<Begin Segment 5>

KL: So you moved to Lone Pine you said when you were...

KP: About four.

KL: Where was your house in Lone Pine?

KP: It was right by the high school, second house from the corner there, by the high school. I have vague memories of that.

KL: Do you recall the address?

KP: No, I don't. But my dad, down the line... Rose is writing things down, she wants to add something.

KL: She's maybe just taking notes.

KP: She's just taking notes. Where was I about the house?

KL: Your dad...

KP: Oh, he was going to build a house. So they bought a lot, and it took him three or four years to build it because he did it all himself, he built it from scratch. And they had saved money, of course, I'm sure. I always said, during the Depression, that mother could squeeze a penny 'til it cried. Because we ate, we lived on beans and chicken and garden stuff and eggs from our chickens. And she would butcher the chickens, and we would have chicken dinners. So she was very good at all that because she had been raised with a hunter, she knew how to do all that kind of thing. And we would have a campfire in the backyard and she would put the pot on to boil so they could dunk the chicken and pull all the feathers off, which we got to help do, much to our chagrin. It wasn't fun. We lived south of the motel at that time.

KL: So you moved when you were seven or eight?

KP: Yeah. We moved to a city house, it was a city house, and it was directly south, between the Frontier Motel and the (Lone Pine) airport. Frontier Motel was built in about 1947.

KL: Oh, it's that old? I wanted to ask.

KP: First twenty units. And our house was an old city house right south of there. It was there for many years, I think we paid about fifteen dollars a month rent in the '40s, '50s. We lived there for quite a while, until I was a teenager.

KL: And that's when your dad finished their house?

KP: Started building the house, yeah.

KL: Where did he get those skills?

KP: Just learned 'em down the line. He probably had to do that kind of repairs on the bed and breakfast, and he just learned. He studied books, and he just was one of those natural people that could figure things out with wiring. It was basically brick, and brick house, so he learned how to lay the brick and lay all the electrical lines and the piping and so forth. And my sister and I helped him stack the bricks and helped him chink the bricks, too. So we helped build it also, along the line when we were junior high and high school. So I got to move up there before I graduated high school.

KL: Is it still standing?

KP: Yes, Mountain View Street.

<End Segment 5> - Copyright © 2013 Manzanar National Historic Site and Densho. All Rights Reserved.