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TI: Okay, today is June 15, 2004, we're in the studios of the Densho offices, I'm the interviewer, Tom Ikeda, and on videography we have John Pai. But today we have the pleasure of interviewing Ron Magden. And so Ron, I'm gonna just start from the very beginning, and just ask you where and when were you born?

RM: I was born in Mountain Home, Idaho, it's about 40 miles south of Boise, on August 30, 1926. I'm the youngest of three children of Roy and Zoe Magden. My father was a cook, my mother a waitress. We moved to --

TI: Well, so let me just get a little bit more. So go back, and so what was the name given to you at birth? What was your full name?

RM: Oh. Ronald, Ronald Ernest Magden. My mother had -- it's often said -- seen a Ronald Coleman movie the night before I was born, so I wound up with the name Ronald. My brother is named Roy Frank Magden.

TI: And Roy was born when?

RM: Year before.

TI: So 1925?

RM: 1925, July of '25. My sister was Jessie Catherine, she was born in 1924.

TI: So your parents had you --

RM: One, two, three.

TI: -- one after the other?

RM: Yes, and we were close together all the way through college, pretty much. And then...

TI: Do you know about how old your, your mother was when she had...

RM: I, she was twenty-one when she had me, so twenty, nineteen. She married at eighteen, right out of high school.

TI: Okay.

<End Segment 1> - Copyright © 2004 Densho. All Rights Reserved.