<Begin Segment 1>

KL: I should have checked the date. Today is September 16, 2013. I'm Kristen Luetkemeier for the Manzanar oral history project. We're here with Kerry, maiden name Christenson, Powell, in the west theater at Manzanar for an oral history interview. We'll be talking some about Kerry's parents' lives both before and in the Owens Valley, and Kerry's experiences with visiting Manzanar War Relocation Center, but also just as a community member in Lone Pine throughout her life. And Rose Masters is here with us, she's operating the video camera and may have some questions, too. And an important one to start off with is, Kerry, do we have your permission to record this interview and to keep it in the library and make it available to the public?

KP: Absolutely.

KL: Thank you, we really appreciate it.

KP: It would be great if we could see it down the line.

KL: Oh, yeah, we'll send you a copy. Yeah, and if you want other copies for family or whatever, we can send you a bunch.

KP: Great.

KL: So because your parents did spend significant parts of their lives in the Owens Valley, I want to start off talking about them and what you know of the families that they grew up in. So let's actually start with your dad. Would you tell us first his name and when and where he was born?

KP: My dad was Clarence Christenson, he was born in Hibbing, Minnesota, and in the mining, they worked in mining, and that's how they ended up coming to California and looking for jobs. And his mother, his father (Carl Gustof) died fairly young, and his mother was Anna, and his (brother Arthur came from Arsburg, Sweden, and his) sister was Mildred. They decided to have a bed and breakfast in Cartago to serve the people that were working on the lake, on the (Owens) dry lake.

KL: Were his parents both immigrants?

KP: Yes, from Sweden.

KL: Do you know anything about their decision to come to the U.S. or what that impetus was?

KP: No, I really don't. They came to Minnesota, of course, because of the jobs, and...

KL: Were they in mining at that point?

KP: They were in mining, working in mining. But they didn't stay in that cold climate very long before they headed west. [Laughs]

KL: Yeah, where else were they? It looks like they moved around some.

KP: And I don't know where the parents met exactly, but I'm assuming it was in Minnesota. And they came... well, they ran the bed and breakfast for quite a while, serving the guys, as I said, that were working on the dry lake.

KL: Do you know anything about their travels in between, where they were? It looks like Kentucky.

KP: No, I really... well, Kentucky was the other part of the family. My dad's brother (Arthur) ended up down there in the mining, and that's where my cousins were born, two of my older cousins were born there in Kentucky, I can't tell you exactly where. But I've been there. [Laughs]

KL: Oh, yeah?

KP: I got to visit where my aunt was buried and where she grew up (in Kentucky) and all that, so that was great. And then my mother was born in Lomita, and down by Pasadena, and she was Ruth Fryer, from the (Jim) Fryer clan, and her parents homesteaded in Soledad Canyon (north of Los Angeles), and that's where she grew up. (Grandpa Jim) worked for the road department for many years and did a lot of hunting in those hills above Los Angeles.

KL: What did your mom recall of Soledad Canyon?

KP: She was fine with it, 'cause she loved going hunting with Grandpa, with my grandpa (Jim), out in the desert. But then when it was time for her to go to high school, there wasn't any. There weren't any. My dad happened to do a poster when he was in school in 1924, and I have that poster that said we need more schools, which they did at that time. But my mother was sent to boarding school in Lancaster at the time, and she boarded there, was in the same school as Judy Garland Gump, (later a movie star). And she met a girl from Cartago, well, from Olancha, (California), whose mother was the postmistress in Olancha. So the girls became good friends and she came up with her, probably to get away from her big family. She had a lot of siblings down in the canyon.

KL: Who were her siblings?

KP: Oh, aunt... bunch of aunts and uncles. They ended up staying in that same area pretty much, most of 'em. But anyway, she came up to Olancha and helped work the post office, and that's where she met my dad from Cartago.

KL: Who was that friend who took her, do you know?

KP: I'm trying to remember her name, and I can't -- it's not coming to me right now. I stayed in touch with them for a long time, and she ended up over at Boulder, Boulder City in Nevada, when she was married. And they stayed in touch for many years because they were really good friends.

KL: How old was your mom when she started coming to Olancha?

KP: She would have been probably sixteen or seventeen, because she was in school fairly young. And she was a pianist, too, she was almost a concert pianist, she was very good at it, very good at it. She would play piano in the Nazarene church in Lone Pine for many, many years, and did accompaniments for a lot of singing groups in the (Owens) valley because she was so well-known.

KL: Had she grown up in that church, the Nazarene church?

KP: No, not necessarily. They helped establish that in Lone Pine.

KL: Your folks did?

KP: My folks did, along with the (Bill) Skinners and other families in Lone Pine, because she could play piano. [Laughs]

KL: Yeah, that helps.

KP: That was a place for her to play all the time. We loved the classic music because we got to hear it at home all the time. And that added another dimension to my life, all through my life, as well as the art that I have branched into. But anyway, I'll let you ask another question.

KL: Oh, did she, when she was working for the post office in Olancha, did she do that for multiple summers?

KP: Several summers, yes, 'til they got married. And she dated some of the boys from Olancha, of course.

KL: We interviewed Dorothy Bonnefan as you know last week, and she said her mother came up also as a late teenager to work in Olancha, and that her mom was well-received, her mom and the other young woman.

KP: Yeah, oh, yeah, because there were a lot of young men working on the lake and on the ranches, too. And probably the girls, there was a scarcity of young women, I would imagine, I don't know. I don't know what that was.

<End Segment 1> - Copyright © 2013 Manzanar National Historic Site and Densho. All Rights Reserved.

<Begin Segment 2>

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.

<Begin Segment 3>

KL: Let's back up a little bit to before your birth, and I wanted to hear whatever knowledge you have of what your dad's work was like and what his tasks were. Did you say he first worked at Bartlett?

KP: No, he worked at NSP, which was National Soda Products, which is actually where I was born. That was just south of Keeler. And it was in barracks, kind of barracks-like homes, some of 'em were pretty nice looking, and they were a little bit bigger than a barracks, actual barracks. And my aunt and uncle lived there too, because my dad's brother worked there also, on that side of the lake, on the Keeler side of the (Owens) lake. So it would have been kind of dirty, dusty work, mining the soda products or whatever they were mining out of the lake.

KL: Do you know any of the techniques that they used?

KP: No, I really don't. I know when he worked at Bartlett they would go out and check the water that was, the product that was leaching out of the water, he would do that, but then he ended up working in the towers, which he called the towers. And also in a lab (at that plant).

KL: Is that at the Pittsburgh Plate Glass?

KP: At Pittsburgh Plate Glass (plant).

KL: He was all over.

KP: Yeah. He came over and worked at Bartlett's after a while, and then he drove to Bartlett for many, many years, from Lone Pine after we moved to Lone Pine.

KL: How long did he work for NSP? Do you have a sense of that? I guess it would have been about...

KP: Probably eight or ten years. I remember the town a little bit, there was a swimming pool there.

KL: In NSP?

KP: And there was a tennis court in Keeler (next to NSP), and they played tennis a lot between their fishing excursions.

KL: And I guess he probably came about 1927?

KP: Yeah.

KL: Was he affected at all by the bank collapse, the Watterson Brothers bank collapse?

KP: No, I don't think so, because they probably didn't have that much money in the bank to worry about. They probably barely broke even. I wouldn't know about that at all.

[Interruption]

KL: Your dad's work, was he actually mining the soda?

KP: Yes, probably. I don't know whether he actually was out there shoveling anything, because I really never understood the process. You'd have to talk to (my cousin) Don Christenson about that if you can ever catch him.

Off camera: That would be good, yeah.

KP: My cousin, because he was older and a boy and he understood more about it. And his dad worked longer at NSP.

KL: Did your grandmother do any work for NSP or any work for pay in the Owens Valley?

KP: No. All they did was a bed and breakfast thing.

KL: And did they establish that right away?

KP: And when they finally... yes, soon as they came here, as far as I know. Once they outgrew that, which would have been, I don't know how many years they ran it, the lake changed, too, and the jobs changed and they went across the lake and so forth and so forth. They moved, she and her daughter moved to Placerville, (California), and worked up there in various things. She was, of course, a very good cook, Swedish cook. They were very good cooks, I should say. And then my dad, of course, was married.

KL: How did your folks meet?

KP: Well, they probably just met when they were looking out for each other, boys and girls were looking out for each other. [Laughs] Go to the post office and meet Ruth, and finally ask her for a date. You know how that would go in those days. And I'm sure her parents weren't too happy about it, because he was not from there, he was not from Soledad, he was from up here. But, of course, my grandparents loved to come up here and fish, too, later on, which they did.

KL: When did your folks marry?

KP: Oh, dear. [Laughs] What did I say? I was born when she was twenty, and so they had to be married in 1930, '31.

KL: And when were you born?

KP: '33. They were married in Acton, in a really darling little church in Acton, down below Palmdale, (California).

KL: Did your mother ever tell you anything about her pregnancy or your birth?

KP: Well, the birth was pretty tough because there was a midwife (at home) and she wanted me to wait until the doctor got there, so she was trying to keep me from being born. [Laughs] So my mother had kind of a hard time. I don't know whether the doctor got there in time or not, I don't think so. In the house, at home, and in the barracks at NSP. So after that, of course, my sister (Luella) was born three years later, and then we moved to Lone Pine when she was a baby for the schools and so forth.

