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KU: Can you talk about, after you came back from camp, I mean, after you came back to the West Coast, you were married, and then you began starting your family. Can you talk a little bit about your family, like how many kids you had and how it was raising them in Montebello?

EO: Oh. Well, after we were married, we moved to Sierra Madre, and we lived in the house where the nursery foreman used to live. And it's this tiny bungalow, and no neighbors around, because I'm surrounded by greenhouses and plants (...). So what happened was, I was by myself a lot. So I started reading, I did a lot of reading, and I liked reading the Modern Library series, I don't know if you're familiar with that. But they have the classics, so I read a lot of Russian writers, Dostoevsky, not too much Tolstoy, but mostly Dostoevsky, and it was an education in itself. I think it was Crime and Punishment, that book. It went through a thinking process of some of the people, and you kind of learn how to think, maybe. But anyway, I think I learned a lot of logic from reading that book. Anyway, I was being educated myself. But, see, there were no distractions, there's nobody around but plants and workers, so I just read. I read an awful lot. And when we moved to Montebello, that was different people around, I got involved with a lot of stuff. [Narr. note: There was a Japanese American community where my husband and I made many friends.]

KU: You had your first... can you say how many children you had?

EO: I had Amy, my first daughter, in Sierra Madre, at the Pasadena Huntington Hospital. And then Mary was born also in Pasadena, and she was born right before we moved to Montebello. So they both had their childhood in Montebello up to about kindergarten, first grade. Montebello, my husband had money, so he let me design the house I wanted, so I designed a house, I worked with a draftsman. And I like to look at buildings anyway, so I designed a little house, I went to the draftsman and he carried out the plans. And I read about a new heating process. You have pipes in the concrete floor, and you heat the pipes and it makes your floors warm. So I had that. So that little house was kind of special, not too many people had radiant heating. [Laughs] So that's where Amy and Mary grew up. And I used to shock my friends because I let them do anything they liked. Well, like children aren't allowed to draw on the walls, I let my daughters draw on the walls. And they went crazy, they drew everywhere. [Laughs] And people would come in and they're shocked. But I'm glad I did it, (my girls have) asked me, just in the last three years (...) why I let them do it. I don't know. I think I just wanted to let them express themselves, but it didn't hurt them.

KU: They're both very artistic now, I mean, how do you think that...

EO: Oh, expressive, maybe.

KU: Oh, no, they're artistic.

EO: Are they artistic? Oh, yeah. Well, most Japanese are, don't you think? Artistic?

KU: In one way or another.

EO: Yes, I think so.

KU: So as you were raising Amy and Mary, you said you got involved in different community activities in Montebello?

EO: This woman, Amy Kobayashi, she wanted to start a women's club. She and her close friends contacted a lot of women, Japanese American women. And so she called a meeting, I went to the charter meeting, the first meeting, and got involved. So she was our president for the first year, and the second year, I got elected president, it was a service club. And then I got reelected the third year, and then after that, I think we had to move back to Sierra Madre and I had to leave, I couldn't participate as much. Because Montebello put a, we had to move. The high school needed more property, and we were across from the high school. And I understand there's a football field there now.

KU: Oh, so you were forced to move by the city.

EO: Forced to move, and for a while I used to drive all the way down to Montebello for their meetings, but after a while it got to be too much, because it's at night, so I quit the women's club. But they were going strong for a long, long time.

KU: So when did you move back to Sierra Madre?

EO: Let's see. I think Amy was about five or six.

KU: So you didn't live in Montebello for more than several years.

EO: Yeah, just several years.

KU: That must have been hard to leave the house that you designed.

EO: Oh, that's okay.

KU: Can you just tell me what kinds of activities the women's club organized?

EO: When I was president, we had several charity dances at the Roger Young Auditorium, we raised money for different causes. That's what we did.

KU: What kinds of causes?

EO: I think one was for that hospital. I can't think of the name, it's a big hospital. It's been so long, I don't remember.

<End Segment 14> - Copyright © 2018 Densho. All Rights Reserved.