Betsey was a dancer all her life. In 1956 she co-founded the La-Frantics, a local Lafayette community theater group that put on shows at the Town Hall. Betsey choreographed and performed in the La-Frantics shows for the next 30 years. She also founded the Lafayette Suburban Junior Women’s Club and the Lafayette Community Garden Club, two service-oriented organizations which are still going strong 60 years later. She taught thousands of local children and adults how to dance, in a 20-year career as a teacher at Palmer School in Walnut Creek and in various local dance studios. An Oakland native, Betsey made a lasting impact on he adopted community of Lafayette.
Full Transcript Below:
Ryan McKinley: So this is an oral history interview with Ms. Betsey Young in her home in Lafayette, California. The date is April 28, 2014, the time is 1 o’clock p.m., and the interviewer is Ryan McKinley. So when were you born?
Betsey Young: November 12th, 1918.
RM: Okay, and where were you born?
BY: I was born in Berkeley, and my family was in Oakland, and I immediately came back to our home in Oakland. My family was in the funeral business, 5th Avenue and East 15th Street.
RM: And what was your father’s name?
BY: My father’s name was Andker. A-N-D-K-E-R. And in Danish it was Dam Andkjer. A-N-D-K-J-E-R.
RM: Okay.
BY: Both my mother and my father were from Denmark.
RM: And when did they move over to America?
BY: Oh, many years. I don’t know the exact date.
RM: Were they married when they came over or did they meet later, or…?
BY: No.
RM: Okay. So your father came over first, do you know?
BY: My father came over first, and he was married and had two children, and then his wife died, and my mother and father met each other at the Danish hall, and then they were married, so he had two daughters, so I had two half-sisters.
RM: Okay, and he when he came over, do you know what he did when he first came over?
BY: Yes, he was a tailor.
RM: Then he went into the funeral business afterward.
BY: He became a funeral director. And after he and my mother were married, my mother and father ran the business together.
RM: Okay. And your mother, she came around about the same time, or it was much later…
BY: No, earlier.
RM: Earlier, okay.
BY: And she came to Sacramento first, and then moved down to Oakland, and I had an aunt who came over from Denmark, her older sister, she lived in Sacramento, and then my mother came to Oakland, and when she and my father were married, they moved to the mortuary, 5th Avenue and east 15th Street.
RM: Okay, I know where that is, actually. That area.
BY: You do?
RM: I was just on East 15th the other night, actually.
BY: Well, it has changed.
RM: Oh, it’s changed? Okay, it was definitely on East 15th, okay. Do you know how they came into contact, your father and mother?
BY: Other than the Danish Hall.
RM: Oh, okay. Okay. And so when they first got together, your father was still running the tailor shop, do you know?
BY: I don’t know that.
RM: Okay.
BY: I believe he was in the funeral business when he and my mother met.
RM: And so they met and they moved, they went to Oakland together, and they were in a, they had started the funeral business, they were working in the funeral business, was it a…
BY: When they were married, my father was already in the funeral business.
RM: Okay, and that was, he was working for somebody else, or he owned the…
BY: No, it was Andker and Company, so he was alone then.
RM: And then, about how long after your parents were married were you born?
BY: My… I had two brothers, they had three children: my brother Norman, brother Owen, and myself, and so Norman was eight years older and Owen four years older and than I.
RM: You’re the youngest of the three?
BY: Yes.
RM: Okay. And so, what did, I’m just curious, what did Norman do as he grew up?
BY: He was in the funeral business. Both of my brothers were. After college, they came into the business with my mother and father, and Norman went to embalming college, and Owen did not, but Norman did. And then my father died, and my mother remarried another Dane, Mr. Joseph Carl Peterson, and he joined the business with my mother, and he had been married before, and had two boys and a girl, so I had a stepsister and two stepbrothers.
RM: Wow. So you’re father…
BY: The sisters of Mr. Andker are my half… yeah.
RM: Okay. So they lived in Oakland up until about when, do you know? They were in Oakland…
BY: Gosh… it’s been a long time since, well in the 30’s my stepfather died, so because one of my stepbrothers, Peterson, he went into the funeral business with my mother and my stepfather, so that was my two brothers and my stepbrother and my mother are all running the business.
RM: Okay.