<End Segment 3> - Copyright © 2013 Manzanar National Historic Site and Densho. All Rights Reserved.

<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.

<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.

<Begin Segment 6>

KL: So growing up, you mentioned that the pool was kind of a big deal. In what other ways were you part of community life? You said your folks helped start the Nazarene church.

KP: Yes. They... well, that was basically what we did as far as the community was concerned with my parents, was involved in the church, and of course, they were involved with the school. And then down the line my mother also worked in the post office in Lone Pine. She worked in the post office in Lone Pine for almost twenty years, and she had picked up enough Spanish that that helped her to be able to translate for the Mexican people that were here then. They were the early, some of the early families, the descendants of the early families that had come here.

KL: Where did your mom learn that Spanish?

KP: In school, in high school. She took Spanish, picked it up, and just expanded on it. She was much better at Spanish than I ever was, that's for sure. I didn't pick up much of it even though I took it in school also.

KL: What else did she like to do? She had a gift for languages and piano.

KP: And piano, she played the piano a lot. And any minute they had, they went fishing, they went out fishing. Because she just loved that, and then when we would go to the city, to my grandparents' they would also do surf fishing (at Venture), especially in the summer, and then we would get to play at the beach, run up and down the beach or swim in the ocean, until I got old enough to be brave enough to actually swim in the ocean, which I did.

KL: Can you reveal to us any of their favorite Sierra fishing spots?

KP: Oh. Well, we fished locally a lot, we fished at Tuttle Creek and Lone Pine Creek and all of the creeks along here. They didn't go... well, they went to Mammoth in that area once in a while, but not nearly as often as they did. And they also, in the winter they would fish in the (Owens) river, and they loved catfish, and they'd catch catfish and perch. And so we did a lot of that. But as far as being involved in other parts of the community, they weren't involved with politics or anything like that. My husband and I were the ones that got into all of that because of our business, because of the motel business.

[Interruption]

KL: So tell us more about the Nazarene church. Who do you recall, who was involved in it, or the process of starting it up?

KP: It was the (Bill) Skinners and the Smiths, Foster Smith. (Mrs.) Floy Smith was my midwife, and they had an Arabian farm down where the 4-H group is now. He had, he raised horses down there. They wanted to have a church, and they had a little building behind Joseph's Market that probably was actually a house earlier, and they made it into the first church before they were eventually able to build their own church, which my parents, I'm sure, helped a lot with that and the financing for it and so forth, as they gained more people to come to the church. It was very, very active. Very active church with the youth groups and so forth, my kids went to the youth groups when they were young.

KL: Was its founding during your lifetime?

KP: The church? I was really small when they had the church behind the, Joseph's, I barely remember that. I remember that building, but vaguely. And all of the events that you do all year, the Easter and the Christmas programs and all of those things.

KL: What were those like?

KP: Oh, they were really fun. Put costumes on, I had to be Mary I don't know how many times. [Laughs]

KL: Was that a hardship or exciting?

KP: It was fun. It was really fun. And it was always fun to help with it. I taught Sunday school, too, down the line.

KL: What were Easter celebrations like when you were a kid?

KP: Well, they were very meaningful. It was just very meaningful. Sometimes they'd do the Palm things, for the Palm Sunday, and the breakfast, early breakfast at dawn for the Christ rising from the dead, that kind of thing.

KL: Where were those morning services held? Were they at the building?

KP: Well, usually kind of at the mouth of Lone Pine canyon where the Lone Pine tree was. They did it right there because that's a good spot for the sunrise.

KL: Do you remember any of the ministers of that church when you were young?

KP: I'm trying to remember the one that married us, I can't even remember his name. Mel Rich was the one that was very active when my kids were growing up, and he's still a very good friend of ours.

KL: You mentioned the Skinners as people who were involved in founding the church. Tell me about that family.

KP: The daughters, Ruby Skinner was... Ruby and Bill were the main ones, and then Evelyn Nelson and her three daughters are still very involved in the church. (Evelyn) Nelson was Ruby Skinner's sister, and she's still alive and she's over a hundred now. She's a hundred and one or two. Can't keep track.

KL: Yeah, at a certain point it all just is impressive.

KP: I'm eighty.

KL: So they were closer to your parents' age, Ruby and Bill were?

KP: Yeah, same age. They haven't been gone -- Ruby hasn't been gone that long.

KL: Do you know if they had help from the denomination? I don't know a lot about the Nazarene tradition, is it pretty local?

KP: Well, it might have started out as a mission, a mission church, and they probably had some money from the mission, because they had an active missionary group.

KL: You said that church started in a house behind Joseph's, but where did they go after that?

KP: Well, I don't know for sure. I think they had one burn down. They might have had one burn down where they built the new church. That's very vague in my mind. I'm losing it. I'm losing it. [Laughs] And then they built the brick church, but I couldn't tell you when. It had to be in '50, early '50s, because my kids went to Sunday school there. And Martin was born in '57, and then my other son (Gary) was born in '53.

KL: When did you start school?

KP: When did I start school?

KL: Was there a preschool that you went to?

KP: No, not preschool. Kindergarten, I went to kindergarten in Lone Pine, Lone Pine elementary kindergarten, which was a little building where the nursery school is now, the preschool. There was a little building there. Ruby Branson was my teacher, and she's still alive. She's a hundred and something. [Laughs] It was her first year, I think, when we were in kindergarten there. And then we moved into the big old school and spent most of our elementary years there until junior high when we went over to the high school. But I was in the fourth grade when Pearl Harbor happened, and I would have been... let's see, seven, eight. And then when Manzanar, when I came to Manzanar, I would have been eight or nine, probably nine and in Camp Fire Girls.

<End Segment 6> - Copyright © 2013 Manzanar National Historic Site and Densho. All Rights Reserved.

<Begin Segment 7>

KL: You had connections to Manzanar before it was Manzanar War Relocation Center.

KP: Oh, yes, we did. You have probably heard that people would come up here and pick the fruit. Well, of course, we did, too. It was free fruit, so we would come up and pick apples and pears whenever we got a chance to pick some. And we'd also go, there was a farm, some farming south of Big Pine, and we would go up there and dig potatoes whenever we got a chance. And that was augmenting all of our food. Of course, as I said, my mother had always had a garden with garden vegetables, and we always had chickens.

KL: What did you grow at home?

KP: Corn, tomatoes, potatoes, okra. She liked okra. I never did. And then later on when they moved to the new house, she had asparagus, wonderful asparagus patch, and she had berries, I think, raspberries, and strawberries, (grape vines).

KL: What was the... you said there was a property south of Lone Pine where you'd dig potatoes.

KP: Big Pine.

KL: Oh, I'm sorry, okay.

KP: South of Big Pine. It was a big farming area at the time. Where they got the land or the water, I don't know, because the water was gone already to the aqueduct by then.

KL: Where they actively farming it and you guys were kind gleaning it?

KP: Yeah, we probably did the gleaning after they had dug most of 'em out of there, I'm not sure. But, of course, the aqueduct came in and all the water was gone. [Laughs]

KL: Your folks moved here, I think, right after a lot of the unrest in the '20s, right?

KP: Yeah.

KL: Did they ever talk about kind of what it was like to come into this area at that time?

KP: No. Of course, I never paid any attention to the loss of the water or anything, because I wasn't old enough to pay attention. That was something that I feel bad about that my classmate, Frank Gamboa, said that he knew that when the Manzanar, when everybody was coming to Manzanar, that he was out on Main Street and he saw the parade of the private cars as well as the buses on their way to Manzanar. He actually saw it, because he lived close to Main Street. But I didn't, and we lived right on the main drag by the airport. But I don't recall that at all.

KL: When you guys were picking the fruit at Manzanar, was anyone caring for any portion of those trees?

KP: It was pretty well abandoned that I recall at that time.

KL: Did you guys... I'm curious to know how --

KP: The fruit trees were beginning to get kind of raggedy because no one was really taking care of them.

KL: No one was pruning them.

KP: Yeah, they weren't pruning them back and all that. And a lot of the fruit wasn't good because it just was too old. And like I said, not watered properly and not taken care of. It was pretty sad.

KL: Did you have a particular place you would come?

KP: Well, I've been to the fruit orchards out here, and it was in a similar area where the blooming trees were over here on the north side, kind of on the north side.

KL: Would just your family come out?

KP: Yes.

KL: Did you encounter other people ever?

KP: It was sort of like the same thing, you get up and you get pinon nuts. That was fun.

KL: Where did you go for that?

KP: Up Hogback Creek and Tuttle Creek. Any place we could go to get 'em, usually Hogback because they were lot more accessible to the actual trees that bear, that have any fruit on them.

KL: And you said it was fun? What would you do?

KP: Well, we made my dad climb in the tree once in a while, but finally we realized you just have to shake the tree and put a tarp below it, and then you pick (them) up, and then you clean your hands to get all pitch off of it.

KL: Yeah, I've tried to process even the ones from the store with the hull, and it's kind of time-consuming.

