<Begin Segment 14>

KL: When and where did you finish school?

KP: In Lone Pine High School in 1951. I went all the way through school from kindergarten through graduating high school.

KL: What did you think you would be doing with the rest of your life when you graduated?

KP: Well, I was thinking about, well, in those years, women didn't really have big plans for college. I had plans for college, and I had worked in the drugstore and in the soda shop to make money to save for college. And I thought I would go to college and I would either be a teacher or a nurse, neither of which worked out. [Laughs]

KL: What soda shop did you work at?

KP: The drugstore was, I was a soda jerk in the drugstore, that old term. And then there was a malt shop down south of the Catholic church, which was on Main Street, by the Dow Hotel. And I'm trying to remember the name of the malt shop, but I can't remember who was in it. But I worked there for two summers and we ended up serving sandwiches besides malts and sodas and ice cream and all that kind of good stuff.

KL: You said you worked there for two years?

KP: Two summers. And then probably after school, and I also worked in the theater popping corn in the evenings while I was in school.

KL: Would you sort of think back and try to reconstruct Lone Pine in your mind, and then sort of going maybe south to north, tell us what places you remember?

KP: My earliest remembrance of Lone Pine was the Dow Hotel with a bunch of trees in front of it. There were big trees along Main Street, lot of big trees along Main Street when I was a little girl. And then that gradually changed, the trees were gradually removed. There was a Chevrolet agency where the Building is now, there was a Chevrolet agency there, and a Ford dealer somewhere. Still a grocery store, there were at one time two grocery stores. There was a J.C. Penney across from the drug store, where the drug store is now. There was a bar and a restaurant north of that, north of the Penney store, which was the Spanish Garden, and we would go in there and have Spanish food, but you had to walk through the bar. And for a Christian church girl, walking through the bar was not very comfortable to go into there and have dinner. Of course, my folks were fine with it. [Laughs]

KL: They weren't teenagers either, though.

KP: No, no. They knew that it was no big deal to go in there and have dinner. So it was great that we got to do that. There was a really nice restaurant across from the Dow Hotel, and there was also the lumberyard later, which was across from the high school, big lumberyard, Copeland, Copeland Lumber.

KL: You said that was later when you were an adult?

KP: Yeah.

KL: I cut you off to ask that question. You said you had planned to go to college to be a teacher or a nurse, but other things happened instead?

KP: Well, I got married. [Laughs] I went one semester, Pasadena Nazarene College in Pasadena. And then my husband was in Korea as a photo reconnaissance (pilot).

KL: Who was your husband?

KP: Raymond Powell.

<End Segment 14> - Copyright © 2013 Manzanar National Historic Site and Densho. All Rights Reserved.