BY: And all living at the funeral home. We had a very large home, three floors, and then business was in the basement, the embalming business, and then funeral arrangements made on the first floor, we lived on the second, and there were bedrooms and a large attic room it was, but it was a finished attic room, and later on, after I was in college, I started dance there, teaching dance, so…
RM: Okay. Growing up in Oakland, where did you go to elementary school, do you remember?
BY: At Franklin School. I was able to walk to Franklin School. Do you know what that is?
RM: No, I don’t know where it is.
BY: Well, the business was on 5th Avenue and East 15th Street, and Franklin School was on 9th, so that was nice. And then after the sixth grade, I went to Wesley Junior High School, and that was a three year school, that was a brand new school in Oakland, graduated from there in 1930 and went to Oakland High School, graduated from there in ’36, and went to the University of California, graduated there in 1940.
RM: Okay, okay. And growing, do you have, like, a very vivid memory of your elementary school, like anything that specifically stood out, like specific events or anything?
BY: Well, yes, and I do remember kindergarten very well, remembering putting the mat on the floor and taking naps and I remember milk and graham crackers. Did you have that when you were in…
RM: I don’t think so. We had milk, but I don’t remember getting graham crackers when I was younger.
BY: And, that’s about, and, yeah, I remember them quite well, playing on the bars and the slide, and being in a dance, doing a little dance in their auditorium, so I had starting taking dance from Grace Burroughs when I was five years old.
RM: So you’ve been a dancer basically all your life then?
BY: All my life.
RM: So growing up as a child, do you remember things you used to do to like entertain yourself, were there…
BY: Well, I remember my playmate who was living across the street on East 15th Street. There’s 5th Avenue, and she… She was a year older than I, and my younger brother used to play “Cops and Robbers” with us, and he made us those wooden guns with the rubber band and a clothespin. Well, anyway, he ways always a good shot, and would hit us so then we would cry and we weren’t gonna play with him anymore but we always did. We had, as I said, a lot of land to run around, mostly we would play in the backyard by the garages in the front of the funeral home.
RM: All right. So at the time there was much more, there was a lot more greenery and rural-ness?
BY: Yes, there was a vacant lot across the street, but we had a neighbor right next door to us and a neighbor next to the lot on the other side of the street, and then where my friend June Wills lived, there was an apartment, and her duplex, so there were things that were starting to grow up in that neighborhood, but I remember my brothers having a lot of fun in the vacant lot that was directly across the street. They built like a cave and they would have their meetings, you know, underground.
RM: That’s great.
BY: And there was always the East 5th Street was not the front of the mortuary, but always “Kick the Can” and “Tap the Finger”, and you don’t see that anymore.
RM: No, no.
BY: Playing out in the street, of course, and a lot of roller skating we did, and bicycling, and on into junior high school and high school, there was… all the kids would go skating, roller skating, and bicycling across, go down to the lake and ride around Lake Merritt and skate around, and then in the later years, like in high school, there was Eaties…
RM: What is Eaties?
BY: …Ice Cream fountain. That was on Lakeshore Avenue, and after skating around the lake we would go to Eaties for a milkshake or a Coke or whatever and spend the evening dancing, ballroom dancing, they had a jukebox and we would put nickels in and dance and dance. So that’s the childhood, I guess, huh?
RM: Going into middle school, do you have other memories of specifically school that you remember, or… ?
BY: Well, yes. Westlake seventh, eighth, and ninth was a very fine school, very new and up-to-date, and there were two teachers, one was a singing instructor, and the other was for dance, and each year, around Christmastime, they’d do wonderful performances, and the singing and the dancing, so I remember those. I was in them, well, in with the dancers, every year. Oh, there was a little shop down, I say down, the school grounds were up on a hill and there was a nice hill with a big “W” on the front lawn, you know a hedge they kept, and there was a little hangout where the kids would have lunch and get away from classes and that was called the “Green Shetters”.
RM: What about when you went to Oakland High School, what about that? When you went into high school, do you have similar, any other memories from there?
BY: Again, that was the dance teacher, and I started a club. There were all kinds of clubs, you know, Hi-Li and Key Club. Did you have those in your high school?
RM: We had a cooking club, a math club…
BY: …Etiquette Club, Latin…
RM: …there was Chess Club, all different languages and things like that.