KP: Oh, I like 'em raw, so I just get 'em and eat 'em raw. Lot of people heat 'em up a little bit and cook 'em. They come out of the shell a little easier.

KL: Did you use a nutcracker?

KP: No, just your teeth. [Laughs] One at a time. We didn't cook 'em, we didn't use 'em for cooking, we just ate 'em raw in those years for sure.

KL: When you'd be out at Manzanar picking, were there other people around?

KP: Sometimes, yeah. I never saw a lot of people there.

KL: It sounds like it was a really popular thing.

KP: Yeah, it was for a while there, before the fruit got too bad, or the trees died out.

KL: Do you recall people ever talking to you as a child about their feelings about the town of Manzanar's end, or was that really part of your thinking?

KP: No. As I said, my main impressions when I came here as a Camp Fire girl, that was my main impression.

<End Segment 7> - Copyright © 2013 Manzanar National Historic Site and Densho. All Rights Reserved.

<Begin Segment 8>

KL: Let's move into, then, the World War II years. You've mentioned that you have a recollection of learning that Japan had attacked Pearl Harbor. How and when did you find out about that?

KP: I was in fourth grade, and the teachers came and told us. We were just completely horrified as young children that this could actually happen, so many people dying, it just was unbelievable, totally unbelievable. But I never thought about the Japanese people being herded into camps because of that. I never thought of that until it actually happened here. And we were kind of stunned that we were going to have a camp close by.

KL: Had you been around Japanese American people ever?

KP: No, hardly at all, no. No blacks ever came to the valley either, African Americans we call them now. But there were very few. They would come as nurses or something like that every once in a while, but they never stayed, because there just weren't the jobs and they weren't accepted, probably. They didn't feel comfortable here. There were very few Orientals. There were some, like I've said, Bessie Kong Pedneau was an exception. (...)

KL: Did you know her as a child?

KP: Oh, yes, she was a secretary at the school for many, many years, a great lady. She's Chinese. I'm getting mixed up here. (His son Francis is one of my best friends still).

KL: No, you're right.

KP: She's Chinese. But anyway, they lived in, kind of raised their kids in Keeler, (as I said, 15 miles south of Lone Pine). She was a great lady, we all loved her and her family very much.

<End Segment 8> - Copyright © 2013 Manzanar National Historic Site and Densho. All Rights Reserved.

<Begin Segment 9>

KL: I should mention for the tape that you have written about this visit to Manzanar that we are kind of alluding to and that I do want to hear more about. And in your writing you said that there were things in your life, personal things, that changed after the U.S. became involved in World War II. Would you tell us how your life changed after that time?

KP: Well, there was one particular incident that happened during the war. People were out of work before... well, I guess in the '30s they were out of work, and the Depression. And I remember a man coming to our back door down where we lived, south of the motel, by the airport. And he said he was hungry, he wanted some work so he could have some money for some food. And, of course, my mother fed him and gave him some coffee and so forth, and let him rake or whatever, for fifty cents or whatever we had, because we didn't have very much either. But I remember that very vividly, that he came there during that time.

But Manzanar just sort of happened, and then I was in school probably hearing about it and how involved they became with their own people and having their school and their activities, and knowing that they had the scout group and then we had the Camp Fire girls group. I was younger than the scout girls that were in Manzanar, but we were invited to come up to Manzanar as a Camp Fire group. I'm not sure if my sister came with us or not, because she was three years younger than me. She may have been a little too young to come. I forgot to ask her if she had actually come, too. But what I remembered was the beautiful green grass and garden. Seemed to me that it was kind of south central of the camp, or more toward the east where the actual garden was. I've seen some of the gardens in that area in the last few years driving around where they've cleaned them up, and you can see the pools, where the pools were, and the waterways. But there was a red bridge across the little creek. They used the creeks that ran through here to do their little gardens, and it was a beautiful little red bridge they had painted, you know, the arched bridge over the creek. And then the rocks were implanted in the green grass like, well, like a Japanese garden. It was just beautiful. So natural, so simple, not a lot of other plants, probably some flowers, wildflowers, were in it. Because I'm not sure what time of year, so it had to be spring or summer that we came up here. And then they had, they fixed us sukiyaki, which was a wonderful Japanese dish with lots of soy sauce. And I ate it and loved it, and some of the girls weren't sure about eating something that strange, you know. But it was just salty, that's all. But I ate it and enjoyed it, and one of the Japanese scout girls came over to me and they were interacting with each of us, which was really great. And she talked to me and I talked to her, and she was probably twelve, and I was probably eight or nine. Because she asked me if I wanted to see where she lived and her barracks, and I said, "Of course, it would be great." So she walked me -- I don't remember how far it was, it didn't seem to me that it was very far. When we walked, the main door to her barracks was on the west side, and it was just steps with no railing up to the door, because it was up on the foundation of some kind. And then we walked in, and right in front of the... and to the left of the front door was a dresser that I found out later that they actually built from scratch from the wood that they had. And it had a picture of her brother on it and a U.S. Army uniform, and I was just horrified that her brother was actually fighting our war in Europe, probably. And here she is, a prisoner in a camp like that. And there were, that I recall, blankets between the sections of the barracks, it was actually just a square, elongated barracks, with blankets between the rooms inside. But then that was all I remember, and we went home after that.

KL: What was the ride home like?

KP: We were pretty quiet, because we were all... I don't know how many other girls actually got to see them, but I imagine they did, because that was part of their program, to let us see where they actually lived. And she was just a really nice normal, ordinary girl, to me, because we were raised with the Indians, the Paiute children. And we just accepted other races, I certainly did, from a Christian background, too, you just accept everybody because we're all the same, and we're all hurting the same and we're all having joys the same. So I didn't think anything of that at all, I just enjoyed meeting her.

KL: Do you know her name?

KP: No. But later on I did meet a Japanese girl, Hidemi, from Japan, when I got to go to Japan. She had come to Lone Pine and stayed with the druggist and his family. And I met her there. And then when we found out we were gonna go to Japan on a tour, with a touring company, I contacted her and her family and she met us at the airport, and her family and we had a wonderful couple of days with them in Tokyo. So I had, I got to go to Japan, and I also was dragged screaming to Hiroshima. I did not want to go to Hiroshima because of having been to Manzanar, but my cousin wanted to go, so he was with us, so we went. But Japan was beautiful, just beautiful. So green.

KL: You said that you were kind of stunned at her situation.

KP: Yes.

KL: Did you tell her about how you were feeling?

KP: Oh, I'm sure I did. I'm sure I did. She could see it, that I was really upset about her brother working in the army. I didn't meet her family or anything, just her. And I wasn't aware of, at that time, all of their clubs and their school, and all the school activities, and the fact that they had the gardens, the big gardens, that they were actually raising produce out and around the camp. And certainly not that they were out fishing. Found out in the paper this week about the fly fishing film festival.

KL: What was her response to your take on her situation?

KP: Oh, she probably expected it. She expected that we would respond that way, she probably did.

KL: Where did you guys have lunch?

KP: I just felt bad that I didn't have more of a relationship with them. Are you out of film or something?

RM: Just a couple more minutes.

KP: Okay.

KL: Where did you guys have lunch? You said you had a lunch...

KP: They had lunch right by the garden, they had tables there, and they brought it there where we had lunch. But I remember the sukiyaki really well because I was so impressed with it. [Laughs] One of my first experiences eating something other than home food, you know, something from another country.

[Interruption]

KL: You mentioned in your writing that you had a group leader with you from the Camp Fire Girls, Mrs. Sadie Iler? Am I saying that right?

KP: Yes.

KL: What do you remember about her? What makes her stand out?

KP: She was very strong in the church also, but she was also a teacher at the elementary school. And she was quite a bit older, gray-haired lady, she was just great with the scouts. She took us to Whitney Portals camping overnight, and we had a rainstorm, washed the portals out, and we were very fortunate we got out of there in time. [Laughs] But I was thinking when we took our break that I don't recall how many barracks were here when I was here. It didn't seem to me that there were a whole lot of barracks finished, but they must have been. It would have had to have been the second or third year. There would have had to have been a lot of homes in the camp.

<End Segment 9> - Copyright © 2013 Manzanar National Historic Site and Densho. All Rights Reserved.

<Begin Segment 10>

KL: Yeah, we were talking about when exactly that visit was. What are your thoughts about when that visit occurred?

KP: Well, it probably was the third year. You said it was '43?

KL: Manzanar opened in '42.

KP: '43 or '44.

KL: But I was guessing...

KP: So there would have had to have been a lot of different homes, barracks homes. And I remember the wire around it and the gate and all that, of course.

KL: What do you remember about actually gaining access? Do you remember a process to get into the camp?

KP: No, because we were in a bus, and just sort of waved us through. I don't remember that at all. Like I said, I'm sorry I'm not really giving you very much of details, because as a young child you just don't pay attention to those things.

KL: You started to talk about remembering the fence and stuff. If you were to sort of drive by Manzanar or see it from 395, would you describe to us what we would have seen in 1942 or '3 or '4?

KP: Only way I would know that is from seeing what you have in here.

KL: Oh, you don't remember it?

