<Begin Segment 16>

RM: Do you have memories of the Burbank trailer...

PS: I don't remember that at all.

RM: You would have been very little. Did your sister remember it?

PS: No, my sister actually remembers less than I do. But I do remember living with the trailer in the backyard of their house. And I remember going to kindergarten.

RM: So Paul was living in Burbank trailer park or facility or whatever it was called while his family was in San Fernando?

PS: Or either he was visiting a friend in the trailer park, but my mom never said because I think, I would say they were probably sleeping together, you know, at some point, before they got married. Because then my mother couldn't even get a divorce.

RM: Oh, yeah, how did that part of it work?

PS: Well, she, they decided they were going to get married, but she had to file for divorce here in Los Angeles. So she went down there to file for divorce, went to see the judge, the judge wouldn't grant her a divorce saying that he felt that they could reconcile.

RM: While her husband was in Japan?

PS: Yeah. So my mom would just say to me, "That judge was prejudiced against Japanese." And if he decided he didn't want to grant you a divorce, you didn't get a divorce. So then my stepfather and my mom, he drove her to Reno, and she took up residency there, and she became a housemaid. And my mother boarded us up there and we lived there for, what is it, six weeks, six months, something like that, until she had residency there, he came back for her with that wedding ring. And they got married -- or they got divorced on one floor and got married on the other floor.

RM: That was the only way they could figure out how to do it then.

PS: Yeah.

RM: I didn't realize that a judge had the power to say you can't get divorced because you can reconcile.

PS: Well, that's what my mother told me, so I don't know whether that was true, but that's what she said.

RM: I mean, I don't doubt it, but it's alarming that that was a possibility.

<End Segment 16> - Copyright © 2015 Manzanar National Historic Site and Densho. All Rights Reserved.