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AI: Well, I'm wondering also as the oldest child, the oldest son, did that have an impact that -- in some families, the oldest child, the oldest son has some particular other responsibilities, or takes on other responsibilities for the other kids in the family, or in some way has a different role. Was that the case for you?

PI: Well, I think being the first of seven did have an impact on me, but not in that way. I was not, I did not really help to take care of the younger kids. There were two boys at the top and then two girls, my sisters Amanda and Mariah. And they took care of the three youngest kids as they came along. In fact, they're both in sort of, my sister Amanda is now a special needs school teacher, and my sister Mariah is a nurse. And they were both of the, the sort of very caring, and so the older boys really didn't have that kind of responsibility. My responsibility really was to -- and it may sound odd -- to relate to my parents' friends and the people that my father worked with. And I was very early, for example, just to run through some of the places that we lived after we left New York at the end of World War II -- I think in 1946 or 1947, we moved to the state of Washington to Richland, Washington. And my father's job there was to supervise the engineering and construction of the Hanford Atomic Works. And that, of course, is where they were processing uranium into plutonium to make hydrogen bombs. Now, I didn't know this at the time. I was too young. And it was highly secretive. My father never talked about his work. My mother says that the whole time we lived there for about three years, she thought he worked in urban planning, which is totally ridiculous. There was no urban anything there anyway. It was this little town of houses built, ready-made houses in the desert. We had rattlesnakes in the front yard and cactus. And it really was desert territory.

And I have a lot of memories of that time in Richland. We went to several, the town was being built so quickly, you know, literally had 20 or 25,000 people coming in over a year or two, that I went to several different schools. I remember the Sacagawea School, the Lewis & Clark School, and a couple of others. And I don't remember my school, what happened in school those years as much as I remember the place itself. And my brother Rocky and I used to go out and -- into the, into the desert in the hills and play cowboys and Indians. And we had BB guns, and we would, we would shoot at each other and shoot things. And I was very much involved in, I got into the Cub Scouts and the Boy Scouts there and a singing group of young kids. And we left around 1950 or '51 and moved to Delaware, all the way across the country. My father had then gone to the Atomic Energy Commission, and they were, he was in charge of constructing a new plant in South Carolina, Aiken, South Carolina, where -- I'm not quite sure what they did, but it was heavy water, whatever. It was also part of the hydrogen weapons plant. And that plant was being constructed by the Dupont Company, which is headquartered in Delaware. And so he was the liaison between the Dupont Company and the Atomic Energy Commission. We almost wound up living in South Carolina, and I often wonder what would have happened to me, what my life would have been like if we'd gone to South Carolina, which back then was a rigidly segregated, very conservative state, in many ways still is. But we stayed for three years in Delaware. And we also lived in a mansion in Delaware in a little town called Newcastle, right on the Delaware River. It was called the Jean Vierre Mansion. It was a huge old brick house with these white columns in front, a portico. And one thing I learned in that house was that there was a gigantic fireplace in the kitchen, a walk-in kind of fireplace. And that fireplace had a secret opening, a door. You'd push on this, a brick, one particular brick, the door would swing open. And there was a stairway behind the fireplace up to a little room that was totally enclosed. And that was a stop on the Underground Railroad for slaves escaping to the North. Delaware was then a slave state.

And one thing I didn't realize -- and I was there from about the age of eleven to fourteen -- was that I went to segregated schools. These were schools that were racially segregated, and in fact were one of the school districts that was involved in Brown v. Board of Education. There were five cases, one from the state of Delaware. So the schools that I went to at the time I was going to school in junior high school were segregated and were being sued because of that. But I wasn't conscious of that at the time. And I've always reflected that -- and I've thought about it often in the years since then, that we lived, it was, we were actually outside the town of Newcastle in a rural area, and down the road just a mile or so was a little black community called Buttonwood. It wasn't even a town, but it was just a location. And we would go down there sometimes, just ride our bikes around. And there would be these black kids playing. And we didn't play with them, but we saw them a lot. And it never crossed my mind, where do they go to school? How come they don't go to our school? And it wasn't until we left Delaware in 1954, just at the time Brown was decided, May of 1954, and went to Ohio, to Cincinnati, Ohio, that it suddenly struck me because I was very conscious of the Brown decision, that our schools had been segregated.

<End Segment 3> - Copyright © 2000 Densho. All Rights Reserved.