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VY: Okay. So I think we have a good sense of your dad, let's now talk about your mom and where she came from, her family, why she came to America.

MM: So my mother's family is all uneducated. She's the only one that has any college degrees. Her father did not believe in education, so she got her mother's permission to go to school, because her father wanted her to work on the farm. So she went and, because there were eleven children in her family, number one, took care of the new babies in the house, and number two was my mother. So she took care of all the younger children that could walk.

VY: And where was the family at this point in time?

MM: At this time it was in Pennsylvania.

VY: So your mom's parents and the whole family came to America?

MM: No. My mother's parents went to Wyoming, and then they went to... they came over on the boat and they docked in Baltimore, so they entered in Baltimore. And during that time on the boat, my mother and grandmother Schwenk took care of a lady who had TB, which ended up being in my mother and also my brother and I. And I would assume she died shortly after arriving, but they weren't like Ellis Island, they didn't check people for their health as well in Baltimore when people came over. Anyway, they went to Wyoming where they knew somebody and it was a disaster, so they moved back. But they were in farming at that time, and my mother loves children. She can't clean a house, but she can entertain children no matter what age they are and make life fun. And she was very good at that, so much so that she got a job in Perryopolis, which is a very tiny town in Pennsylvania. And in order to go to college, you had go to Connellsville. In California, there is a requirement that if a person wants to go to college, the school district has to provide them with college recommended courses. Each state runs its own educational system, educational rules, that's what it says in the Constitution. So each state is responsible for the education, so California, if I wanted to go to college, then the school district would have to provide it for me. In Pennsylvania, it didn't. So what they did in Pennsylvania, if your school didn't provide it for you, then they sent you to another town, and the town would have a special entrance where they would interview the people coming into the town, find a place for them to stay in the area of their interest. So my mother wanted to be a medical missionary, she went to Connellsville, so they assigned her to the doctor's house to give a basis for understanding where she... but the family that she went to was a woman who was a woman's advocate for the vote. So she was always having these events that my mother could see would be important for her in the future. So my mother was made middle-class by this lady instead of immigrant class. Because she taught her how to speak, required that she educate herself with vocabulary so my mother would know Greek and Latin words. And if she didn't know a word, even before she died, she's writing on these little slips of paper the words she didn't know, and the Greek and Latin roots. So she was a wonderful dictionary.

And the other thing the lady told her she had to have good manners, so Emily Post. And it was very important for my mother that her children had good manners. Because when we were young, having a Japanese father, short father and a tall Western mother, and these two children, we would look like a zoo coming in there and they'd always look at us. So having these perfect manners that my mother (had) inculcated it was perfect for our family moving around. And this lady was also very important because she gave the money to my mother when the banks died during the Depression. So our parents went to Japan in 1929.

<End Segment 4> - Copyright © 2022 Densho. All Rights Reserved.