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TI: So tell me some of your earliest childhood memories growing up in San Jose. What can you remember... when you think about just a small kid...
LP: I can't remember any of that... the only thing I can remember to start out with, that my neighbor, Don Balcomb, he's the same age as I am, and he and I walked to school, which is a mile and a half, that morning by ourselves. Parents didn't take you to school back in those days. We walked to school and it was just the two of us, five years old.
TI: So like going to kindergarten, you were just walking?
LP: No kindergarten. First grade.
TI: First grade, okay.
LP: They didn't have kindergarten back then.
TI: So tell me about the house that you grew up in. When you were a kid, what was the house like?
LP: It was just a ranch house. If I'd have known that, I'd have brought you a picture of it. I don't know what to say about it, it's just all those houses up there, they were all ranches, acreage. And they had ranch houses on them, and barns, and that kind of stuff. That's all I can tell you about it. Just a ranch house, wooden ranch house.
TI: Like how many bedrooms did it have?
LP: Two bedrooms, a front room, and a kitchen. And then it had a second story, that was just one big room.
TI: And Larry, how many brothers and sisters did you have?
LP: Ten. No, I had two, one brother and one sister. [Laughs]
TI: [Laughs] You had me going there for a second. I said, wow, in a two bedroom ranch house...
LP: You were gonna say that page is not big enough.
TI: So I'm sorry, so you had a brother and a sister?
LP: My sister was next down... we're two and a half years apart. And she was second, which is his mother. And then my brother was two and a half years younger than her.
TI: And what was your sister's name?
LP: Agnes, which she also hated.
TI: And then your brother's name?
LP: Ed.
TI: Good, so you were the oldest brother. You were the oldest then.
LP: I'm the oldest one and I'm the only one that's here.
<End Segment 2> - Copyright © 2012 Densho. All Rights Reserved.