<Begin Segment 9>

TI: Now when your family owned the farm, how large was the farm?

MM: Only ten acres, very small.

TI: Only ten acres? [Laughs] And what was on the farm?

MM: Ten acres, but then there was a swamp right here, and then more land was cleared for strawberries, so there was, afterwards, I think there was another five acres or more.

TI: Oh, so ten acres, fifteen.

MM: But the nine, ten acres was very small. Everybody else had big farms.

TI: And what did the family have on those ten acres?

MM: Apples and pears, those days. But now they're changing more to, I understand, to cherries and things like that.

TI: And do you know what kind of apples and pears the family grew?

MM: What kind?

TI: Yeah, what kind.

MM: Nowadays they have hundreds of kinds. We only had Red Delicious and Newton, (...) and Gravenstein. Oh, we had Winter Bananas, a little bit of Winter Bananas, pale green with a little pink cheek. Now they had... oh, I don't know how many kinds they have in the (stores now). There are so many. They had very few (these days).

TI: Now when you look today at the apples in the store, how did they compare to the apples that you grew on your orchard?

MM: Oh, they were good. They were good, but then they're expensive. There weren't such things as, like the Honeycrisps that costs $3.99 at QFC, a pound. They're good, but I guess ours weren't that good. [Laughs] They weren't as good as Honeycrisp.

TI: Well, when you, so when you eat a Honeycrisp today, you think that tastes better than the apples at your orchard?

MM: Then there's Fuji and Braeburn and Gala, all kinds now. I haven't even tried a lot of those new ones. (Honeycrisp is especially good!)

TI: You can't even find a Red Delicious anymore.

MM: I think at Washington State, there are researchers and they're trying different things, pretty soon they're going to come with an apple that's red inside. They're talking about that.

TI: Now when you were growing up in Dee, like in your high school level, was there much dating going on amongst the boys and girls?

MM: Not much. No, not much then. We'd go to dances, just single, just as a single. Oh, talking about what we did in the wintertime. (...) My dad would make skis with wood like this, curved up like that. We'd ski on (our) bottoms, go down the hill, we had hills, and we'd just, in fact, we just made with nothing, I think, those days. We just, everybody just enjoyed themselves. A few people had skis, but you didn't have nice outfits or anything like that, we just went out and played in the snow. My dad would use wood and cut it, big tub outside, make a fire and get that wood in there, so it'd get curved, and they'd wire it, make "skis."

TI: Now would you ever go up to Mt. Hood and ski?

MM: No, we skied just around the area. Oh, we'd go to Mt. Hood, too, because that's only about twenty miles or more away. We'd go visit, but we didn't ski.

TI: So you'd just find a hill by your place...

MM: Around our farm. Down the road, not many cars come by, so we'd just go down the hills.

TI: And in the winter, would you get quite a bit of snow?

MM: (Lots of snow).

TI: Good.

MM: We'd buy sleds. They had sleds those days. But we didn't have all these fancy things to play with those days, you know. The farmers (...) worked very hard. They worked very hard to make it with the families. We had soup (in) cold weather; we had soup served in the basement of our school, elementary school, and I noticed that a couple families I remember, they couldn't pay for the soup for their children. They had about six, seven children. They'd bring potatoes and dry onions and things like that, carrots, they raised, in exchange. They had a struggle, some people were having a hard time with the big families, so they'd take that.

TI: I mean, it was during the Depression, too.

MM: Oh, yes. We used to hear that some people never used soy sauce, they used salt (during the depression days).

TI: But at least the farmers had food, I guess.

MM: Yes. Oh, they all raised big gardens. You couldn't give away great big tomatoes (they) would rot in our garden, I remember.

TI: Because everyone had tomatoes.

MM: Everybody raised, yes, they raised practically all the vegetables, everything they could.

TI: But it was kind of interesting when you were talking about, so in the basement of the school, it was like a hot, that was the hot lunch where they'd always have hot soup.

MM: Hot soup to supplement our sandwiches that we'd bring from home. They had a hired couple, lady in the kitchen to make the soup.

TI: That sounds good, especially during the winter when it's cold.

MM: It was very good. It was very little that we had to pay, I can't remember what it was.

<End Segment 9> - Copyright © 2014 Densho. All Rights Reserved.