<Begin Segment 6>

MN: Now I want to ask you a little bit about the neighborhood you grew up in. It sounded like a very diverse neighborhood. Did you end up, did you learn Spanish from your friends?

MO: You learned street Spanish; you learned the bad words, those are the first words you learn. But most of the people... let's see, on our block, across the street were houses. And we were the only house on our side of the street, and there was an apartment building next to us. And then next to the apartment building was the elementary school, Luther Burbank Elementary. And they had, across the street they had a date tree. It was kind of interesting when they got ripe, a palm tree, I guess. It was one of these big, fat, ugly palms. But, and then behind, just across the alley was an Italian family, and then Mr. Hurd, who owned the Richfield Station, lived behind us. And then next to the... what was the Italian people's name? Delcorcio, Delcorcio, that's right, was the market, Smith's Market. We would go there on Thanksgiving, and they would bring in live turkeys and they needed people to pluck the feathers and give us, I can't remember, maybe four cents for each turkey. Anyway, in a day we could make maybe fifteen cents, which was a lot of money. Because the bookie next door used to pay me twenty-five cents a week for working for him.

MN: Share with us that story.

MO: Well, the bookie's name was George Sheleen, and he was from Minnesota, and he was an incredibly foul-mouthed person. And I can never forget, he never bothered learning our names. And we were all, there were three of us, three kids at that time, we're all "Little Jimmies." My father went by Jimmy, I guess. Little Jimmy. And my job was to go into his apartment once a day and take his trash out and burn it in the backyard incinerator. And then every so often I'd take my wagon down to the liquor store, which was just down the block, and they would put a case of beer in there, and I would pull it back up to his place in the apartment. And then sometimes I'd take care of his dog. I think it was a black cocker spaniel, I think that's what it was. Yeah it was, but they were all Rocky, and he'd always get 'em when they were a year old. If one died, he'd go out and get another one. And he would always buy a Cadillac. And then Rocky would live in the backseat. He'd take the seat out and Rocky would stay in the backseat. And I don't know if he bought a new car every year, but he always had a nice car, I mean, much nicer than what we had.

So when you're a kid, you're always looking for something where you can make money. And if you can't make money, then you worked for barter. For instance, we would, in the apartment buildings, they had garages in the back. And one of the garages was rented by the Good Humor ice cream company. And in those days, the ice cream carts were pedicabs. They would pump 'em on a bicycle, and they had this thing in front with dry ice, and they would come in at the end of the day and then have to clean them. And we would go over and help them clean them, and they would give us all the broken bars, which was a treat in the summertime. And then on San Fernando Road, which might have been 150 yards, there was a Burbank Chicken Pie factory, and we could always smell that in our house. We went down there and helped them clean up, did some job, they would give us the broken pies or the ones that were leftover, I can't remember whether they were broken or not. And then sometimes my friends and I would go... where was that? I think that company's still there called Martino Pies, and they would make fruit pies. And if you went down there, and they would make these little ones, just like the bread place. I'm trying to think what the name... it wasn't Weber's, I think it was called Langendorf. They make little bread loaves about six inches by three inches, and you could buy those. And the best part was that they were warm. But it seemed like my mother always bought day-old bread, because sometimes our bread had green spots on it, and so you'd pick off the green spots. But we were poor, and that's simply how things were. We didn't know any differently. We were poor. No one ever said we were poor, but we were poor.

MN: But did you understand that you were poor?

MO: I understood we didn't have things, especially once... I remember when I went to Emerson, there was a kid my class, name was Carlos Ling, L-I-N-G, sounded like a Chinese name, but it wasn't. And his father was the editor of the local newspaper. And one day we were eating lunch, and he had funny-looking bread. And he gave me part of his sandwich and it tasted differently than what we were accustomed to. And I remember asking him, "This bread's different." He said, "Well, our maid bakes it." Wow, you got a maid. [Laughs] You know, mothers of my parents, of my friends were maids, and that's what they did. But they had a maid. So the exposure was quite different in school there than it was at Luther Burbank. They dressed a lot better, and they were all white. Until we came, the school was all white.

MN: Was there a problem then when Burbank school closed and now there's all these...

MO: I don't remember if there was a problem. There might have been a problem. There might have been parents who didn't want their kids to go to school with the "riff raff," that might have been. I think there might have been some anxiety by some of our parents who had to walk up the hill. Basically it was six blocks or so to walk to that school. It's just one of those things. It's all part of growing up.

<End Segment 6> - Copyright © 2012 Densho. All Rights Reserved.