KP: I don't remember it hardly at all, no. The tower maybe, and the gate. But I don't remember seeing, paying much attention to it. It was just a fact, it was just a fact. And it was sad, and we were sad about it. We understood why, my husband said -- he came from Imperial Valley, and there were a lot of Filipinos down there as well as Japanese working the farms. And he said the Filipinos were actually wanting to kill the Japanese that worked down there. So they had to move them out to save their lives. They had to protect them. So that's part of the reason they put 'em in the camps, because people were actually hating them for what they had done in the Philippines and Hawaii. And so they were actually to the point of killing them. So that was another reason, and he explained to me why they wanted to put them in camps, to save their lives. I knew that was a minor one, but... the safety was a minor issue compared to the fact that they might be sending messages to Japan. [Laughs] Which I understood even at that young age.

KL: What were your thoughts at that age about the camp?

KP: I don't recall really thinking about it very much, other than just the fact that it was there, and that it was happening, and I was glad when it finally shut down and people were able to try to assume their lives again. I thought it was very sad.

<End Segment 10> - Copyright © 2013 Manzanar National Historic Site and Densho. All Rights Reserved.

<Begin Segment 11>

KL: When the news broke that the camp was gonna be here in the Owens Valley, do you recall any conversations with or between your parents or at school or any conversations locally about people's thinking?

KP: No, I don't recall anything like that at all.

KL: Did you ever encounter either Japanese Americans or members of the WRA or the army like in Lone Pine or anywhere outside of the camp?

KP: I remember later on a few of them coming to town, but very few.

KL: Japanese Americans?

KP: Yeah.

KL: Did you see them in town?

KP: They probably came to visit, people that came to visit them probably would be distant relatives or something, I don't know whether they were actually allowed out of the camp to come and shop in Lone Pine or not, I don't really understand who they were.

KL: But you saw them?

KP: A few.

KL: What sticks out about those memories? Do you have any sense for how others around you were responding?

KP: No, they seemed to accept them okay. But I'm not really recalling anything about it in particular.

KL: When the camp was being constructed, did you have any interaction with the construction crews?

KP: A little later on I found out different people that had helped build it, but I didn't know at the time that they were actually working up here. The Gamboa family, his brother worked here and helped build the camp.

KL: He did construction?

KP: He did construction, yes.

KL: Did he ever talk to you even later in life about...

KP: No, no.

KL: That was another question I had, who you know who was involved in the camp, and you were talking about...

KP: Well, Frank Gamboa, (descendant of Mexican Americans from and in Lone Pine), could tell you a few things. He lives in Virginia, so he's a little bit inaccessible. He would talk to you on the phone, especially about his father's relationship with the camp. That would be interesting to you, I'm sure.

KL: Are there any other local people you know who were part of the administration or did construction?

KP: No, other than (my cousin) Don Christianson delivering ice up here, my cousin, did deliver ice up here.

KL: What did he say about what it was like to come to the camp?

KP: Well, he, after that he went in the navy and he was in the Pacific, so he wasn't very friendly. [Laughs] He wasn't very friendly about any of it.

KL: Yeah, I guess I wanted to go back to that, how World War II affected your family, if people had to go into the military or if there were blackouts that you recall ever out here this far?

KP: No, not really, not really. We just went on with our lives the best we could. I had uncles that were in the war, of course, several of them were in the war. And they got to come home, fortunately, none of them died in the war, so we felt lucky about that. And my husband was a shade young to go in that. He went to Vietnam -- I mean, not Vietnam, he went to Korea. He was a jet pilot in Korea.

<End Segment 11> - Copyright © 2013 Manzanar National Historic Site and Densho. All Rights Reserved.

<Begin Segment 12>

KL: You mentioned in your writing and kind of mentioned in conversation, too, that one of the things that you were learning around the same time as you were involved with the Camp Fire girls was racial tolerance. And I wondered if that was a value of the Camp Fire girls? You mentioned you were getting some of those messages of racial tolerance from your church community. But I wondered if you would talk a little bit more about different ethnic groups that were in the Owens Valley and how they kind of interacted with each other, and how you're thinking about...

KP: Well, I can tell you, a couple of the Indian girls were bullies. [Laughs] They picked on us really bad when we were in elementary school. But no, we grew up with them, and in high school, we had square dancing, and my favorite dance partner was a Paiute boy, and we just had a really good time together. And as I said, I was raised racially tolerant of anybody, and it seemed to me that most of our classmates, people in school, were okay with it on the whole. I'm sure there were radicals that hated the Japanese, but I didn't see it. I wasn't aware of it, I didn't pay attention to it because I didn't want anything to do with it. That kind of thinking, they're just people, we're just people. I've been all over the world, and people are just people. They have sorrows and... they have families and they have sorrows and they have joys just the same as we do. So I've always related to them all over the world that way, our guides and all those kind of people. And I was just really thrilled to get to see Japan and China, and to interrelate with those people.

[Interruption]

KL: Well, back to your, sort of, growing up with the Paiute kids, those reservations down around Lone Pine in particular, the Lone Pine one was founded when you were very young. Did you spend really any time on the reservation or do you have any...

KP: One of my best friends growing up was a little girl from the Paiute reservation, because we lived right next to the Paiute reservation, the motel was right next to the Paiute reservation. And she would come over and play with us all the time, Beverly Newell, she's still there in the same house. And Rose probably knows that family, too.

RM: I know that name.

KP: Charlie Newell, that family. So a lot of them, of course, were in school with us, and we did everything with them.

KL: Did you visit Beverly in her house, too?

KP: Oh, yeah.

KL: What else do you remember about sort of the layout or the look or feel of the reservation, the Lone Pine reservation?

KP: Well, it was pretty much the way it is now, even way back then. My son, when we were going to live next door to the reservation, he was about three and a half or four, he said he didn't want to live there because the Indians might scalp him. [Laughs]

KL: He'd been watching some movies or something.

KP: He was watching the movies, cowboy and Indian movies.

KL: What was your response. Just laughter?

KP: I said, "Well, I grew up with them and played with them and went swimming or wading in the creek with them and we always had a wonderful time. "So you'll be fine with them in school." And they were good athletes and good people.

KL: You mentioned Mrs. Pedneau who was formerly Ms. Kong, and she had Chinese ancestry. Are there any other individuals, I guess occasionally African American people or black people coming into the Owens Valley?

KP: No, we didn't even have any Hindus then. We didn't even have any of those people at all. Like I said, very few blacks, very few.

<End Segment 12> - Copyright © 2013 Manzanar National Historic Site and Densho. All Rights Reserved.

<Begin Segment 13>

KL: Do you, I wondered, you mentioned that you were kind of reluctant to visit Hiroshima because of your experiences at Manzanar. Do you remember, you were really young, but do you recall getting news of the atomic bombs being deployed?

KP: Oh, yeah, yeah. But I don't remember thinking, I just thought how horrible it was that those people had to die like that. It was just horrible. But when we visited, when we actually visited Hiroshima, the biggest memory of mine going into that museum there, it was very well done, and there were a lot of Japanese people there. And I didn't want to look 'em in the eye, that's the way I felt. But there was a cement step, like had been in a building, and it had a gray stain on it where a human body had been melted from the bomb, and that's what it said. And I just went, I was just completely horrified how the power of that bomb, what it would do, it was really awful. So that's why I didn't want to go there in the first place, but we did see the bombed out building that's still there, the framework, at Hiroshima. But we did, we took the train down from Tokyo and visited Kyoto and the shrines and the beautiful churches and shrines that they have down in there. So we had that side of it, too, in Japan.

KL: Do you remember news of -- this may be a silly question -- but what do you remember about news of Victory in Europe day, or Victory in Japan day?

KP: I don't remember very much about it because I was just too young. The impact of just being grateful that the boys could come home, my uncles could come home, I knew how many people had died. You just go on with your life, that's all you can do. We were having enough trouble, enough struggle on our own without thinking about the big pictures, I guess, just surviving.

<End Segment 13> - Copyright © 2013 Manzanar National Historic Site and Densho. All Rights Reserved.

<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.

<Begin Segment 15>

KL: And you said he was from the Imperial Valley?

KP: El Centro (and Calipatria).

KL: What else do you know about his childhood? Was this family part of the farming business?

KP: No, they were in a service station business, Standard Oil, I think. And they sold tires all during the war. They did really well because they were in the middle of a farming area, and they sold tires to the farmers who were really stressed to provide for the war. Because all the farmers were doing really good at that time, because they needed all that. So he worked the service station, his dad's service station all the way through school, but he went to school in Calipatria because he was really basically raised in Calipatria, which is on the north end of Imperial Valley. Then he was actually born in El Centro. His mother and dad had a dairy for a while before they got into the service station business. They were from, both from Missouri, the Powells were from Missouri.

KL: How did they get to California?

KP: Probably for jobs. The same deal, because his father (Clyde Powell) had worked over in the San Joaquin Valley. One of his (stepfathers) was killed by a covered wagon, drove over him on the farms, over in the Imperial Valley, I mean, over in the San Joachin Valley.

KL: One of his grandfathers?

