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TI: What were some of the other activities that you did while you were at the University of Idaho?

RM: Well, I loved, I was in a fraternity, I was, pledged Sigma Alpha Epsilon, and mainly because they had sleeping porches, and I wanted to sleep outside the room, type of thing. Anyway, I was a fraternity man for four years, and knew a lot of the people in the house that I went into. And that was, I lived a full life of that. I met my wife when I was a junior in college, and she was playing the piano, Clair De Lune, and it was a Sunday, November 1947. And my cousin was in the same house as she was, took me over and introduced me, and I fell in love. I probably was in love within three or four weeks, and I hadn't, I had gone out with girls in high school, but didn't have a car, didn't really have a paramount interest in women at the time.

TI: What was it about Lorraine that attracted you? What, what was it --

RM: She was quiet. [Laughs] And, God, all the girls that I ever went with were argumentative, you know, we even had a couple that sold newspapers. And God, they were opinionated. We would go round and round, and I had, I was doing four years' time in a sorority with all kinds of girls there, and it sort of destroyed... my sister was a sedate, dainty lady that, she wouldn't have wandered around the house with her slip on. And these girls in the, in the sorority would wander around with sometimes not even a slip, they'd be ironing it. And God, it just destroyed my mystique about women. And my wife was quiet and she loved music, she loved to read, we were very compatible as far as personalities were concerned. We studied together in the library, that kind of thing. And it was very easy to get along with her. And I knew early on that she objected to the treatment of the Indians and the Japanese. She had a -- and I, and I recall that she wrote an essay on the Chinese in Idaho, and she was like my mother in that regard. She was not going to tolerate intolerance. In fact, that's, she, she once said, "I'm intolerant of intolerance."

TI: Where, where did she grow up?

RM: She grew up in Lewiston, Idaho. Her father was a barber, and her mother a schoolteacher. And she was one of three girls, she was the middle girl. She, she was, she loved the piano. In the Mulroney home every Sunday was an extended family visit. They would have a roast, and people, relatives would come. And I loved that. I hadn't, I knew that I hadn't had a family life, so that was extremely attractive. I would go down, I'd hitchhike down after school Friday night, and back on, go back, sometimes I'd have to go back on Sunday and I didn't get to stay for the dinner, because I'd have to serve at the house -- as a waiter. But in any case, we were engaged for probably almost two years, and it was a wise thing. I didn't have any money, and Lorraine wanted to, she didn't want to go on after her sophomore year. She wanted to go home, she sang at different events and things, but she wasn't interested in completing college.

TI: How did the family accept you? Lorraine's family?

RM: They didn't. They didn't. I came from... they were, well, it was an interesting -- her grandparents lived with her parents. The grandparents, he was still working as a, taking care of lawns and landscaping, was in his seventies, wonderful fellow. The grandmother was just, one, just great. Her father was seriously ill. He had high blood pressure, and was invalid quite a lot of the time, and the mother carried the, the heavy part of the load. The father, Lorraine's father and mother were Catholic, and one of the questions, first questions to ask me was what religious faith was I. And I said, "I, I haven't any." And they said, "What? Haven't you been baptized?" I said, "No, not been baptized. I don't know anything particular about formal religion." I said, "I've read a lot about religion," I said, "but I haven't made up my mind yet." And her father said, "You know, I think you better thing twice about marrying my daughter. You're, her, her religious faith is extremely important. She may not say that, but it is." And so I was careful, I didn't, I took her to mass, both when we went to college and, and in Lewiston. And I did, did the instructions over a six-month period and became a Catholic to... and I'm, it's sort of interesting, when I became a Catholic, my mother then became Catholic, and my brother. And so there was a progression with that. And from Lorraine, and I put all my faith not in the, the doctrines of the church and the teachings, I put it in the sublime peace, serenity, my wife had abided. And that carried us through fifty-five years. I never, I never raised the question of religion, and she never talked to me about that part of it. But I did, I did respect her religion as I promised her dad. And he didn't live very long after we were married.

So -- and I love the family. It was a, the family I never had. They got along extremely well, and the, the whole I idea of -- and there was a lot of jousting at the dinner table, and it was between liberals and conservatives in the family. And I can't, I don't recall the subject of race relations ever coming up there. Lewiston had even fewer Asians and blacks than, than Boise.

<End Segment 15> - Copyright © 2004 Densho. All Rights Reserved.