<Begin Segment 24>

KL: And the wandering oldest sibling?

DW: Well, I don't know. Mine's kind of weird. I went to Hendrix for my freshman year, and then I really wanted to try the university, and talked my parents into it. And I went up to the University of Arkansas, did the whole thing, joined a sorority. Then I met my first husband, and he was graduating that year, and I got married. [Laughs] So after that two years of college. And he was an engineer, and went to [inaudible], we lived in Texas and Oklahoma. Finally we lived in Branson, Missouri, before it was famous. That's where our first child was born. I had three sons and eventually ended up back in Little Rock, we've lived in California, lived in British Columbia, moved back to Little Rock, and was living in Little Rock when the University of Arkansas Little Rock was opening up. So I went back to school and got my degree. And Grant was engineering, and he decided that he would go back to school, so we went jointly and took teaching credential a semester, and then moved to California. And taught school, he was in high school, I was in elementary school, we had three sons. Then... trying to remember my years. I taught school, junior high, basically, and kind of a little bit of everything. My majors were history and minors in art and psychology, but I taught typing and PE, you know, what it is, and smaller...

KL: Did you teach U.S. history?

DW: Yes. And just... well, I taught seventh and eighth grade history, so it's kind of generalized, yeah, specific is high school. I started applying for jobs as a high school history teacher, but they wanted coaching, and I started with a cap and a whistle, and where's the football team?

KL: Right, it was soccer in my high school for U.S. history, but yeah.

DW: And I ended up teaching junior high. Somewhere in there, I divorced, and then I'd been married about twenty-three years, got divorced, couple years later remarried to a guy with three children. And so then I had six kids, three stepkids and my sons, and then he passed away ten years ago this year.

WJ: It's hard to believe it's true.

DW: It was 2002, yeah. He had cancer. Anyway, he had been married previously, too, but we said we could add 'em together and we could have a fiftieth anniversary. We almost made it. But anyway, I, because of that, am the proud owner of twenty-four grandchildren and twenty-three great-grandchildren.

JJ: And know their names. [Laughs]

DW: [Laughs] I actually, this is what's funny, because I have one stepdaughter who had five children. She, her children and her grandchildren, they have twenty-three of this mess. Because I have, my three sons, none of them are married. No, wait a minute, grandchildren. They're all married, but out of them, I just have three grandchildren, four grandchildren, and none of them are married.

KL: So you lucked out with the additions to you family.

DW: I think that's more normal. That's more normal, yeah. Grandkids, like they are, you're just now getting a few grandkids, great grandkids.

WJ: I don't have any great grandkids, but I got hopes.

DW: You have hopes, yeah.

JJ: No great grandkids... yeah, I do.

DW: You do, yeah, 'cause he's got two sons and a daughter and three, four --

JJ: No, they're not great-grandchildren.

WJ: You don't have any great-grandchildren.

DW: No, just grandchildren.

KL: It's a separate adjective, right? They're just really outstanding grandchildren.

JJ: They are great. [Laughs]

DW: They are great. We do, we all have a cluster of good looking kids, and they're nice kids, they're smart, they're all...

WJ: We wound up with one son, and he has three sons. So we're a little short of daughters.

DW: Yeah, mine was going that way with just sons and brothers until suddenly all this other exploded, and...

<End Segment 24> - Copyright © 2012 Manzanar National Historic Site and Densho. All Rights Reserved.