KP: Yeah. Then they ended up down in the farms in the Imperial Valley. And Raymond said when he was a little kid, they didn't even really have fans to cool off in the summer. They would go to bed and get a sheet wet and put it over them so they could sleep for a while. And then when it dried out, they'd get it wet again so they could actually sleep in the Imperial Valley. Because they didn't have any cooling kind of thing at all when he was a little boy down there. It was an interesting development.

KL: Yeah. How did you and he meet?

KP: Well, actually, his mother brought him over to my house and introduced him to me when I was a senior in high school.

KL: How did you and his mother know each other?

KP: Oh, we were neighbors. They built a motel next to our house when we lived down by the airport. They built a twenty-unit motel, and then they added another ten right away because they were both working twenty-four hours a day and they needed more income so they could actually hire somebody to help 'em. They had somebody to make beds, I'm sure, but they had to add, they could see that they were in a good spot, location, location, location, they always said in the motel business. But they built a motel so you that you could come up here and go fishing. Then he didn't have time to go fishing. [Laughs]

KL: Because he was working so much?

KP: Because he was working so much, yeah.

KL: What hotel is it that they built?

KP: Frontier Best Western, it's still there, and the fourth generation is running it now. Because we ran it for quite a few years, and then my son ran it, the younger son (Martin), and now my grandson (Travis Powell) is running it. So that's pretty interesting. [Laughs]

KL: What were Raymond's parents' names?

KP: Clyde and Alma.

KL: And Alma wanted you two to meet?

KP: Oh, yeah. They both said that I was a worker, that I was a hard worker and they needed a hard worker in the family. They saw me out there working around the house and digging in the garden and loading wood and doing all kinds of things that my dad, since he thought I was the boy in the family, that I could do with him, and the fishing and all that, of course. So anyway, they thought I was a hard worker and that he should meet me. [Laughs] And I loved square dancing. I had been doing square dancing all the way through high school, but he wasn't a dancer particularly. But anyway, he came back and we started dating, and he was getting ready to go to Korea in the war. He did photo reconnaissance in Korea, so he wasn't actually dropping bombs, he was doing the photo recon type of thing, (as a pilot of jets).

<End Segment 15> - Copyright © 2013 Manzanar National Historic Site and Densho. All Rights Reserved.

<Begin Segment 16>

KL: He was in the military, he was active duty?

KP: He was in the air force before it was actually the air force. He went into control tower school, and then he wanted to become a pilot, so he became a pilot and he flew the RF-80 jet, one of the early, some of the early jets that were used in Korea, so that's what he was flying. But he was going to do a hundred missions, and they figured that would take a year of sorties where you were taking film up in northern Korea. And he finished in seven months because he wanted to come home and get married. [Laughs]

KL: When did he come back?

KP: So he came home in March (1952) and we got married right away. And then we went to South Carolina to the base for two years, (Sumter Air Force Base).

KL: What year were you married?

KP: '52.

KL: So when did he go into the air force?

KP: He went in in '46, '47.

KL: Oh, he was in longer than I realized.

KP: Yeah, he was in... he was in active duty only about ten years before we got out of the military. Because I was part of it. [Laughs] That's why I said "we" were in the military. When you marry a military family, you're a military family.

KL: What did he say about his time in Korea, what it was like to... like what a reconnaissance photo...

KP: He was glad he wasn't dropping bombs. And one of his best buddies became a prisoner of war over there, one of the reconnaissance pilots was a prisoner of war. But he made it as easy as he could, they had their own little tent, four or six pilots shared a tent on base, and he would write me almost every day (...) telling me what he was doing and how it was going, and someone had taken some shells. And they were on the, he did Black Tuesday, he and another pilot did the Black Tuesday event where they were in North Korea and they had about fifty fighters protecting their mission all around, all around them to protect their mission so they could get their pictures and get back and not be shot down. So that was really a big thing at that time. He told us about that. He didn't tell me much about the grimy side of it at all.

KL: Where was the base?

KP: K-12? I don't remember exactly. I have pictures of it.

[Interruption]

KL: You said he had a friend who was a prisoner of war. Was this friend ever released?

KP: Yes, he finally got out. But of course it was a horrible experience for him, and his son wrote about it on the internet and all that. And Raymond was mentioned on the internet for a while, too, because he's a veteran of that war.

KL: What was his friend's name?

KP: I'm trying to remember. It's not coming to me.

KL: It'll probably come up later when I haven't asked you the direct question.

KP: Later on, yeah.

KL: You said you guys went to South Carolina after you came back?

KP: We went to a base in South Carolina and he did instructing in photo reconnaissance, and that's where our first son (Gary) was born, in the military hospital, which was basically barracks.

KL: It's a theme, huh?

KP: Yeah. So I came back to California and then I had a Carolina accent, I picked it up. He said, "Oh, you're from South Carolina?" No, no, I'm a California girl. [Laughs]

KL: Who is your first son and when was he born?

KP: Gary, he was born in '53, and he worked for UPS (as a co-pilot, then as a captain). He just retired from UPS, and he just turned sixty.

KL: Is he here local still?

KP: No, he lives in Minden, (Nevada). And then Martin is the second son that ran the motel for many years.

KL: When was he born?

KP: '57.

<End Segment 16> - Copyright © 2013 Manzanar National Historic Site and Densho. All Rights Reserved.

<Begin Segment 17>

KL: You said you guys came back here after South Carolina?

KP: Yes. Well, no, we came to Imperial Valley for two years, and he tried farming, tried working in the farms, and he just wasn't, we weren't getting anywhere. And his dad really needed help at the Frontier Motel to add more rooms. So we did add more rooms right away. And the last twenty units Raymond and I actually added on our own. I designed the rooms, because I'm an artist and a designer, and I knew what was needed in the rooms, and measured the distance, the size of them basically and all that. So we did that over the years, added all the extra units. It became Best Western, it was one of the first ones to become Best Western. It started on the West Coast in Long Beach, Best Western did, and we were one of the first ones to join, because it became international, of course, all over the United States (and the world).

KL: I know you've said different parts of the hotel's history in different parts of the interview, but I wonder if you would kind of in one swoop walk us through the history of the hotel, when it was started, when you began it, when the additions were...

KP: It was 1947 with twenty units, and probably... in two or three years we added another ten units. Then we added four units, then we added six more units. [Laughs] Then we added ten more units, and then we added, what, twelve more units. Anyway, there are seventy-nine units ultimately.

KL: Who built it in 1947?

KP: I'm not sure who built the original building, but I do know that Francis Pedneau built the last twenty or twenty-five units for us. And probably (A.L.) Bonnefin was in there somewhere, the (local) construction company. And we added the pool because we needed it. And it was great for my kids for sure, to get to use the nice warm swimming pool all in the summer. And as I said, I did coaching at the local pool, too.

KL: Did you guys live on site at the hotel?

KP: We did for a while. There was a little house in the back, and we lived in that house for a while. And then we wanted our own place , and so we bought the property in town and built our house there.

KL: When did you make that move?

KP: '61. '60, '61, we built our house and moved in. I've been in there ever since, and (we) expanded it, (remodeled).

KL: What was the experience like to design those hotel rooms?

KP: It was really interesting, really interesting. My husband couldn't visualize things, I could visualize things, so when we added on to our house, I could visualize how it would look, enlarging it. And I knew what space we needed in the motel rooms in the bathroom part of it, and the layout, because we learned what would work and what hadn't worked. The original rooms had showers in them, and we had to put tubs in them, so we had to make bigger spaces for some of those things, into the motel rooms. Of course, the architect had to finish up with the final plans for the actual width of the lumber and all that kind of thing, which I was aware of.

KL: That (motel) is a pretty important part of tourism in the southern Owens Valley. Were you part of any kind of organization, or was there a structure to the tourism industry in the 1960s?

KP: Just through Best Western. They started international advertising through that. But later on, Raymond and I became active in the Chamber of Commerce and helped advertise and go to trade shows and advertise Lone Pine and the valley, and worked with Bishop and Inyo County doing that kind of advertising all over the place for the valley to extend the season from just summer. I told Raymond thirty years ago, "We're not just an in-transit, we don't have to just be an in-transit, we can be a weekend, at least a weekend, because we have so much to offer in Southern Inyo." And now we offer Manzanar and our own film history museum, and the visitor center down there, all these different things.

KL: When did the hotel become part of Best Western?

KP: In '47, '48.

KL: Oh. So it was built as a Best Western Hotel. Oh, I didn't realize that.

KP: Really, '48, '49, right around in there.

KL: Do you have any memorable experiences attached to the hotel, any particular guests or big conventions?

KP: Well, we had a lot of movie people. I'm trying to think, movie stars staying there, like Chill Wills stayed there, one of the early character actors, and he and his buddies were playing cards in the service room, and they were cussing up a blue streak and having their drinks. [Laughs] And my father-in-law went down there and told them to calm it down because they were right by the swimming pool, and there were a lot of families out there and he didn't like that kind of language around the families. And they kept it up, so he went in the room and he packed their bags and he told them, "You're out of here." He moved them out of there. [Laughs] So there were other incidents like that, that happened with some of the crazy movie people that we had stay there. The remake of High Sierra, they actually used a room in the motel in a scene, and they have used the pool since then with other scenes. John Wayne came down there to say goodbye to everybody, he usually stayed at the Dow (Hotel) when he was in town, but he did know people down there, because some of his crew stayed down there and he would come down there. So when he knew he was dying, he came by and said goodbye to everybody, my son got to meet him then. Martin is my younger son.

