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LG: All right. We're going to talk more about high school, but I want to go back a little bit to your move to Seabrook. Do you remember moving into your new home?

DM: Oh, do I. To me it was a palace. And you know that old saying, you feel like you died and went to heaven? Well, that's how I felt. We had a kitchen no smaller than this, it had a wood burning stove, but we had a kitchen. It had an ice box. Not a refrigerator, an ice box. It had a table and five chairs. We had a bathroom where I could close the door and have privacy. Not one of those open outdoor places or in the camps we had flush toilets but no doors, just hoppers lined up, and everyone watched as you went to the toilet and that was what I hated most. So when we got our own bathroom, hallelujah, life can't get any better. And then my sister and I had our own bedroom, my grandfather had his own bedroom, my parents had their own bedroom, and my dad had all the beds made up and he had a doll on my sister's bed and my bed. I remember the trip on the train, and someone met us at the airport and drove us to Seabrook. That was my beginning at Seabrook, bed on the doll and our family all together. Had a bathroom. [Laughs] A bathroom that flushed.

LG: You said you were one of the first?

DM: Yes, yes. So it was sort of lonely, I guess. But I had my sister so I never felt lonely. But when the other families, I mean, they used to send buses up to get people. I mean, twenty-five hundred, that's a lot of people, so that's a lot of families and a lot of kids. So when they started coming in, I guess I was happy, but you know, six years old, what do you think? You really don't think, "Oh, gee, now I have a whole bunch of friends to play with." All I knew was it was all people that looked like me, that was camp anyway. And this is the thing. When people came to Seabrook, some of the people... see, my parents were poor. Some people were rich, they lived in homes. My family lived in a home in Los Angeles, so when they came to Seabrook, to them, it was no better than camp except that it had no barbed wire fence around it. So a lot of them wanted to leave immediately, especially later on when so many people came, they had to put up barracks just like camp. It looked just like camp, so they were so disappointed when they came. I was happy because I was in an apartment, and this was much better than camp. And you know, I was oblivious to the barbed wire fence, so it didn't bother me. I mean, I didn't know that wasn't allowed to go out, be on the fences, I wasn't even aware of the fences. So when I came here, it made no difference to me, it was just like camp, except that the apartment was so much nicer.

LG: Do you know if your parents or older sister had the same [inaudible]?

DM: You know, my sister was older. She had friends in camp. She might have been a little lonely, I don't know. Because we were like two and a half years apart, and so I really wasn't a good playmate for her. So I think she appreciated it when she made friends. But you know, the apartments quickly filled up, and so she had neighbors to play with, I had neighbors to play with, so it became a very happy place for us.

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