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KL: Did you say when your mom was born, what year?

KP: 1913, I believe. And then he was born in 1909, I believe.

KL: So she was up here then in her late twenties. Did she tell you --

KP: Yeah, late teens, early twenties.

KL: -- any stories from that time?

KP: Well, she had date with a Cline from the local families, where she rode to L.A. with him in the car, and she was kind of in the middle of the seat. [Laughs] Which is, I thought was pretty funny. Young love or something, I don't know. But she loved fishing and outdoors, and that's something that she loved up here, too, and my dad. I don't know whether he was really as gung-ho a fisherman as she was until she got a hold of him and trained him.

KL: Did he grow up with that?

KP: But they spent a lot of time fishing. Probably not, because they were, he probably had to work on the farm or whatever they were doing in the mines to help raise the family and take care of the family. They all did in that era, everybody worked hard. So he was used to going back to work, even as a, you know, nineteen, twenty year old young man out on the (Owens) lake, and that got him started to work at Bartlett eventually. But first he went to NSP (National Soda Products near Keller, California).

KL: Do you know how he found that work and what drew him and his mother to Inyo County?

KP: No, I really don't. They must have seen advertising about it somewhere (in the Los Angeles area), or someone told him about it, that there were jobs, opportunities up here. Otherwise I don't know why they would have come so far out, because I know the road at that time was a dirt road. All the way from L.A. was a dirt road, and from San Bernardino, too.

KL: Did he talk about the trip out ever, tell you what his first impressions of...

KP: No, he never did. But I've been across there in different places, too, and I could relate a little bit. But the Fryer (great-grandparents) took a covered wagon looking for work from Lomita and Pasadena area, my mother's family. When my grandfather was a baby, they went in a covered wagon down to Yuma, (Arizona). They camped on the San Bernardino River (in the Los Angeles basin) of all things, on their way to Yuma looking for work in the farms down there. And that didn't last very long because it was just too miserable down there. [Laughs] So they came back to the Los Angeles area, and like I said, they ended up in Soledad Canyon on a homestead there. His parents, my grandparents' parents, homesteaded in the canyon and they were washed out in 1938 in a huge flood. So they had to reestablish higher up on the canyon where they built their (own) homestead, and we visited there. My mother wanted to visit her mother very frequently after we were born, and so we would drive down there about every six weeks to Soledad Canyon to visit the grandparents.

KL: What were those trips like?

KP: Long. [Laughs] And we usually went on a Friday night, came back Sunday night for school, always just totally worn out.

<End Segment 2> - Copyright © 2013 Manzanar National Historic Site and Densho. All Rights Reserved.