<End Segment 17> - Copyright © 2013 Manzanar National Historic Site and Densho. All Rights Reserved.

<Begin Segment 18>

KL: Do you have other kids besides Gary and Martin?

KP: No.

KL: That would indicate a pretty powerful connection to this place and the people here, that John Wayne would come when he was dying to say goodbye.

KP: Yes. But loved Lone Pine because he worked up here a lot, and he made quite a few movies up here. So I found out more about that after the film festival started.

KL: Tell us about that. That's a nice segue. [Laughs]

KP: Nice segue into the film festival?

KL: Yeah, we'll make you a ranger, that was an excellent transition.

KP: Twenty-seven years ago, twenty-six years ago almost, I started the... I had the idea for the film festival, for a film festival. I was part of an art group that was going to do a big festival at the Lone Pine Park. And I thought about having a film festival because I had seen posters in the Sportsmen Cafe in Lone Pine at the stoplight, he had movie posters in there. So I thought, well, I know that movies worked up here, so why can't we have a little film festival? And also I had the idea to have a marker put at Movie Road, one of those white stones with a marker on it, as a historical marker that so many movies were made on Movie Road, and in the Alabama Hills that I remembered. Because when I was seven, Gunga Din was made in the Alabama Hills, and my sister and I got to go up there and see the elephants, actually roaming around in the Alabama Hills, in "our hills," there were actually elephants, and we were so thrilled to get to actually see elephants. Then I remembered that, so I contacted the man from the restaurant and asked him where he got all these posters, and he said in L.A. on Sunset Boulevard. So I talked to the art group and I said, "Would it be all right if we had a little film festival and maybe a dedication at Movie Road along with the arts festival?" And they said sure, that would be great. Because October is usually good weather, October, Columbus Day weekend. So I thought that would be a good weekend for us, too. I had no idea what a film festival was, none. [Laughs] I therefore went ahead and went to Sunset Boulevard and found all these folders with pictures of our mountains and the hills with movie stars in 'em. And I said, "This is too much, we definitely have to do a film festival." And I was going to use those to decorate motel rooms, because we were doing another twenty units and I wanted to put the pictures in the rooms and make a note about the stars that had actually worked up here and stayed at the motel. Where was I now? I'm lost. [Laughs]

KL: You went down to get those posters.

KP: We went for the posters, okay.

KL: And you were kind of working on planning the festival.

KP: Yeah. Well, we came back, and I said, "I have all these pictures, and I'd like to have somebody come and dedicate this stone marker at Movie Road." And he said, "I have a pheasant hunting club down at Sage Flat, and I can get Roy Rogers to come." So he called Roy.

KL: Who said that?

KP: The man that had the restaurant, Easton. And he said, "I've got Roy coming, you just tell me when in the fall," and I said, "Well, we're already kind of thinking of October, Columbus Day weekend." And he said, "He can come, he'll be there to dedicate your plaque in the Alabama Hills at Movie Road, and that'll be part of the film festival." And so then I found out that Dave Holland had been writing this book On Location in Lone Pine, and he had been researching it for twenty years about all the movies that were made in Alabama and Lone Pine and the area. And so I met him, and he and I hit it off. He said to me, "Do you know how to do a film festival?" And I said, "Absolutely not." [Laughs] So we put little stickers on the wall in my dining room for a two-day weekend film festival, and he said, "I want to do tours, and we always do panels, and of course the most important thing is movies." We'll show movies, which most film festivals are movies, but the beauty of our film festival is we have the Alabama Hills that was used, and they're right here, and people can go on tour up there and play Cowboy and Indians, which was ideal. And then he thought about the buses from Mammoth to be used for that part of it. So the first year I was the director until I realized it was insane, and it was too much for me as a grandmother with a grandchild that I was helping raise at the time. And I told Dave Holland he had to be director, which he was for about six years or seven years after that. But we didn't think that the film festival would go on that long. It's still going on, and we're going in our twenty-fifth year coming up soon.

KL: When did you know it would continue?

KP: Well, I found out that there were fans all over the world of our movies, and they loved coming back and playing Cowboy and Indians in the rocks and at the Portals and all around. And they just encouraged us to continue doing it. And we added another day, and now we're adding another day this year with the concert on Thursday night instead of Friday night. So that's expanding us for another day, which is really hard to do with the volunteers. We have to have volunteers do everything. So then the museum came, segued out of that.

KL: Good job, good job. I wanted to hear about the relationship between the two.

KP: Well, it was, what, seven, eight years ago that Jim Rogers of NBC TV affiliates in Las Vegas had heard about the film festival, and he came and he loved it, because he loved the old Westerns because of the family values. He loved the family values involved in the old Westerns, and he wanted to see us have a museum to go on from our film festival. So he met with a few of us in Lone Pine and he offered to build a museum. But we had to get the land to do it.

KL: You said he really valued, he really appreciated the family values in the Western movies. Did he ever elaborate on what those were and sort of how he saw them?

KP: Well, usually, especially in the early movies, usually the good guys win at the end of it. The good guys win, and Roy stood up for... Roy was a strong Christian gentleman, and he did come for the dedication that fall, and dedicated our plaque at the Movie Road. And his son and his grandson, they all three came, and then they went to the Pheasant Club after that. But he always stood, he had a code, code of conduct, and so did Gene Autry, they had their kids clubs, and they had these code of conduct which was all family values. Do the right thing, take care of your neighbors, take care of your, take care of the weak people, do all these things, the right thing, and be honest. Of course, they had guns, they shot 'em once in a while. But you didn't see a lot of blood. You didn't see a lot of blood at all, thank goodness. So that's what he was interested in, and he, most of the things in the museum are parts of his collection.

[Narrator note: My husband Raymond Powell continued his flying career in Cessna 250s and 180 small planes flying locally for Bob Whites Flying Service for about 20 years. He flew tourists into the Sierra Mt. landing strips mostly the Whites tent camp at Tunnel meadows air strip. He also flew for the Forest Service on snow surveys and flew business people to meetings in cities in the West. Later on we had our own plane and flew all over the West ourselves to Best Western meetings, etc.]

<End Segment 18> - Copyright © 2013 Manzanar National Historic Site and Densho. All Rights Reserved.

<Begin Segment 19>

KL: I wondered what... this may be an obvious answer since you're so involved with the film museum, but do you have a particularly deep connection with any of the historic sites here? Do you feel like there's one that speaks to you more strongly than the others?

KP: You mean in the...

KL: In the Owens Valley.

KP: Oh, in the Owens Valley?

KL: Just more broadly. I don't know if you've involved in the Eastern California Museum or anything.

KP: I have been involved with the Eastern California Museum off and on over the years. I worked there for a little while as a, just helping in there. I don't know, it's hard for me to get away from Mt. Whitney because I'm an artist and that's what I think of a lot.

KL: You said there was an art group that was involved in the film festival. Do they have a name?

KP: It was the Southern Inyo Artisans Guild at the time.

KL: Tell us about your work with the murals. How did that get started?

KP: Well, because I'm interested in painting, I had a friend in Anaheim, had a restaurant, and he was doing a Western restaurant, a spaghetti house in Anaheim. And he wanted a mural of Sitting Bull eating spaghetti, and I offered to do it for him. So that got me started, I did this four foot by ten foot mural of Sitting Bull, standing up, eating a plate of spaghetti of all things. [Laughs] That got me started on murals. And then when we, Dave and I put a little mural in the Chamber of Commerce section there, which used to be a motel, you knew that?

KL: I didn't.

KP: Across from Joseph's, that little enclave in there with all the little rooms. It was a motel.

KL: I wish it still was, it would be perfect.

KP: It was kind of the original motel in Lone Pine, yeah, before the Dow (Hotel/Motel) went in even. But we put a mural in there about where the movies were and with the plaques and all that, so that was kind of the second one that I did. I cut out the outline of the mountains and the hills, painted that, it's about fourteen feet long by three feet night. And then I got into helping with the mural on the Film History Museum on the outside, I helped (John) design that and pick out which pictures we wanted in it. And that was the... oh boy, you're gonna ask me his name. [Laughs] John Knowlton, John Knowlton. He designed that and painted most, he painted the beginning of it and the mountains and the end of it, and different artists did the other sections. I did the part with Roy Rogers and Dale Evans, which is about four feet by six feet, so that was pretty big. We painted those down at (Art and) Jackie Hickman's workshop, we actually painted them in the workshop in the building in the back there (at Boulder Creek RV Resort).

KL: Where is that?

KP: At Boulder Creek (south of Lone Pine). And then Marlene came along, Marlene Chernick came along, and she wanted to do a mural on the El Dorado bank, and she and Margaret Warner wanted to know if I could design something to go on there. They didn't really ask anybody else, and I had the idea to make the mural look like a bunch of postcards thrown out on a table to do the story of the Wedding of the Waters on the bank. So I painted the stagecoach section of that, where the stagecoach goes to the train. And we did those on metal panels also. The mural on the Film History Museum is also on metal panels which we did somewhere else and then brought in and installed, which is the same idea.

