<Begin Segment 24>

KL: What was it like for you to be a live-in maid?

MM: Well, I had my own room, my own bathroom, so I liked that. I like my own space, that was good. And I wasn't scared or anything because I was living in a house, little house separate from the family and in the back, and somehow I thought that was great. Because living in such crowded conditions all my life until then, to have my own space was really freedom.

KL: Were you always with the same family?

MM: No, I worked for a principal in the ninth grade, and in the tenth grade I worked for, tenth and eleven and twelve I think, I worked for the Imwali family. And then the third family, when I went to junior college I worked for a professor, a divorced woman with two boys. Yeah, I worked for her, I lived in with her. And I'll never forget this, because she was such a bitter woman, because of the divorce, and it rubbed off on her oldest son. He became bitter, just a spitting image of his mother. I saw all this, and then the youngest boy was cheerful and, "Oh, don't take it so hard, Stewart," and he tried to accept the fact that they no longer had a father. He was a wonderful boy, that young one, (Randy). He was smart. But Stewart was bitter and his life was really affected by his mother's divorce, and I never saw such a bitter woman, who let that bitterness eat her up, made her a miserable woman to be with. She was not fun to be with, but I stuck it out with two years with her. You see a lot of life when you live with other people, so I think those were all lessons I learned. I don't want to be like that, not bitter like that.

KL: You mention junior college, did you go straight from high school?

MM: High school, yeah. I was given a scholarship to go to junior college, and that's all I could afford. By then I needed to go out and work for myself, so I went to live in San Francisco with my aunt.

KL: With which aunt?

MM: The one I used to live with as a child.

KL: In L.A.?

MM: In Salinas. Margie, my grandmother's daughter, one of the two. She was the younger of the two.

KL: That was after you graduated from junior college? You became --

MM: Yeah, I went to San Francisco. She said, "Come and live with me." And we lived in one room; oh my goodness, I'll never forget it. The closet, clothes on one side and a burner stove on the other side, and dishes up there, and a sofa that you turn into a bed at night. And you have to go down the hall and take your Clorox and your whatever it is to, cleanser, and clean the tub before you could even use it, because somebody else used it. That was just awful.

KL: What part of San Francisco was it in?

MM: It was on Arguello Street. Arguello is First Street.

KL: Were you working that year? I'm sure you were.

MM: Oh yeah.

KL: What were you doing?

MM: I worked for an insurance company. I was secretary to the manager. I knew shorthand, so I took shorthand and wrote letters and answered the phone for him, did everything what a secretary does.

KL: Did you have any trouble job hunting based on your name or your heritage, your looks?

MM: Well, I got a job. I didn't have to look too hard. But it didn't pay that much. It wasn't a high-paying job. Imagine in working in San Francisco for two hundred dollars a month, that's nothing, really. So that's why I wanted to look for another job. Well, so I went to work for the Sixth Army after that, underneath the Golden Gate Bridge. I worked for Colonel Dawes, and he worked in the comptroller department. And I worked there one year because I didn't like, I didn't like what I was seeing. I saw these women, older women in the same department -- I was low man on the totem pole -- and they would come in and talk all morning, smoking their cigarettes and drinking their coffee. I said jiminy, what kind of, and the colonel doesn't say anything to the women, "Get to work," you know? I didn't like it, 'cause you're supposed to work. I can't do that. So in the meantime I was helping this one lady, and unbeknownst to me, I didn't know that she was having me checked so that I could do, what do you call, secret work for the army. But I told her after that what I was seeing and feeling, I said, "I can't work here. I'm going to quit." But I had to find another job, so I was working with, I got a scholarship to work with teenagers in Lake Tahoe. It was a church conference, so I went, and the lady there was from the Board of Christian Education and she said, "We need a secretary, office secretary. Are you interested, by any chance?" And I said, well, gee, that's a lot better, worthwhile job than what I'm doing. I said, "I'll take it." It was a pay in cut, but I took it. I would go to the seminary and be the registrar, go to the seminary where Sab was going.

KL: And, just for the camera, what was that seminary?

MM: San Francisco Theological Seminary in San Rafael, across the Golden Gate Bridge. And we would go to churches and put on seminars, Christian ed seminars, and I would be there to work with the ladies and sell materials and things like that. So it was a good job. I loved it. And one day Sab came to our office -- nobody ever comes to the office, because the bookstore is downstairs where they sell everything, but he comes upstairs and he wanted some Christian ed materials. And I said, well, what grade and all that, and I gathered some materials and start writing down his orders, how much he had to pay and all that, and that's how I met him.

<End Segment 24> - Copyright © 2014 Manzanar National Historic Site and Densho. All Rights Reserved.