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AI: But it sounds like you were very fortunate with your employer, that he was so understanding, and then allowed you to come back part-time and rest and then actually work up to where you were doing your full-time job again.

PB: Yes, well, they liked the work I did, and you couldn't get replacements that easily. People that were accustomed to certain jobs, and I had become quite proficient in coloring, so now I had become a full colorist. And at first, we had three colorists, and eventually ended up I was the only one left. And I worked with a German-Jewish woman, who was actually a dentist in Germany. She and her husband both were dentists, and quite wealthy at... but here, she was working as a colorist in the studio, and I felt sorry for her in a way, because having been a dentist and her husband was a dentist, and they were quite wealthy people, but they had come to this country and smuggled certain things out. She always wore so many diamonds that everybody kept telling her, "Aren't you afraid that you're gonna get robbed?" And she says she had a necklace that had huge diamonds on, number of diamonds, and I guess she said people wouldn't think they were diamonds -- [laughs] -- because she wore them so openly and casually that people probably thought they were glass or something. But they were actually real diamonds. And she was a proud woman, very proud, but she resented the fact that I was being... well, she thought the boss was partial to me, and her daughter worked in the studio as a receptionist, and she was the boss's girlfriend. But he eventually married another woman, and he had a lot of girlfriends, because I think almost everybody that worked for him more or less became his girlfriend, because he was a womanizer.

But we had a lot of fun in that studio. It was kind of a fun place, everybody had parties, we had Christmas parties and everything was kosher, and we tried all kinds of Jewish food because they were all Jewish people. And they take care of their own; we had one fellow who was a finisher, and he came from South America, and he didn't speak English. He spoke about four other languages, but he didn't happen to speak English. But he learned very quickly, and we used to tease him a lot because when he got angry and he'd get frustrated and he'd stamp his foot and he'd swear in his native, some native tongue -- [laughs] -- and I'd always ask him, "What did you say?" And he says, "Oh, bad word, bad word. I don't want you to learn it." But I picked it up, and I would imitate him. When he'd get angry, I'd imitate him and I'd stamp my foot and I'd say the Jewish word. And then everybody'd start laughing, so we had a lot of fun.

AI: It sounds like it was a very good-humored group of people.

PB: Yes. We had, we had a lot of fun. One of the girls that worked was the boss's niece, and she had lost one eye with meningitis, but she was a lot of fun because she would say, "Oh, I'll get my uncle to do this or do that," and a big help to us, because she would always stick up for us, and get her boss to do -- get her uncle to do a lot of things that maybe he wouldn't do otherwise. But we had our own coffee cake, special kind of coffee cake that we liked, and we'd have a coffee clutch after the wedding group was gone, and we had a lot of fun.

<End Segment 58> - Copyright © 2004 Densho. All Rights Reserved.