<Begin Segment 4>

KL: Do you have any memories of life at NSP, or what are your earliest memories?

KP: No, other than I went to the swimming pool, I remember going to the swimming pool. I don't remember the little school there hardly at all. I do remember the train station, because I guess it was still in operation at the time.

KL: Tell us about it.

KP: Well, I forgot about bringing you some pictures from that era. I have one from the train. But no, I just hardly remember the train or anything about it. I remember they told me that as a baby, that I wouldn't go to sleep until they took me for a ride in the old Studebaker, standing up in the front seat until I finally fell over and they could take me home and put me to bed. [Laughs]

KL: I think my folks used that technique with me, too, actually.

KP: Well, the first child, that's what you do. You do whatever you have to do or whatever you can do to deal with it, I guess. I don't know.

KL: You said you were in the depot some. Did you travel by train, or was it just something...

KP: No, I didn't, but Raymond, my husband, and I actually rode in the last train ride. That was a view train ride, where they took the train out, totally out of commission. So that we got to run through the length of the valley, you could see how it would be great to have the train back there again now, because of the view from over there, all the way down on the Sierras, it's just amazing. It was quite an experience to get to do that. I'm sorry to skip ahead, but...

KL: Oh, that's okay. That was in 1960, right?

KP: In the '60s somewhere, yes. She's up on all this.

KL: I try to... it's always a good excuse, you know, to get to spend a couple hours trying to learn. Do you have any memories of the boarding house, were they still operating? Was your grandmother still operating that when you were alive?

KP: No.

KL: I can't put all the chronology together.

KP: No, I don't have any memories of it at all. I know approximately where it was, and that it was a big, it was a big rambling white painted building, facing kind of east, right in the middle of Cartego (south of Lone Pine). So it wouldn't have been on the main road or anything, it was down in Cartego. So they showed it to me over the years, where it would have been.

KL: What was the relationship like between Keeler and the NSP town? It sounds almost like people just kind of...

KP: Well, there really wasn't any division that I know of, because NSP was more just where the workers lived. They didn't, they would go to Keeler for the mail, and probably, I'm assuming had a post office there, and there was a little shop, a tiny little grocery thing I'm sure, so they could do that. Before, they had to go into Lone Pine for other things, doctors and actual groceries and whatever they needed. Because I know Lone Pine supplied the farms and the ranches and everything else in the area at the time.

KL: And where is -- this is admitting my ignorance, but where in relation to Keeler was NSP? Was it further out on the lake?

KP: No, it was almost directly south of there, it was about a quarter mile. You can see remnants of roads that went down in there, where the barracks homes were, along the roads down in there.

KL: How big a settlement was it, how many people?

KP: I've seen pictures of it, but it seems to me like there were close to fifteen, twenty houses, but I'm not sure. I can't verify that at all.

KL: Do you have a feel for what your house --

KP: They were gone, you know, as soon as that process quit happening, they tore 'em all down and they were gone. And I'm sure Keeler moved whatever they could over there and built houses over there for people that wanted to live out there.

KL: Do you have a feel for or memories of your barrack?

KP: None. None at all, no.

KL: Did your folks ever describe it to you?

KP: No, but I do see pictures. My cousin has pictures of their home, and it actually, I think it actually had two bedrooms in it, so it was a little bit bigger probably than ours, a little bit bigger than ours. Because they had two children already, and then (Aunt Drucie) did the same thing (as my mom). She had two younger children that were younger than my sister and me. So she had two families also. And my mother had three families. [Laughs]

KL: You know, one's good.

KP: She had a second, a third child when I was fifteen, trying for a boy, and then she had a miscarriage. Then she had the last child between my two sons. Are you sure you want all this information?

KL: I do, yeah. I mean, it's a window into what life was like in the 1920s and '30s in the Owens Valley, yeah.

KP: In those days, huh?

KL: And who was there and stuff.

KP: Oh, I remember driving to Lone Pine in the sandstorms, because the sand dunes were down there and (winds) would blow across the sand dunes. And many, many times we drove through that sand to go to Lone Pine or to go home again. But I definitely had really strong memories of the tennis court and the swimming pool there.

KL: Would you describe them?

KP: The tennis court was just in the middle of the desert, and probably just had a hard-packed mud court, that's all they could do out there. And right around it would be the sagebrush, of course. And the swimming pool was closer to the lake, on the lake side, on the west side of the town. And you could still see remnants of that, of the building there and the changing rooms and so forth. I did have one incident when I was in there, there was a little child basically drowning, and my cousin (Don) told me he was a lifeguard. And I was not aware that the child was drowning, and somebody pulled him out. But they were just frantic because he had almost drowned. He was floating around, and I didn't know any different. I was a little kid. Yeah, he was playing in the water. So that was a bad memory of the pool that was actually there.

KL: What role did that pool play in community life, would you say?

KP: Probably... in the summer, it was probably really popular because of the heat and the dryness out there. I'm sure that everybody used it. I don't remember the adults using it that much, but I was really young then. Well, we would probably go out there and use the pool after we moved to Lone Pine, too, because it was the only one in the area. But I was in Lone Pine when we built the community pool here and helped them raise money for that.

KL: When was that?

KP: I don't know. [Laughs]

KL: Like '40s or...

KP: Well, it had to be in about the '40s, late '40s, when they put that pool in. So it's been there a really long time.

KL: How did you raise money?

KP: Knock on doors. Everybody gave what they could at that time. I actually coached in (the Lone Pine Plunge) when my kids were in school. I ran the swim team in that pool, and we had a lot of fun trying to make it work for races and things, because of the high sides on it, it was almost impossible, and it was so cold, and still cold. [Laughs] Very icy pool if you've ever been in it. It's just too cold. And then we built one at the motel, at our motel.

<End Segment 4> - Copyright © 2013 Manzanar National Historic Site and Densho. All Rights Reserved.