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RP: Eventually you kind of adopted sort of a surrogate mother in Bishop. Name was Ruth Pellisier.

DB: Oh, yeah.

RP: How did that come about, Dennis?

DB: Oh, how did it come about? Just, just a, a chance. Remember I told you my father was a doctor. And my surrogate mother, several years after this starts, is named Ruth. And Ruth becomes ill with some kind of long term illness, and she's under the treatment by my father. And, somehow, somehow Ruth agreed to help with the raising of our three, the four children. Just as a therapy to overcome her other problems that she was having. And she was quite contrary to my mother who was dictatorial and saw very little good in any man. And so Ruth observed this and became my surrogate and would explain to my father what had happened that day and so forth. And she tried to be my advocate. And, when you, or if you knew Ruth, she just had the heart of gold. And she was a one man, not man, she would always come to my defense. And it took a while and she never fully... no, not fully. She did recover. And she fixed up a extra room with a couch on it so that when things weren't going well I could, had a place to stay. And, I was self-supporting basically from the time that I was in ninth grade 'til the time I graduated from college. And Ruth never was able to give me any financial help, but she gave me a lot of emotional strength. And, in her own very... I want to say simple, and I'll say simple. But also very meaningful. And she had a daughter and a son which today we treat each others as brothers and sisters. And her husband, Bob, who had about a sixth grade education but who could take anything apart, put it back together, and make it work, had the exceptional ability to do this type of thing. Taught me how to hunt, how to fish, the important things of life. They were very special.

RP: In her interview she spoke, she always spoke very highly of you as well as her husband.

DB: Uh-huh.

RP: Hence...

DB: Well, it's, well, she was... what I would say about our relationship is that in a two years period of time we were closer than we ever were with my mother in fifteen years. I mean, we just, just had the wrong combination, I guess.

RP: Uh-huh. Where did you like to go, or where would Bob take you to fish and hunt? Any special places that you went to?

DB: Oh, Bob would fish in all the drainage ditches around town of Bishop. He would never fish for instance in Bishop Creek 'cause you don't need that much water. You just need a little ditch about like this and you need to be able to outsmart the fish. And so you go out East Line Street to the airport and about five miles before you get to the airport there was a ditch that ran across. It had water all the time. And, he'd say, "I'm gonna go fishing. I'm gonna catch me three fish." He'd come home with three fish. I mean, that was, that was it.

RP: So Bob in his, in his own way sort of introduced you to the natural world to some respect?

DB: Yes and he introduced me to an understanding that if you work hard enough at something, like mechanically, you can be a success. If you don't want to work hard at it you probably won't, you'll probably just become frustrated and throw your tools down and give up. And he'd never let you do that. He'd always say, "Well, try this," or, "Try that." First thing you knew you had your wrench in your hand and you were doing what five minutes before you were, were not letting happen. Yeah.

RP: What about Ruth? What, is there a particular value or lesson that you took from her, from your relationship with her?

DB: Well, Ruth's problem... well, Bob's... Ruth's problem was a health problem. I don't know how many back surgeries she had. She had curvature of the spine from the lack of calcium. In order to, in her late years of life, in order to do her favorite thing which was dig bottles, she had to have a brace. And the brace didn't allow her to walk, it allowed her to drag. So, if you were out hunting you'd see this track, you'd wonder what it was. Well, it was, it was her brace dragging on the ground over to get to the bottles. And she would, all by herself, dig away and collect bottles. I think she had... I built her a couple of bookshelves for her bottles and she must had sixty or eighty bottles on her shelves. And so her lesson became one more of endurance, more of self-satisfaction at being successful. And our relationship, she and my relationship, was more on a... when I was having difficulties I was able to go to her, and she would give me very common sense. And my relationship with her was to build her shelves, do little things around to help, to take the pressure off of her difficult health periods of time. She never really ever recovered from the back problems, etcetera.

<End Segment 9> - Copyright © 2009 Manzanar National Historic Site and Densho. All Rights Reserved.