<Begin Segment 5>

RP: Tell us about your first teaching job.

MS: Well, a man came down from up north, and he was looking for a bunch of teachers. And he got several right from Claremont because there was a Connie Lyon, and I got a job the first year at Westwood. And Westwood was up north by Mount Lassen, and it was six hundred miles from here. And then there were two... I don't know if the first year there was another woman, well, she lived down here, I don't think she went to Pomona, I don't know where she went. But she got a job up there. Anyhow, we used to come down here for the weekend, and we'd get out of school, like, at two o'clock on Friday, and we borrowed a car from the science teacher. And we could -- you know what 395 is, goes east side of the Sierra?

[Interruption]

MS: We could leave up there at two o'clock in the afternoon, we'd get here at two o'clock in the night, twelve hours. It was six hundred miles, and you could go on this 395, there wasn't much traffic. And we'd stay down here, then, all day Saturday, and then we'd leave here at two o'clock on Sunday afternoon and go back up, and we'd get there at two o'clock in the night.

RP: You did that every, you did that every weekend?

MS: Oh, no.

RP: I hope not.

MS: We did it about four or five times during the winter.

RP: So that was the first time you actually saw the... oh, and during the winter?

MS: Huh?

RP: You did that during the winter?

MS: Yeah. Well, there was no snow on that 395. You had to get over the mountain, and it came on, we'd come in on Cajon Pass, there wasn't usually snow there.

RP: So that was the first, your first time in the Eastern Sierra, you saw the Owens Valley driving through. And you'd be up there...

MS: I taught up there two years, and then I knew Ralph.

<End Segment 5> - Copyright © 2008 Manzanar National Historic Site and Densho. All Rights Reserved.