<End Segment 19> - Copyright © 2013 Manzanar National Historic Site and Densho. All Rights Reserved.

<Begin Segment 20>

KL: For the sake of posterity, would you tell us the story of the Wedding of the Waters?

KP: Sure. Father Crowley came here and ministered to the Catholic church, of course. And then he was kind of a missionary priest that went to a number of different parishes to do services for the Catholic people. And he realized very soon that there was the highest water and the lowest water in the continental United States in this (Inyo) county. And he was very impressed, of course, he loved the mountains and the Sierras and everything about this whole area. But he would drive to Furnace Creek (in Death Valley) to do church services over there. Well, at that time, in the early '30s, he had to go through Darwin (30 miles away) and down Darwin Wash, which gets washed out. Every big rainstorm it would get washed out. He would try to go through there because there was no highway. So they started campaigning to get a connecting highway (shortcut) down into Panamint Valley, over to Death Valley, and then on over to Las Vegas from the southern end of Owens Valley. So they campaigned with the state, the powers that be, the Inyo Associates and other groups like that, and they finally got this road to go through, and they (eventually) built the road. And he had the idea to do a big celebration weekend including the opening of that road with all kinds of other events going on for a whole weekend. And he wanted to do the Wedding of the Waters, bring in the water (in a special gourd) from Lake Tulainyo, (Highest Sierra Lakes) on Friday morning by (trail by) Indian runner, which would be the original way the water was brought down (from the Sienna). And then into Whitney Portals (at the end of the road up from Lone Pine), and put it on a Pony Express rider, which was the local cowboys, and three different riders brought it from Whitney Portals into Lone Pine that first evening, and they had a parade of cars following them with their headlights coming down at dark, because it was October and dark (early). [Laughs] And by the time he got the water to the Portals, it was four-thirty or five in the evening, coming down from Lake Tulainyo. It was a long climb, it was a big climb. And so then (Friday evening) they put it in the bank, which (is a) shoe store (now), which was the Bank of America at the time. They put the water in the bank overnight with the assistance of the movie stars, Hopalong Cassidy. Some other people were there, and Governor Merriam came from Sacramento. (Father Crowley) invited dignitaries from all over the state to come and be part of this whole weekend. And he had set up dinners and events, demonstrations, shooting events, (horse) shoeing events, football games, dances, dinners, barbeques, all kinds of things all weekend in Independence and Lone Pine and then even in Death Valley for part of the weekend events.

So Saturday morning a miner (with a burro) picked it up, it was supposed to be Death Valley Scotty, but he wouldn't do it, I guess, or he didn't come over for some reason. But anyway, the miner took it to the Catholic Church which was on Main Street at the time by the Dow Hotel. And then he gave it to a covered wagon, which took it just several miles down (south on the main highway) and gave it to the twenty-mule team, which kind of went on Keeler Road out that way. And then they gave it to a stagecoach, which took it to the (narrow gauge) train. This is all on Saturday, big day, big day. And the train took it the fourteen miles to Keeler, and they put it in the Keeler (Railroad) Station, the water (gourd) in the Keeler Station overnight (or Sunday). (A specially invited winning) Indianapolis driver took it in his fancy car, a Lincoln Zephyr -- I've been reading up on this because I have to interview, I have to do this talk in a couple of weeks, next weekend. He took it in the Lincoln Zephyr and took it up to the dedication on the other side of Keeler where they were dedicating the opening of the (new) road from (the) Darwin turnoff. And they did the dedication there, and they had set up... what did they call it? (Telex?) Anyway, President Roosevelt sent a message there to them at the dedication telling them that the road was officially open so they could go down that road. So (the driver with the water) went down that road into the bottom of the Panamint Valley (where) he met an oil company plane, (landed on the dry lake there), and the plane took it from there that (Sunday) morning over to Furnace Creek (Inn), and they had a big dinner and a big lunch there. And then at four-thirty the plane took off and went down to Badwater (in Death Valley below sea level) and dumped the water from (the highest) Lake Tulainyo into (the lowest) Badwater (water) from the airplane, and that was the end of the actual Wedding of the Waters.

They had set up campfires or fires up on each mountaintop to go ahead and signal to Lone Pine that it was over. So (up on) Dante's View, as soon as they saw them, so dump the water, they lit their campfire there, and then they did it on top of Cerro Gordo (above Keeler), or Telescope (Peak), I think Telescope first, and then Cerro Gordo, and then they saw it (from the) top of Mt. Whitney. And so at the top of Mt. Whitney they lit the campfire and they had (a) fire fall in front of Mt. Whitney to let the people know (down) in Lone Pine that (the wedding) was completed. So that's the whole story.

KL: You're gonna give a good talk.

KP: [Laughs] That's the whole story. I think I got it all in sequence.

KL: Yeah. I did not expect to ever have an Indianapolis motor speedway car in any of my oral histories for Manzanar National Historic Site.

KP: So that was a very interesting weekend. And like I said, he had set up a trout dinner in Lone Pine for Governor Merriam that first night, so many special events, dances, there was a big dance in Independence, and there was a dance in Lone Pine, I'm sure. And then like I said, a football game and shooting demonstrations and all kinds of things.

<End Segment 20> - Copyright © 2013 Manzanar National Historic Site and Densho. All Rights Reserved.

<Begin Segment 21>

KL: I wanted to ask you sort of about some big events in Manzanar's more recent history, too, since you were here locally for them. Starting off with the historic marker that was placed in 1973 and the state marker, do you have a recollection or were you involved at all in that?

KP: No, but I had friends that went out there to the monument behind Manzanar a number of years ago and they got stuck in the sand out there. [Laughs]

KL: Oh, really? Were they on their own?

KP: Yeah, they were on their own. They had to walk up to here (to the then Garage) to get a phone, to (my husband) Raymond to come and get 'em out, and they were stuck back there.

KL: Were they local people?

KP: No, they were from Imperial Valley. But I've been very pleased that they're having the Return to Manzanar every year. I think that's a really good idea, it's a good thing. I wanted to be on the original Manzanar Committee before the museum went in, but then I realized there was going to be a lot of objection by military people, and I just wasn't up to that. I wanted to be, having been to Hiroshima, I wanted it to be a Peace Park. I wanted it to be called the Manzanar Peace Park, and I thought that would have been a really good idea, but it's worked out. I knew it would work out sooner or later, somehow or other it would work out, because it was meant to be, needed to happen.

KL: What do you think it has done... you said it needed to be, it was meant to happen. How do you think the establishment of a public site here has affected people's thinking or affected the area?

KP: Well, all I know is every time I go by here, there's ten or fifteen cars here. So people are interested. They're interested in that side of California history, or U.S. history. It's part of U.S. history and it needs to be remembered. I think it needs to be remembered. And I've been impressed that so many people were wanting to see it and wanting to come here. And as I said, in my opinion, it's very well done.

[Interruption]

KL: Looking out, you know, say twenty, thirty years into the future, what would you like to, how would you like to see Manzanar continue to develop?

KP: Well, I'd like to see some of the gardens totally restored, or at least one as a sample garden, because it was so beautiful. And I know it's a big job to maintain it and so forth, but you already have the rocks and the spillways, and the place for the waterfall, several places on the north side, I know you already do. I'd like to see that happen, and I'm so thrilled that they're restoring some of the orchards and selling the seeds, because they are drought-resistant. And then I don't know about the garden, the other gardens that they raised here, whether there'd be any value in that at all. But I think it's fairly well-done the way it is. And also restoring the barracks, I've been in the barracks that they have restored, and I think they've done a really good job on that, and that was important to do, because you really have the feeling that you're right there with the people that were actually in there, eating in there with those photos, those photo montages that are in there. They're great; I was very impressed with those. Yeah, I've taken a lot of people around.

<End Segment 21> - Copyright © 2013 Manzanar National Historic Site and Densho. All Rights Reserved.

<Begin Segment 22>

KL: I've been forgetting to introduce the tapes. This is tape three, so far, of an interview with Kerry Powell here at Manzanar, September 16, 2013, and Rose had a couple questions from the conversation.

RM: Yeah. Kerry, when you were talking about growing up in Keeler for the first few years of your life, then living in Lone Pine for almost the rest of your life, I know that when I was growing up, the dust on the lake was a huge problem even when I was a child. And I was wondering if you have a recollection of when that started or when it came to the national consciousness, I guess you would say. Do you remember lake dust being an issue when you were a young girl in Keeler?

KP: Definitely. This was a big issue because when it would kick up like that, it was really thick, you couldn't even see, and you're breathing it. But I also was aware that people lived in Keeler. Maybe they didn't get it as much as we did, because it didn't blow that direction as often as we did. Because they've lived there all their lives and they're still alive, do you know what I'm saying? And so they weren't as affected by it as we thought we would be. I had questions about them re-watering the lake because I thought the original idea was shallow flooding, and it was gonna smell really bad. And it was going to be a waste of time and money because it would evaporate so quickly, so I didn't see that it was really going to do that much good. But it has, it has done a lot of good. It's been really different and better. And then I found out just a few years ago that Inyokern and Ridgecrest (90 miles south) were suffering also from the dust blowing south, and they just really hated it. They were really thrilled when they found out we were going to get water on that lake to cut down some of that dust. We still have some, but nothing like what we had before. It was hard to describe it when it would really blow from the south, it would just be really thick, you couldn't see anything. It was really miserable to live with. (Not really so often but bad when it did because we usually have such clear air up here.)

