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AI: Today is October 25, 2000. We're here in Seattle, Washington with Peter Irons. I'm Alice Ito. My co-interviewer is Lori Bannai, and Dana Hoshide is our videographer. Thanks very much for being with us, Peter, we really appreciate your time.

PI: Well, I'm really glad to be here.

AI: Wanted to start off the interview at your beginnings and ask you what was your name at birth, when were you born, and where were you born?

PI: My name is -- and always has been -- Peter Hanlon Irons. My middle name was my mother's maiden name. I, my first name was my grandfather's name, Joseph Peter Hanlon. It's a family name. I was born in Salem, Massachusetts, in 1940, and did not live there -- didn't grow up in Salem. That's just where the hospital was. My parents at that time were living in Marblehead, Massachusetts. My father worked at the General Electric Company plant in Lynn, Massachusetts, at the time, so that's... but I have no memories of those early years in Massachusetts.

AI: Well, will you tell us more about your parents, your mother, your father, and what they did, a little bit about their background?

PI: Well, my parents met actually in Massachusetts. My father was an engineer. He was then working for the General Electric Company in a project -- this was before the Second World War started, and the project was to build steam turbines, improve the design of steam turbines for ships. And he was from western Pennsylvania, a little town called Beaver, Pennsylvania. And he grew up in a family very different from my mother's family. His parents and all his relatives going back several generations were Scotch-Irish, very Calvinist Presbyterians, in fact, a lot of Presbyterian ministers in my father's family. His father was a, an accountant, and I think had his own little accounting firm. I didn't know him. He died during my first year, so I never really met him. But he and his family were very stern, very strict kind of people. They didn't have a lot of fun, apparently. Couldn't do anything on Sunday. And my father didn't really enjoy that kind of life. He went off after high school to Carnegie Institute of Technology in Pittsburgh, became an engineer, and traveled around the country for a while just to see the rest of the world 'cause he'd never left western Pennsylvania before then. Hopped on freight trains -- this was during the 1930s in the Depression -- hopped on freight trains and went out West. I'm not sure how far, but at any rate, he got a job with General Electric. And jobs were pretty scarce back then. And they sent him to Lynn, Massachusetts. And while he was there, he met my mother at a party. And she was a nurse, and had been born and raised in the Boston area, little town west of Boston. Her father was a doctor, but they were, they weren't Scotch-Irish. They were Irish-Irish, Catholic Irish. So my family really was a merger of, of Protestant and Catholic, and it was not a very easy mixture. In fact, my father's parents would not even attend my parents' wedding because it was held in a Unitarian church. It wasn't a Catholic church. But they wouldn't even go to another kind of church for, even for their son's wedding.

But my mother's family was very interesting. Her father had grown up in a small, in New Hampshire and went to work at a very early age in a shoe factory. In fact, I found in the U.S. Census records in Washington -- while I was doing work on researching the internment cases, I spent spare time doing family genealogy. And I found in the U.S. Census of 1890, the sheet that listed my mother's family. And so my grandfather, it said, "Age, nine. Occupation: shoe worker." And he worked in a shoe factory. His family had come over, his grandparents had come over from Ireland back in the 1840s when there was a big migration from Ireland, and they'd settled in New Hampshire. And they all went to work in the factories. And my grandfather was a very different kind of child. I didn't actually know him. He also died during my first year. But he rebelled against the very strict Catholicism of his family, just as my father had rebelled the strict Protestantism of his. And he ran away from home at the age of thirteen after some confrontation with the parish priest and wound up in Providence, Rhode Island where he was taken in by a family. And I never learned the details of it, but they put him through school, through high school and sent him to college. And he wound up in medical school in Baltimore, became a doctor. Moved back to Massachusetts and lived for most of his life not too many miles from his family, but he never contacted them, never saw them. Apparently that split had been too painful for him. But he worked as a, he started out, in fact, working in an asylum, a state asylum in Massachusetts, for people, I think, who had tuberculosis. And he worked there, and then he went into training at the Massachusetts General Hospital and became an eye surgeon. And this was back in the days when eye surgery was very, very difficult, and they didn't have lasers, and so it was a very precise -- you had to be a very skilled surgeon to do eye surgery. And he did that for a while and then decided, according to my mother, that he should stop doing eye surgery because like many doctors and medical people at that time, he'd become addicted to morphine, and he felt that it might impair his abilities. And so he went into family practice, general practice in a small town near Boston, spent the rest of his life doing that.

And one story I heard which may have some significance in my life, I don't know, is that my mother said that when her father died in 1941, they opened up this big old desk in his office, one of these giant old desks with the roll-top, and found the drawers full of bills that he had never sent to people because they couldn't afford, during the Depression, to pay him. So he had really done a lot of, I guess what we'd call now pro bono work, public service work as a doctor.

My mother was a nurse. She'd gone to nursing school and worked in radiology at Massachusetts General Hospital when she met my father, I think in 1939. And so they lived in Boston for a while. And I was born in 1940. And I have six brothers and sisters. And the next oldest, my brother Rockwell, Rocky, was born just fourteen months after me. So there wasn't a whole lot of time that I had just to myself in the family. It was a very large family, and my parents added kids every year or two. Apparently they wanted to have a dozen children. There was a book that was very popular back then called Cheaper by the Dozen. It had been written by a man who was a time and motion engineer, very much like my father. Everything was planned very precisely. So every one of the twelve kids in that family had chores to do. They couldn't even go to the bathroom without learning the solar system on the ceiling. And that was the idea in our family, when you have seven kids and you move a lot, everything has to be organized. Interesting because I have never been organized. But at any rate, we moved around quite a bit during our early years.

AI: Well, before we go further, let me ask you your parents' names.

PI: My dad's name was Davison Ewing Irons, although he was known by everybody as Rusty, partly because of his hair, which was sort of a rust-colored red. My mother's name was Alda. Her middle name is Gertrude. She never told anybody. She did not like that name. But she's Alda Irons. I don't know where her name comes from. It's a very unusual first name. But her last name, her parents' name was Hanlon. It had originally been O'Hanlon in Ireland, but they dropped the "O," and so it was Hanlon.