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RP: How about your, your father and mother? Tell us a little bit about them. Where did they come from before --

MS: Well, they came from Kansas, and they grew up, I think, in the Church of the Brethren, too. And they were married, I think, in 1901, I've got a picture of their wedding in there. And they met at an annual conference. Our church has what they call an annual conference. It's just a big family meeting, they just finished one right now in Richmond, Virginia. And my son and my oldest daughter have been there, and they've got my grandchildren there, too. Anyway, we have these every year, and that's where my parents met, at one in Kansas. And well, somehow they had two children, and people were starting to farm and grow cotton in Texas, and I had an uncle that was down there, too, in fact, two uncles, I think. But my parents moved to Texas before I was born, and they bought some land, and my brother told me that my dad picked out the land that had the biggest brush on it, because he figured it was the best land. And so they bought, I think, 160 acres. And also, some relatives had 80 acres, and in later years, we had this 160 and the 80. And, well, actually, I'm not sure how many years they were there, but we left Texas. They didn't have a high school, and my older brother and sister needed to go to high school. And so our church had a, they called them academy in North Manchester, Indiana, so we went there one winter. And I was five, and my younger brother had been born, and he was a tiny baby. And we lived in North Manchester, but during that time, my grandpa died out here in Whittier, California. And so I guess my dad came on the train out here for a memorial service for my, for his father. And at that time, he knew a man and a woman called Laura and Ben Haugh that taught at the La Verne College, and it had an academy, too, a high school. So Dad came over here and he bought us a house right on Lincoln Avenue then, now it's White. But he bought us a very nice house. It had two stories and four bedrooms upstairs, big rooms, they were as big as this, bigger than this room. And we had a living room and dining room and a big kitchen, and a family room. We called it a den. Anyhow, he bought it and our family went from Manchester back to Texas. And I had a grandparent, my mother's mother was in Kansas so we stopped. And the year I was five, I went from Texas to Indiana, and then at Christmas we went to visit cousins in Ohio, and then we went back to Kansas to see my grandma, and then we went back to Texas, and then we drove to California all the year I was five.

RP: [Laughs] Whoa.

MS: I couldn't believe it.

RP: Do you remember any of that?

MS: Well, I remember coming in that car. Well, I think at my grandma's, I was swinging in a swing and I got, swung out and hit the door to the cellar, and I cracked my collarbone. I think I remember that a little. And then as we were coming out here, we were camping along the way, and one night, a ranger came by and said there was a mountain lion someplace around. And it was someplace between El Paso and San Diego. And so I think my parents, one of 'em, I think, stayed awake all night and kept a fire. And I think my baby brother and I slept in the car, but I think we had army cots outside, and that's where the rest of 'em slept. But I know coming, we had a little car trouble. And in San Diego, somebody bumped the car, and my mother and my baby brother fell out on the street. Didn't hurt 'em much. But I know we drove, we got here to La Verne on a Sunday night, and my dad had a cousin here. And she lived in a house that's right over on D Street, and that's where we slept the first night. But it was, I remember...

RP: You remember quite a bit.

MS: Some of it.

RP: So, the house that you moved into was still around?

MS: Yeah. But it had a beautiful porch on two sides of the house, and after we sold it, they glassed that all in. It's not pretty at all now. Not nice like when we lived in it.

<End Segment 2> - Copyright © 2008 Manzanar National Historic Site and Densho. All Rights Reserved.