RM: Thank you.

KP: Okay.

RM: I guess I was also curious, you mentioned the Skinner family a number of times because they helped found the Nazarene church with your parents, it sounds like. I was wondering if you know anything about when the Skinners came to Lone Pine. (The men were always involved in the local mines and there are still some descendants in Darwin, below Keeler.)

KP: But no, I really don't, I don't know. I would assume they came probably about the same time that my parents came, because I'm not sure if their antecedents were here before that or not. I'm really not sure. I'm sorry, I just don't know.

RM: That's fine. I'm jumping around a bit.

KP: That's okay.

[Narrator note: Also my father Clarence Christenson took 2 summers off from Bartlet Plant to work in the Sierra for the Forest Service when I was 14 and 15. We stayed in their log cabin at Tunnel Ranger Station, where my mom Ruth tended to the mountain phone line. The Ranger Station was about a mile from the Tunnel Air Strip. My sister Luella and I enjoyed fishing up there for the golden trout with our folks before we were flown out to Lone Pine to go back to school. The folks came out later in September.]

RM: You were talking about how you went to Pasadena and Nazarene College and you were there for six months while your soon-to-be husband was fighting, or, well, taking photos, but at war in Korea.

KP: Yes.

RM: I was wondering if you could describe what it felt like for you. Were you nervous?

KP: Oh, yes, oh, yes. He called me one time there in the middle of the night, and my dorm mother had to come and get me up. She was really nice about it, but he did call me in the middle of the night. But I was engaged, but I was not married, because he wanted me to get married before he even went, and I said, "I'm too young and I'm not going to do this." I don't want to be a war widow, is what I was thinking. And, of course, he came home safely. But it could have been the other way around, obviously. No, I was busy with school so I didn't think about it a whole lot except from his letters and what he would tell me how lonesome he was, and I tried to write to him, but I didn't write to him nearly as often as he wrote to me, which was kind of sad.

<End Segment 22> - Copyright © 2013 Manzanar National Historic Site and Densho. All Rights Reserved.

<Begin Segment 23>

RM: Yeah, I guess my last question that I had, jumping around again, you just told this wonderful story about Father Crowley and the Wedding of the Waters and how he had involved Inyo-Mono Association at that time, which is now Inyo Associates. And I was wondering if you've been involved with Inyo Associates as somebody in the hotel business.

KP: Yes, we were, we were very involved in it, and my husband was president a couple of times of Inyo Associates, and we went to those meetings. And like I said, we went to Anaheim and other trade shows, too, representing the valley for tourism, for tourism reasons, because I really believed in advertising more than he did. I believe in advertising very strongly. And no, I haven't gone for several years, but we did for quite a few years, we went to a lot of the trade shows, travel shows.

RM: Do you remember what years he was president?

KP: Oh, let's see. It would have been probably early '80s, probably early '80s. But when I first went to Inyo Associates was about the second or third year that they even had women involved in it. Because the early Inyo Associates was all men, it was all men, so they didn't have any women in it. They didn't encourage the women, businesswomen, because there weren't that many businesswomen then, you know, at the beginning of the Inyo Associates meetings. I was very impressed and happy to be involved with Inyo Associates because it was the whole valley, because we're all in the same boat, because we all depend on tourism. And I thought we should work together, and I was really happy to know what the Forest Service was doing, what the BLM was, that leads to the BLM question. My father worked for the BLM for a number of years and he built, he built Tuttle Creek Camp for them (above Lone Pine), and put in all the piping and planted the trees, and put the piping in to water the plants and the trees that they put in. And he installed the fireplaces and the tables, and he also did the camp at Crowley Lake, and also another one out of Bishop close to the prison. What's that canyon up there? I can't remember. But there was another camp, the BLM camp, back up in there. Bishop Creek maybe, I'm not sure where that is.

RM: Did he have other tasks when he was working for BLM?

KP: I'm sure he did. Rangering, whatever needed to be done. I had to work with BLM (Federal Bureau of Land Management) and DWP (Los Angeles Department of Water and Power) when I was putting that (white stone and brass) marker for the film festival on Movie Road, because that land is right on the edge of DWP land where we put the marker. It's on the border between the BLM land and DWP land which was right along Lone Pine Creek. So I had to work with two different agencies, three different agencies. E Clampus Vitus put that stone in there, and that's another historical group.

KL: Tell us about that process of working with that federal, that city agency.

KP: It was very interesting.

KL: What did it consist of?

KP: Well, a lot of letters and a lot of talking, and a lot of questions and a lot of, "Let's get this done." And then DWP actually brought their truck down and they brought the (white dolomite) stone down but they didn't want any advertising about it, because they didn't want people to be encouraged to think they could do everything for us, you know, for nothing, practically. So they didn't want a lot of recognition for that, but they did bring the big stone down and set it there for us, which I thought was great.

KL: How was DWP involved during your time here in the valley, their role or their philosophies or how they do business?

KP: Well, I can tell you that we worked with them, we needed a (small) piece of land behind our motel. And because we had been going to Inyo Associates, we knew them personally and they knew us personally and they knew that we were on the up and up and we weren't trying to pull anything to get a piece of land, a small piece of land behind our property, sort they released it to us. Of course, we paid for it (...). But I have been grateful personally, I have been grateful that the city took the water, because I would not like to see this valley full of factories and factory smoke and a million cars and a million homes. I think it's much better off the way we are to depend on tourist dollars to come up and recreate and enjoy the outdoors. And I'm not an out-and-out environmentalist, because I realize people have to live, we have to survive somehow or another up here as well as other places. But it can be done carefully; it can be done carefully. I don't get on the bandwagon, I'm kind of a fence sitter. [Laughs] But like I said, personally, I'm very glad that they did take the water, and the way they did it was pretty tough, but they did it honestly, they did it straight out. They didn't explain how it was going to be down the line, but nobody knew, nobody really understood what was going to happen to the valley. But we've survived, and a lot of it has been because of tourist dollars, of course, but working with the ranchers and the few farmers that we have, the farms are coming back now. Yeah, a lot of home garden type of things going on, it's wonderful.

KL: What about another big, sort of, presence in this valley obviously is Inyo County government. How have you seen that evolve, or how have you worked with Inyo County government and how is that been different at different times?

KP: Well, you brought that to my mind because I was going to say that the, when I was working with BLM and DWP I had to go to the county to get some money and some support from the county for the Film Festival. So I had not ever spoken in front of supervisors, so I took the pictures from the movies, one location had four different movies in one location. I took that to the board of supervisors and I showed 'em all of these pictures that said these were all taken in one location. This is what we're talking about, these are the movies that were made in this area. This is why we want to celebrate it, and they were stunned, they were amazed. So that was what I did to get them on board to help us with the road closures and the police and so forth and so forth and so forth. So that was one. They have a hard time. I think the supervisors have a, they have a huge job. I would never want to be involved with that and politics that way. I think they're doing the best they can with what they've got to do, and on the whole, it's okay. It's good enough. [Laughs] Like I said, it's a tough job, somebody's got to do it. Somebody has to be in charge, same as with our hospital surviving all these years, somehow or other just barely surviving, but it's still there, and it's just enough to keep it going.

RM: Have you noticed in your career as a businessperson or just your involvement with Lone Pine events, big changes in county government over time and different supervisors?

KP: Not really a whole lot of big changes, because we've seen, we've seen agencies try to take more, we've seen that. But they're just doing it try to protect the land, trying to protect things, but that's government. Government has to grow somehow or other, it's not going to stay the same. I think we're through.

KL: Okay. The one last thing I wanted to ask is about your parents' lives and just sort of what the latter part of their lives was like, and you said your dad worked, you talked about his work with the BLM, but could you kind of finish out the story for how they spent their time and what they valued in their later years?

KP: Well, they pretty much carried on with their children, school and the church and the fishing and the visiting relatives and that kind of thing is pretty much what they did with the rest of their lives. And he was working with BLM when he died, he had a heart attack and he died. And I was with him, which was very fortunate, took him to our hospital (here) and he died there. He died really when I got him there, so that was the end of that. (...) As I said, they weren't involved politically and Raymond and I, we were involved in the whole valley and everything that was going on in the valley. I'm retired from that now, but I was involved with the Chamber of Commerce and all those different things for many, many years, doing our work, brochures, designing brochures and murals and all kinds of things like that to keep me busy.

KL: Well, I see those all the time in sunny weather, so I'm really glad to have a recording of you talking about them and hear more of the story.

KP: Yeah, it's been really fun, kind of keep your hand in. It's amazing that I can still do it.

KL: Well, thank you so much for agreeing to this, and for letting us keep you tape after tape and sharing with us.

KP: Okay.

KL: I appreciate it personally and Manzanar National Historic Site does, too.

KP: Oh, yeah. Oh, well, it was really interesting. It was fun.

<End Segment 23> - Copyright © 2013 Manzanar National Historic Site and Densho. All Rights Reserved.