<Begin Segment 7>

TI: So three sisters and one brother, you had. Okay, all born on the farm.

VW: Yeah. And we were poor. We were so poor, and then with five kids, it made living very difficult. For one thing, we didn't have electricity, we didn't have running water, we had a hot stove is all in the living room, and then a cooking stove in the kitchen and that was it. That's where we got our heat, from the potbelly stove in the living room, if we had that going. And then, of course, the cookstove did put out some heat for us, too, but we had to do it by burning wood.

TI: And what were some of the daily chores growing up that the kids had to do?

VW: Well, we had chores all the time. For example, we had to weed, weed the peppermint. And fortunately, the weeds were easy to pull up at the time. But they didn't get much work out of me at the, on the marsh because I was pretty young. I was nine years old when we moved to Michigan. But before that, I was also expected to weed and things, and I'd play with bugs and things like that. Bugs always fascinated me, especially the snapping bugs and things. And then I watched the dragonflies and how they would maneuver themselves around with those four wings sticking out. And then I'd watch the bumblebees, and they were so big and then their wings were pretty small, but they still flew. So these things fascinated me. And then we moved to Michigan, of course, and then the work started getting...

TI: And before we go to Michigan, so you, the family raised peppermint.

VW: Yes.

TI: Tell me, I mean, in your memoirs you talked about, there was one season that it was very lucrative, that the crops did really well. Can you describe that?

VW: Yeah. We... now, as I remembered, we raised peppermint, we'd take it to the distillery, and put the peppermint in the big vats, the huge vat. And then they'd clamp the lids back down and they'd heat it, and then squeeze the peppermint out of it, and then it'd come out from pipes and things. And it was very valuable. It was twenty-five dollars a pound eventually. It got that high. We sold it, I think, about eighteen dollars a pound. In fact, then, a dollar was really a dollar. It isn't anymore, but it was then. And I remember one day my dad forgot a shovel or something. He had to go back and get it, and when he went back, he noticed that the guy running the distillery put the pummy, it was called pummy once you got all the oil out of it, and you'd throw it on a big pile out in the yard. Well, he was taking this pummy back, puttin' it back in the vat and then squeezing the rest of the oil out of it. So he was making all kinds of money from that situation. Now, this... honesty was one of the forefront of my dad's thoughts on human beings. It had, you had to be honest, and if you were not honest, he didn't want to have anything to do with 'em. And then he found this guy out, how he was cheating on squeezing the oil out and then, not all of it, and then puttin' it, saying it's all done. So then he started unloading it, throwing it down on the pile, but then he'd, later on when the day was over, he'd put it back in and squeeze it. And this really, that was the end as far as my dad was concerned. He wouldn't take the mint over there anymore. He went to another distillery. And it's too bad that things had to happen that way, but the guy was a crook. Like we have a lot of people nowadays in the government that way. [Laughs]

TI: Now, I'm curious, when your father saw that, do you know if he confronted the man, or did he just sort of say --

VW: Oh, he confronted him all right, you bet. Right in front of everybody, and in fact, my dad happened to have that shovel that he had forgotten, and he was gonna smack him with that shovel. [Laughs] But people stopped him. But my dad was very, very much against anyone lying and cheating, and it's a good thing.

TI: But one of the years, the peppermint, you mentioned up to twenty-five dollars a pound, or eighteen that your family got?

VW: That's when...

TI: So with that crop, what was the family able to do with a good crop like that?

VW: Well, that's when we put a big chunk of money down on the farm in Michigan, and then we moved to Michigan when I was nine years old, around nine or ten, I can't remember. And it was right along the border, our farm ran right along the border of Indiana. And when I was a kid, I used to stand one foot in Michigan and one foot in Indiana and say, "Oh, I'm standing in two states at the same time. And in that, I've never forgotten that. Seemed like that was a pretty good thing to do, for anybody to do, stand in two states at the same time. [Laughs]

<End Segment 7> - Copyright © 2010 Densho. All Rights Reserved.