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RM: So you said that your mother then lived on this ranch in Montana. Where were her parents?

PS: More or less they lived on the other side of the tracks. And she could see them periodically, he would take her -- she knew that she had another family. And Papa Nordquist used to take her over there to visit. And they were very poor, and my mother lived a very comfortable life with the Nordquists.

RM: Was she the only one of her siblings who lived with them?

PS: Right.

RM: How did that arrangement come to happen?

PS: Well, when her other brother, the brother that's a little bit older, year and a half older than she, Tadashi, when my grandmother had him my mother said that she was already not quite right. And they had, she found another family to take him for like a year, and then he came back to the family. Because my aunts were ten and eight years older than my mother so they could help out in the house.

RM: Did she spend her whole childhood with the Nordquists?

PS: Only until she was eight years old because my mom said her father got transferred, and it was going to be two hundred miles away, and he insisted that the whole family go together. So he made her come with them.

RM: What was that like for her? It sounds like she was having sort of a more comfortable life, and then to...

PS: Well, my mother didn't want to go. She said, "I didn't want to go," and Papa Nordquist said he had to let her go. He said that was her family, and she belonged to them, and if he wanted her, then she had to go with them.

[Interruption]

RM: So when your family moved two hundred miles, where did they, do you know the geography of where they ended up?

PS: It wasn't Great Falls, I know that. Would be in that general area, because my mother would mention Great Falls. I can't even think of the town.

RM: Do you know if there were other Japanese American families in that area?

PS: I have pictures. There are some other, there would be a crew and there would be some other Japanese there.

RM: Do you know your family had social interactions with other groups, other families?

PS: You know, my mom really never said anything about that. I think they were pretty isolated. She never talks about other families, and the only other time would be when she was with Papa Nordquist, that's the only thing she remembered, really, of happy times. My mother never talks about when she lived with her own family, other than she didn't like the food. And she, I think she felt like an outsider for a while. And then by the time... she was eight years old then, her father died when she was twelve.

RM: Oh, wow.

PS: Because he was in an accident on the railroad, and he bled to death.

RM: So she only really got to know him for about four years when she was living with them. Did the Nordquists have other children in the house?

PS: They had grown children. Actually, when she went to school locally, one of his daughters was the teacher.

RM: Oh, so she went to school with Papa Nordquist's daughter.

PS: Yeah.

RM: That's just such an interesting situation to me, that that happened.

PS: Because that one daughter used to always tell my mom, "You have to call me Ms. Nordquist, you can't call me," you know, by her first name. She said, "Okay," and then she'd always call her by her first name.

RM: Did the Nordquists' grown children live in that house as well?

PS: They probably did at one time, but I think some of them got married and moved to other ranches. Because when I was thirteen, I went and visited. So they were still in the same area.

RM: Was Papa Nordquist still alive?

PS: He had passed away. He actually passed away shortly after, I think, my mother left, because he came to the house when my mother wasn't there, shortly after she had moved in with her own family, to bring a coat and shoes for her, because he wanted to make sure she was going to be warm for the winter. And then shortly thereafter he died and she never saw him again. But she would always go back and visit Mama Nordquist in her later life.

<End Segment 2> - Copyright © 2015 Manzanar National Historic Site and Densho. All Rights Reserved.