<Begin Segment 5>

MA: So then you grow up on a strawberry farm.

NM: Well, I mostly stayed with my grandparents.

MA: Did your brother as well?

NM: No, we always were separated. When my mother got married the second time, we all briefly lived together. And then when my mom got sick, well, then I went back to my grandparents, and my younger sister, too. And then my brother stayed with the stepfather.

MA: I see, so when did your mother get sick? How old were you?

NM: Pardon me?

MA: How old were you when your mother got sick?

NM: Let's see. I must have been about six then.

MA: And what, did she have a chronic illness?

NM: Well, she, it started out with pneumonia, but she had to go out and work in the field, and it turned into tuberculosis. And then she still worked. And so then she was sent to a sanitarium in Weimar, California, up in the mountains. And, and that was the last I ever saw of her, alive anyway.

MA: When she was in the sanitarium.

NM: Uh-huh. Went to visit her, once, I think, but we were, like, far away from her and we couldn't get close to her. And then, she knew she was going to die, so she promised all my relatives that the three of us would be together, never separate us, but it never happened.

MA: The three of you meaning, you and your brother and then you had a sister at that point, who was the daughter of your mother and stepfather?

NM: Uh-huh, right.

MA: So she said that you'd never be separated, basically, the siblings.

NM: Yeah, she made them promise that we would never be separated. But I guess we were separated that year, the same year. Same year my mom died the year of the war.

MA: 1941.

NM: And then we moved to Santa Monica.

MA: In L.A.?

NM: Uh-huh, L.A. area. Santa Monica.

MA: So you moved with your maternal grandparents.

NM: Uh-huh. The three of us were together then. Then I was sent to Colorado. My brother stayed in Santa Monica. And my sister was still there when I left, but he came home from school one day and she was gone, just like that. They sent her up north.

MA: To be with her father?

NM: Stepfather.

MA: Your stepfather.

NM: Yeah.

<End Segment 5> - Copyright © 2008 Densho. All Rights Reserved.