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AI: Well, let me ask you, then, the next year, 1951, was, that was the year your first child was born?

EH: Uh-huh. We bought our first house -- see, Larry was born in August, and probably late in '50, we started negotiating to buy this house. And they wouldn't sell us anything north of Madison. So we ended up with this very nice, sturdy house that a Swedish guy had built all by himself. He worked in a lumber company during the Depression, and saved all the best lumber himself. He knew he was (going to) build this house. And it was a four-bedroom, three upstairs were fairly small, but on kind of a declining hill towards what's now Empire -- Martin Luther King Way. And, but a solid house, and six months after we got there, we were there, this Mr. Ostram came knocking on the door, and I invited him in and we sat in the living room, and he says, he said to us, "Mr. and Mrs. Hayes, I love this house. This is my house, I put every nail into it. I want to buy it back from you. I'll give you, I'll find you another house, I'll give you more than you paid for it." And you know, Larry was six months old, so it must have been maybe early '52. And you felt badly for him, but we, in many ways we couldn't move. We couldn't afford it, Ralph was in school full-time, and Larry's a toddler. But what happened was he said, "I never wanted to leave this house, but the women, you know, women always..." he had just a wife and daughter, his daughter was a nursing student at, at the U, was a Garfield graduate. And they wanted to live in Ballard, so that's where they ended up. Ballard was even more then, a Scandinavian part of town. You felt badly, but that was, it was interesting, there was a white couple across the street from, from us, and a white couple at the end of the block. It was a fairly integrated neighborhood, but the... and the neighbors, we really were very friendly with everybody, and they, they loved to watch Larry and Candy growing up, and Peter was, they said, "He's so dangerous, I want you to do something about it." Because we lived on a hill like this, and he would, at three years old, ride his tricycle downhill and not have, you know, have his feet hung out like this, and just managing to steer that thing. And neighbors would say, "Elaine, you gotta do something about that kid. Somebody's (going to) have a heart attack watching this." [Laughs]

And, but Peter was that way all his life. And he would, he was, he was always having accidents, not, not by accident, but because he was so much of a daredevil. And one, one year he had... he had, he almost injured his eyes, and I, we weren't in Group Health then. When I got pregnant with Mark -- that was the fourth one -- Larry says, "We're joining Group Health." And I said, "They're not (going to) cover you if the conception took place before you joined Group Health." But I went and inquired and (yes), they would cover us. We'd have to pay, what was it? Eighty dollars or something for delivery. So that was, that was great. But before we got to Group Health, Peter injured himself once, and it was close to the eye and it was a weekend. So I dashed up to Providence, and you know the name Henry and, Henry Itoi? His name was...

AI: Minnie?

EH: Huh?

AI: Minnie?

EH: Minnie, (yes). Minnie was a nurse at Providence, and she just happened to be on a glass-covered passage and saw us coming. And she, she thought somebody was losing their eyesight, come dashing down, inquiring. And it's just that he needed stitches over his eyes. And he was... I don't know whether I was pregnant -- no, no. It was just before Mark was born, or just before we got into Group Health, but when we first got into Group Health, we had two more accidents, when Peter, someone had, we had to rush Peter to... and the pediatrician said, "You know, we're going to have to do something about this kid." I mean, he was serious, that he was too accident-prone, and somehow he's not recognizing danger like he should. But...

AI: So, so Larry was born in '51, and Candy...

EH: Candy was born in --

[Interruption]

EH: The, almost about twenty months younger than Larry, and Peter was a month and... I mean, two years and two months younger than Candy. But Candy always had, from the time she was three, or a little under, she always had maternal instincts. Peter, on the other hand, was so rambunctious, it was hard to stop him. And I was not always in the presence of those kids; we had neighborhood kids around. So Mark -- Ralph came home one day and Candy was laying on the top, top steps of the cement porch, because Peter was, Peter must have been not quite one, 'cause he was crawling. But he was wanting to get down those steps, and the only way Candy could prevent him from going down the steps was lay across the top of the steps and keep pushing, pushing him back. And just fortunately, that Ralph came home at that time. And praising Candy and said, "Thank you, Candy." But remarkable kid that instinctively -- but she also had to become the mother of, she picked up early instincts and doing things. I, by the time Larry was eight or nine, those kids had assignments in the summertime, that they had to do a chore before they could go. Larry could, "Okay, what's my, what's my chore?" And he would get it done and out, off he'd go. And they would all do that except Peter. Peter just, I, I had to really keep after him to get things done. But he was certainly healthy and no problems.

<End Segment 17> - Copyright © 2004 Densho. All Rights Reserved.