<Begin Segment 6>

TI: So I'm just thinking about how you're describing your life, I mean, you were very independent. I mean, you would, you would at nine, sell newspapers on the corner.

RM: Yes.

TI: In the summers you would go up with this Finnish couple...

RM: Come back the day before school started.

TI: Was that pretty common for, for boys of your age to be that independent?

RM: No, I don't think so. We didn't, we had a very loose-knit family structure. My father left...

TI: So when you say your father left, how old were you when your father left?

RM: I might have been eleven, twelve. My father just disappeared, and my mother didn't make any explanation. And my sister told me I was too young to worry about it. I remember that. And so I, it was about 19-, probably 1940 that I read the divorce papers. He lost --

TI: Going back to, you're eleven or so, when you first found out, and your sister said you were too young, I mean, how did you feel about it? Do you remember?

RM: I felt sorry for my father. And so I hitchhiked... he was up in Cascade, sixty miles north. I found out from a cousin that he was there. And so I just went out and hitchhiked to Cascade, it was sixty miles north of Boise...

TI: Now, why did you feel sorry for him?

RM: That he'd left his family. I didn't really connect it to he'd had differences of opinions with my mother or anything, although I'd heard those, the, it wasn't fighting so much as complaining. We, I would hear that in the middle of the night, so I knew there was trouble, but he just disappeared, and I went up to see him. I, I was probably eleven or twelve, and then picked me up, laundry truck driver who knew the family picked me up and took me there to Cascade. He was on his way to McCall.

TI: And what was that like? What did your father say when you -- he must have been surprised to see you.

RM: Yeah, he was. He was asleep on a sleeping porch, and I went in and I, I said, "Hi, Pop." He rolled over in the bed and, "What are you doing here?" I said, "I came to see you." And so he, he got up and he got a cup of coffee, and he always carried, put the spoon in the coffee, and didn't put any cream or sugar in it, but I, and I never understood the spoon in there, but it was a habit. And he got me a cup of coffee, we sat and talked for maybe an hour. Not, not once about the separation from my mother. It was all on what I was doing in school and reading, selling papers, that kind of thing. And I got through chatting with him, went out, and hitchhiked back to Boise. Yeah, I was...

<End Segment 6> - Copyright © 2004 Densho. All Rights Reserved.