<Begin Segment 11>

MR: So now we'll go back to your meeting Homer. He was in Wisconsin then and you had graduated from college.

MY: Okay. After we were married, he had accepted a residency at Vassar Brothers Hospital in Poughkeepsie, New York, so we that was our first home as a married couple, and it was a lot of fun. It was a small college town, and I got a job at the Vassar College Library, and he worked at the hospital, and we were very poor. I think I got $25 a week, and he got maybe $75 a month. I don't know, but we couldn't afford a car. We had a bicycle, and we'd go all over on our bikes, and it's a good thing we were young in those days. But, we took trips up to Hyde Park on our bicycles. If it was a long trip like that, we usually rented a second bike and we would go, but it was fun.

MR: Did you miss the fashion industry?

MY: No, not really.

MR: It sounds like such fun.

MY: But after coming to Oregon and after we had our children and I was home, I kept thinking, well gee, I should have continued to work, you know. It would have been exciting; although, I believe the opportunities aren't here in Oregon as they are in New York. But I was a stay at home mom and did volunteer work.

MR: There's a lot of value in that. When did you have your children, and where were you living?

MY: Okay. Barbara was born in Oregon -- well, all of our children were born in Oregon, but Barbara shortly after we arrived in Portland, and Meredith was two years after that. And we had I was pregnant with a third child, but we lost him and adopted our son who came about a month after two or three months after we lost Alan.

MR: And what year was your daughter Barbara born?

MY: Barbara was born in 1952, February, and Meredith was born in December of '53, and our son, John, was born in '57, September of '57.

<End Segment 11> - Copyright © 2003 Oregon Nikkei Endowment and Densho. All Rights Reserved.