013)
• I loved this book because I lived through the period for I and my family were incarcerated in one of America’s concentration “camps.” I couldn’t tell where fiction started or ended. Jobs were difficult to obtain, but I am delighted that someone managed in Las Vegas based on talent and not on ancestry. It is an important understanding of what happened to one of 120,000 innocent persons of Japanese ancestry during and after WW II. There is a comforting conclusion. Thank you! (by Masaru Hashimoto on April 11, 2014)
• This book is a “must read.” It tells about the world of musicians who played in the orchestras at the big casinos for the big singers like Sinatra. In those days, singers didn’t have their own bands, as they do today. Then the story moves to the memoirs of Japanese Americans being yanked from their homes and businesses to being sent to internment camps–in the USA! I’ve been to the camp mentioned–Topaz. It’s out in the middle of nowhere in central Utah. There aren’t any buildings any more, but there are wells, foundations, and markers for the buildings. The nearby town of Delta is creating a museum. They may even reconstruct some of the living quarters. What a sad, secret part of our history. (by “cat traveler” on March 24, 2013)
• History, Music and So Much More. Read this book. You’ll love it as I did. We know so little about World War II from this angle. I wish I had read it 50 years ago, but I cannot make up for that. You can. Read it now, hand it off to your friends. Keep it for your children. This is a story everyone should know plus it’s fun. Read it. (by Patricia W. Ihrig on March 6, 2013)
• Japanese internment of 19402 revealed. First-hand account of effects on Japanese who lived on the West Coast of the United States (both citizens and non-citizens) before and during World War II and some of their contributions in the U.S. Army is well written from personal perspective and covers a generous middle half of the novel. Emphasis is on young people’s experiences. History buffs will find new information here. I enjoyed reading insights about the internment camps of 1940’s and also one internee’s later backstage life as a Las Vegas professional musician during the Rat Pack era. (by “blueandpewter” on Jan. 31, 2013.