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TI: So how did you get to, to Boise? I mean, at what point did you move to, to Boise?

RM: Okay, it was, we started in Mountain Home, and my father bought a candy store in McCall, Idaho. McCall was a resort town about a hundred miles north of Boise. And so we moved there. And then I don't know whether he lost it in gambling or what, but we lost the candy store and had to live in a tent for six months. And that's one of my earliest memories, it was about 1930, and they pulled the tent from the water and set it up, and we lived in that tent. McCall can get really cold in the fall and the winter. So we were, by the fall, he'd found a job in Caldwell or Nampa, Idaho, cooking. So we went down there, and then he found a better job in Boise. So by 1932 --

TI: Going back to the, the tent, were there other families around there, too? So this was like a tent city, almost?

RM: Yeah, there was a tent city in, on the shores of Payette Lake, yeah.

TI: So this was right at the beginning of the Depression? You said about 1930?

RM: The U.S. census shows the family to be in McCall in June, 1930, and I know we were there probably a year, and left as the winter snow comes. McCall is very high elevation, the snow is early. And so we, we were down in Nampa or Caldwell, I can't remember exactly which, and then moved from there to Boise. I started school in Boise, Park School, and I enjoyed it.

TI: Let's talk about Boise. What was it like? So this is probably more your childhood.

RM: Oh, Boise is about 20,000 people, 20-, 25,000 people. Everybody knew each other, it was a small town, Main Street, capital, no industry, the railroad had been kept out of the city for twenty, thirty years, was way out on the edge of the city, so that Boise was not the industrial giant at that time.

TI: So how did people make their living in Boise? You said it was the capital, so it was more government?

RM: Yeah. I would think most people made their living in Boise, they were farmers, and there were a large number of retired farmers. They would come in from the hinterland and retire there. And the reason I say that, when I started selling papers in 1935, the people I sold newspapers to were retired people, rocking chair people, boarding houses and that kind of thing. I got to know them quite well, enjoy that world. There was, it was not a major business center, sort of off the track.

By the time we got to Boise, though, my mother was quite ill. Some kind of a thyroid disorder. And so I, at the end of my first grade, I remember them putting us on a stage, a bus, if you will, going to McCall, and spending a first summer, that first summer, with a Finnish couple, the Kodlas. And they didn't speak English, I didn't speak Finnish, and my brother was with me, and so, but we stayed there, and they were wonderful people. He was radical, he was a Socialist, but in any case, we enjoyed being on that farm a great deal. I went back every year 'til I was sixteen, every summer.

TI: To stay there, or just to visit?

RM: Just to stay there. To work on the farm. We milked cows and we did the work with the alfalfa and the wheat. They were very, very neat people. And I enjoyed, it was a great life. It was a, weekend social get-togethers were really interesting and important, we got to be aware of ethnicity, I think.

TI: When you say you got exposed to ethnicity, because they were Finnish and they really sort of a strong sort of Finnish identity?

RM: Yeah, it was Long Valley, and there were probably at least fifty families, I would say, Finnish families, all strongly tied together, all socializing together. And we got, my brother and I were aware of this big difference coming from Boise, where maybe sophistication, to a certain extent, and growing up with Finnish people, where it was really a community. First time I really --

TI: So up to that point, did you ever identify yourself with an ethnic community, or ethnic...

RM: No, you know, I, I was never really interested in finding out the heritage of the Magdens until I went up to see my father at probably 1940. He was working in La Grande, at a restaurant there, and I went up to see him, and for some -- and we were in the car, and I asked him about Magdens and where they were from and everything. And all he could remember was that they were from Sunfield, Michigan, and he was, he remembered the cold winters and the hot summers, and that was about it. He didn't know anything about the background of the family.

TI: Well, how about your mother's side?

RM: My mother's side... my grandfather came home in, I believe, 1935, came to our place in Boise to die. And died on the, the davenport, or... and in the process of his dying, he talked a lot about the Bunnells, and that's my mother's maiden name. Zoe Catherine Bunnell, and he talked about their coming west from Connecticut to Michigan, interesting enough, and then to Oregon. They were very early Oregon people, but mostly tinsmiths, through all that. So I knew the background of the Bunnells, but I didn't know the backgrounds of the Magdens. In, in many ways, still, though, though I tried to find 'em. I guess, though, that coming back to the story, Sand, Sage, and Cement told the story as my mother saw it, and in, let's say, the dramatic moments of our life story. She, she did persuade me to go to college, and I did go up there and I loved it. It was magnificent and I, I was really interested in what I was taking and doing, and enjoyed it immensely. I had a job as a waiter in a sorority for four years and survived that.

TI: Okay.

<End Segment 4> - Copyright © 2004 Densho. All Rights Reserved.