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MR: So you were pretty young when your father died. Could you tell us --

MB: I was four. I was four and a half. See, I was born in August, and he died in March, so I was four and a half when he died.

MR: And how did your mother then support the family?

MB: Okay. My mother didn't know enough English to get a job. Our landlady worked for Broadway Bars and Cleaners in Portland, Oregon, and she was able to get a job for my mother mending clothes. And so every Friday afternoon, the Broadway Cleaner van dropped off a huge bundle of clothes. And by starting work at five in the morning and work until midnight every day, my mother mended the clothes all weekend and got most of it done by Monday morning when Mrs. Sunderland went to work. And as Mrs. Sunderland couldn't carry the huge bundle of clothes by herself to the streetcar which was ten blocks away, my oldest sister helped carry the clothes, you know, to the streetcar. And as the streetcar stopped in front of the cleaners, you know, there wasn't any more work for my, for Mrs. Sunderland. And in that way, she earned some money, but it wasn't enough, and so she took in sewing. She sewed dresses for the ladies, the lady's families, and shirts and other clothing for the men. And using the scraps from the leftover, using the leftover material, my mother construct, made dresses for us girls, and there wouldn't be enough material, so she'd visited the Meier and Frank. They have a bargain basement in the Meier and Frank store, and Mama would buy ends of yard goods. And using these along with the scrap, she designed new dresses for us. And my mother had an eye for color, and she created many new styles, and the parents of classmates would copy dresses Mama made for me. So sometimes in school, there'd be five or six of us, girls, all dressed alike. Mom was real good at designing clothes, and so she should have been a dress designer because I know several of the dresses that she designed ended up in the Butterick patterns book several years later.

MR: Did she continue sewing for a living, or was there another line of work for your family?

MB: Well, it didn't bring in much money, and it wasn't continual. She needed a job where she could get paid every day. And so when the farmers needed help, she worked on the farms. And when the family lived in Montavilla... Montavilla back then in the '20s was farming country, and she'd take walks and she'd visit, she'd make friends with a lot of people in Montavilla. And so when this one farmer wanted pickers for his potatoes, Mama got a job from him. Well, from Portland to Montavilla was six miles. Carrying me on her back and going across country, she could walk that six miles in an hour. And once we got to work, she'd set me down, give me something to do, and tell me to stay there, and she could pick potatoes, go about her work. As as she was fast with her hands and could pick two and three times more than her coworkers, her boss paid her two dollars a day and all the potatoes she can use. And around about that time, my sister who has started school, my sister Orga who had started school in the fall before, was kicked out of school. See, Orga was born dead, and wartime substitute lady doctor had spent twelve minutes breathing life into the baby. And as a result, she was very slow in the head and needed constant attention, and so that's been, the teacher couldn't spend all her time with Orga, so she kicked her out of school, so then Mama had two of us kids to take to work with her. And Mrs. Sunderland, our landlady, got a buggy, baby buggy, so Mama could push us to work. But once at the job site, Orga was the same as she was in school. She would disrupt the class, and the teacher couldn't do any teaching, so you know, they kicked her out of school. Well, she was disrupting Mama at work, so Mrs. Sunderland went back to school and pleaded with them to reinstate Orga as a pupil. Answer was no. So then she went to see the superintendent of schools, and answer was the same, no. So Mrs. Sunderland said, "Orga has a younger sister who seems to be bright. If she were to come and stay with Orga, will you accept Orga back into school?" and she was told, "We'll give it a try." Well, I was Orga's constant companion for five and a half years. And when we were in the sixth grade, the school hired a special education teacher to teach a class, and there were seven in the class, five boys and two girls, and Orga was the smartest. She was quick to learn, and whatever she learned, she retained it. And this we found out fifteen, twenty years later, you know, when the family got together for family reunion. The talk, conversation would somehow get to our school years, you know, what we learned and everything, and May, the smartest one, wouldn't remember, George wouldn't remember, and I wouldn't remember, and Orga would say it was this way or that way or whatever. And I can still hear my brother, "Oh, yeah. That's the way it was," and Orga would be so happy. It didn't take much to make her happy. She was always wanting to please people. And Orga was never scolded or reprimanded because she wouldn't have understood, you know, why she was being punished.

<End Segment 2> - Copyright © 2003 Oregon Nikkei Endowment and Densho. All Rights Reserved.