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TI: I want to ask a little bit about the farm life and what it was like growing up on the farm. You mentioned earlier not having indoor plumbing until you were fourteen. But describe kind of growing up when you're say, eleven or twelve in the summer, type of things that you would have to do on the farm.

PN: Well, first of all, I liked school, and was always sad when school let out because it meant that I would be working every day, and I wouldn't see my friends. [Laughs] So we would hoe, we would irrigate, we would pick strawberries. I grew up on a berry and vegetable farm, so twenty acres of strawberries and x-number of acres of boysenberries, raspberries, blackberries, all that, throughout the whole summer. And then in the winter, broccoli, Brussels sprouts and cauliflower. So you'd have to plant in July, the crops for the winter. So it was a lot of work from sunup to sundown. We had migrant workers from Oklahoma and Arkansas, Indians from Warm Springs, and Mexicans from other parts of Washington, and they would come and stay. We had cabins for them to stay. So every year, these families would bring their ten children from Oklahoma or Arkansas and come stay. And every summer there would be some incident of drinking, or a threat or guns or something, you'd have to call out the police. And I didn't grow up around guns and I didn't grow up around alcohol, so that was always sort of frightening. And my father, who had a temper, would just be right out there in the mix, and my mother would be afraid. So there was a lot of, I think there was a lot of tension, a lot of hard work there, and, while we were, we owned the farm, we were still poor, they were just poorer than we were. So to me, it was a hard life. And I developed skin allergies very early on, and it felt like I was allergic to dirt. [Laughs] I remember of 1964, because we had a bumper strawberry crop, and that's when we got indoor plumbing and a new car, and that was significant.

TI: Oh, interesting. So if you just had one year, a good crop, that could make a huge difference financially for your family.

PN: Yes. And at the same time, in the winter, if you had four days of freezing weather, you could ruin the entire crop of Brussels sprouts, or I don't know about four days, but a certain period of time, then your whole crop would be gone. So I grew up in a financially, in a financial situation where there was no steady paycheck, which I didn't realize how much of a difference that makes. Because, first of all, you had to work hard, the work was never done, second of all, there was no guarantee that you were going to get paid, because those crops could fail. And that served me -- I didn't like it then, 'cause it seemed pretty unsettling, fearful for a kid, worried, my parents were worried, always talk about the weather. And so that worry kind of came down. I would say my mother is an expert worrier. But on the other hand, when you don't have a steady income and you can't rely on a paycheck, it's quite different. You have to begin to rely on yourself to work hard. And the message my mother gave us was to work hard, get your education, and get off the farm, 'cause it's too hard of work. So that's what she wanted for us to do.

TI: And do you think your dad had that same kind of feeling, that he wanted you to not be farmers?

PN: Yes. Well, he definitely wanted us to do well in school, because I remember in high school I would, like, bring home one "B" and he'd say, "Okay, how come that wasn't an 'A'?" And it wasn't even the permanent grading period. So I graduated with one "B" in my entire high school history. [Laughs] Also because my brother was pretty, the first six weeks of my high school career, I was tardy for PE class and I got a "C" the first six weeks, and he said, "You're never gonna get a four-point now." I was fourteen. And he was right, I got one "B" in PE my first year, my freshman year in high school. But there was a lot of, to me, there was a lot of pressure to do well. But there wasn't a lot of pressure, like, to go to college. The boys, I was a girl, they were boys, they needed to go to college. But nonetheless, I went to college, too.

TI: So your three older siblings, they all went to college?

PN: My sister went to business school. She was the one where I think it was hard, 'cause she was the first one, and didn't have much guidance counseling, you know, in high school, and was very shy, so that combination. I was probably the loudest one in the family, having had the benefit of three siblings.

TI: So, but Jerry and Jim both then went to college before you?

PN: Uh-huh.

TI: And where did they go?

PN: Jerry went to Oregon State, and Jim went to the University of Oregon. They were quite different. Because Jerry was an engineer at Oregon State, he graduated mechanical engineering, and Jim was, I think he started out in architecture but went into sociology. And he was very much into politics at the University of Oregon, and anti-war. And his roommate was the student body president, Ron Eakus, who when he was student body president, went to North Vietnam. So my brother Jim was very politically active. Long hair, all the rest of the attendant factors of being a hippie college student. [Laughs]

TI: Now, was it Jim or Jerry that was the student body president?

PN: Jerry.

TI: Okay, Jerry.

PN: They were one year apart in school.

TI: How did your parents deal with Jim's, I guess, political activism?

PN: They didn't know that much about it. And Jerry, Jim and I, 'cause we were so close in age, were pretty tight. So we also shielded them from his political activism. Although he, Vietnam was going on, and he applied to be a conscientious objector. He was not going to go to the war, he would have done many different things instead of going to the war. And luckily, the draft stopped, 'cause he also had a low draft number, but it stopped right before or very soon. But I was very concerned about him because I know he did not want to go.

<End Segment 7> - Copyright © 2009 Densho. All Rights Reserved.