<Begin Segment 19>

DW: Oh, talking about Mother, too. Good heavens, I think Mother was one of these women that she adapted to wherever she was an enjoyed it. Except she wanted to tie us in trees when we were getting clever.

KL: When you were what?

DW: Oh, we camped a lot and everything, and Mom was great, camping, fishing, sewing, she just all around everything. And we got flooded up in north Arkansas in a campground, and we woke up in the night, Mom did, telling Dad, "I hear boulders rolling." Well, they were. The creek had come up, we were in this pop-out tent camper. We ended up finally, the people over in the little town of Parthenon came over in mules and a wagon and got us back out, and we sat the flood out after they chained everything to trees. But at one point Mother's running around --

WJ: Wait, let me tell this. We'd had cleared some brush, moved this little two-wheel trailer that did pop up, but it was the first pop-up that our Daddy made. We chained it to a tree, and we'd been out to town, and Mother's running around with this ball of twine in her hands.

DW: About that strong.

WJ: My dad asked her what she was going to do with it, and she said, "I'm going to tie the kids in the trees."

DW: "If they get sleepy, they might fall out and drown." She's thinking we're going to have to climb trees.

WJ: But the next thing that happened, after we messed with the... twine wasn't going to work. There were some people from Parthenon who walked down as far as they could --

DW: But they knew we were out there.

WJ: They was a two or three hundred yard stretch of water that we couldn't wade across. And Mother was over there waving at 'em, and Dad says, "Don't do that. They'll think you want something." She says, "I do." And they came over in a wagon and got us.

DW: We have a lot of camping and flood stories. That same one, when she was saying, "I do," was she kept saying, "This is getting worse, Dad, this is getting worse, Ray." And he said, "Oh, no." And anyway, he said, "Here," he stuck a stick in the edge to show that water's not rising. And she said while we're standing there looking at it, the water goes over the stick.

KL: Oh, geez. [Laughs]

DW: Anyway, but she would have tied us in a tree, and sat up there with us.

KL: What did they do for work and for just in their personal lives and stuff after leaving Rohwer?

DW: Dad goes back to Dyess and mother was still a housewife.

WJ: Mother basically was a homemaker.

DW: They loved to play bridge, they always had bridge partners.

WJ: Still, both of 'em loved to dance. If we had a school dance.

JJ: That was VFW, or was American Legion?

DW: American Legion, wasn't it?

JJ: American Legion had a dance.

DW: And then Dad was big hunting and fishing. Mom always fished some, but he was always off on that.

WJ: Their big night out, every once in a while, they'd go to Chaplin, Missouri.

DW: Or Memphis.

WJ: Go to the Memphis to the Peabody [inaudible] room or whatever they called it.

<End Segment 19> - Copyright © 2012 Manzanar National Historic Site and Densho. All Rights Reserved.