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BN: Actually, I wanted to ask you about this house, and the story behind your buying this house.

FS: I guess you ought to ask my wife, too. Yeah, because houses are, you can't select it by yourself. You're in trouble if you do. Yeah, we weren't shown the area before, and the interesting thing with this house was it was the least expensive of all the ones that we were shown. And I didn't realize it at the time, it was also damaged from the earthquake, and the people, family that lived here, they got out in a hurry. And so it came up, and so the price was more reasonable, even there. Even though the damages didn't show, because they had covered the ceilings upstairs with wallpaper and painted it, and we didn't know it was all cracked up. And outside, I didn't look at all the plaster on the walls that were patched up real quick and pretty bad. And the reason is, I had a cast on my leg. I was playing ball at Cal Tech and I pulled my Achilles tendon (operated and so) I couldn't move around too well. And I was still younger, because I think she said we bought it in 1972 or thereabouts. So you know, it was the first house... see, I guess because I did work with my hands, and because of the time and everything I'd done, I kind of improved the little places we lived.

[Interruption]

FS: Yeah. So what happened is because I... and then we moved two times on the east side. It was not far east, we were right there near Chester and Orange Grove. And so each time, when we came back and we moved in, we moved from a house that we purchased with a low down payment and all that stuff, and I was able to sell it for a little bit more. And so we moved across the street to a house that was kind of haunted, and it was a concrete house that somebody had built, but the reason I bought that one was it was adjacent to a lot where my parents eventually moved to and then allowed us to sort of take advantage of my mother being around. So my Head Start work and even when we traveled to... when I went to Japan, and when I was doing Head Start, that's where we lived, in this little six hundred foot concrete house that was, that we sort of fixed up to where Marian could accept it. And then when we had the first child, third child, Mutsuko, the house got too small and she wanted to move. So by then we had fixed up the house enough that someone else wanted to buy it right away, it happened to be a guy who was working for me or helping me in the Bridge. So he bought it, and then we were able to then get started here. They didn't show us all these houses, you know, there were certain houses. But the lady that happened to show us this house, I discovered while we were talking about it, what we liked, of course, was the size and scale and the price, obviously. She happened to be the daughter of a very famous writer who spent most of his life in France, because he used a lot of foul language in his books. Don't know if you know the name Henry Miller, very prominent at that time, but I guess he had to get out of here because it was illegal to even sell his books in this country. When we first went to Europe, I did sneak one in my bag, so I got a pocketbook of that Tropic of Cancer, I think, was the name. So that's how we, again, interesting ironies of who I meet and how we ended up in this place, in this neighborhood.

And when we moved here, there were nothing but big houses on the street. And we didn't know that the lady who lived in one of them was a real estate agent, and she had her mind set on developing the condo there. And so after we moved in and settled in, they got a variance to build that. And the three houses got demolished, so my good wife really got upset about that. We didn't know, we thought it was our one, we were sold with the idea to have the single family residence. I don't think that realtor knew, because I don't think she lived in Pasadena. So that's kind of how we got started and it was before the big hole over here before the pseudo railroad track, right, where we always have the good side and bad side of the railroad track. Well, that side of that hole was all the Latino Mexican people, working class, used to be working and living. So we moved in here into a very, the more elite side of town, not knowing what I know now, and nothing's changed, thanks to the railroad track there, we were secure. And Bryan now knows all about the west side people. And it's going to continue that way because it's been almost landlocked to be preserved. Other side of the Arroyo is all well-established, it's a certain scale of Pasadena, it's upper class.

<End Segment 16> - Copyright © 2022 Densho. All Rights Reserved.