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TI: So let's, before we talk about your father, your father's name was...

RM: Roy. Roy Dennis. And he'd been born in Michigan, came west in 1908 with his family, there were fifteen children in the family. And they settled in Mountain Home. And he, he was an outdoorsman, loved the woods, he also was a baggage handler for the railroad, and then he, he learned -- he was a good cook, and he, he got into the cooking business and stayed with it the rest of his life. They, in the worst of the Depression, around 1937, '38, he just disappeared.

TI: Oh, before you even get there, how, how did the two of them meet? Your mom and dad meet?

RM: Oh, my mother and her grandmother lived in Mountain Home, and they had to cross the railroad tracks from their house to the high school, my mother did. And so she would -- this is the story she told me -- she would use the station, railroad station to walk, the easiest way to the high school. This was about 1922, '23. And so they would walk, she would walk across it, and this fellow who was handling the baggage would always watch her as she crossed, and he finally got up the nerve to ask her to go to a show with him, a movie. And Mountain Home had about 500 people in it. And so they went to the movie, and the day she graduated from high school, she married my father. And so... and they lived in Mountain Home for a while, and then moved on. That story is told in Sand, Sage, and Cement. Their meeting, how they grew to love each other. But he, I remember as a boy that he worked a tremendous amount. He, he had one facility talent, maybe. He could add figures in his head, he had a remarkable ability for mathematics, I think. But he'd quit high school, his father had died, let's see... he would have been seventeen when his father died. So he quit high school and went to work to help support the family.

TI: But then in the home, in terms of sort a closeness, was more with your, your mother in those early years?

RM: Yeah.

TI: And the influence of the, the readings and the writing was all there.

RM Was very strong. There was, it was almost a given, in particular, my, my brother and I read a tremendous amount, always. And I, I remember being disappointed with Dick, Jane and Spot in the first grade, having to go back and read that kind of thing. And the, the great desire to move on. And I never really was happy with school until I got to the university, where I felt I really could read and try to get meaning out of... in high school, I felt it was pretty much a bore. We kept going over the same things. Anyway...

<End Segment 3> - Copyright © 2004 Densho. All Rights Reserved.