BY: Okay. So I started “Le Danceurs”, and the girls who liked to dance joined the club and we would put on a little program once in a while for the school, they had a nice stage, so I was president of that club, I was president of the senior class, of course I always just remember the dances, we had dances, ballroom dancing, boys and girls would come into the gymnasium, and they were supervised, and someone would play the recordings and you know boys and girls would circle the room, and the music would stop, and then whoever you stopped next to, you’d dance with. There was a lot of running around for that. That was nice, and then my senior year, I had a steady boyfriend, so we did a lot of dating then, going to dances, and then a lot of classmates went to the university out in Berkeley, and I joined a sorority, Chi Omega it was, and I was an art major, so I was quite… Mr. Obata, who was a famous Japanese painter and then I had him for four years so I enjoyed that, and I was asked to join the Orcasis Club, which is the honorary dance society, and that was after class. It was not one of your classes that you were given marks to, so that was a good experience, a dance teacher, Ms, Soronowski, she was very talented and we learned a lot of Martha Graham technique, modern, so that was not ballet, but I studied on the side ballet from Raoul Jose, he was quite well-known in Oakland, and sort of started the Oakland Ballet at the Oakland Auditorium only for two years and… I can’t remember the name of his… oh, Ron Guidi, who was a pupil of Raoul Jose, he carried on the Oakland Ballet, I think he’s only been retired about two years, so he carried that on, and then after college, I would dance professionally to lodges and women’s clubs and at a hotel maybe in San Francisco, the Fairmont Hotel and the Mark Hopkins and so forth, well anyway, I did that and one grandma wanted me to teach her two granddaughters, so I did in that big room that I told you about on the third floor, so if there was a funeral we had to be very quiet, but if not then we could jump and run and sing and dance, so then that was like from 1940 after high school… no, I did start earlier, like 1938, yeah. Okay.
RM: Okay.
BY: What now? Should I go on from there?
RM: You can, I was gonna ask about the different types of dance you learned over the years.
BY: Oh, gosh. Well, my dance teacher, she taught at the Hotel Claremont, Grace Burrows was our teacher, after she started when I was little, teaching in her home on Hatton Road in Oakland, she went to India, she and her husband, and she learned a lot of dancing with the bells on the feet and the… they had different positions and things like in ballet, you had different positions to perform, so she taught us, her class, there were in this class, there were only four of us, myself and three other girls, so we did some East Indian dancing that she taught us with the bells on the feet and the scarf on the head and swishing, swishing, and one time we danced at the Hotel Claremont in the ballroom in front of the orchestra, so that was exciting. And when she did teach it and after she left Oakland and taught at the Hotel Claremont, and one of the big rooms where there was a stage, a small stage, so we were able to use that, that was a good thing to learn, and then in 1938, my mother took me to Honolulu. At that time, she had… my stepfather passed a way, and my mother received some insurance, and she wanted to take me to Denmark to meet the relatives there and, you know, where she grew up and everything, but 1938 was a bad time, Hitler time, so we couldn’t travel, but I had met a friend the year before in Yosemite that I was kind of smitten with, my husband-to-be, so he had gone on a vacation with three other boys, and they ran out of money so they had to live and work there, and so when my mother said, “We just can’t get to Denmark, it’s too dangerous”, and so I said, “Honolulu is a nice place. I’d like to see that”, so Momma said yes, so we went then to Honolulu and I became re-acquainted with my husband, husband-to-be there, and it wasn’t until… oh, then came 1941, Pearl Harbor, he’s still living in Honolulu, and that was at the time when names were drawn out of the fishbowl for the draft, 1940, and my husband, don, he was the first name drawn in Honolulu, and the name was drawn in every state. Do you remember reading about that?
RM: I don’t. Actually, I’m from Honolulu, but I don’t know much about the draft or things like that.
BY: 1940, were you there?
RM: No, I wasn’t there at that time.
BY: So that was supposed to be an honor, you know, all these men in all these states in the territory of Honolulu or Hawaii was a territory then, not a state, so his name was the first one drawn, and had a big parade downtown in Honolulu, down Kalakala and so forth, and then all these men were sent to camps and were trained, and then he, let me see, well, a year of training, and he was at Fort Shafter, you know where Fort Shafter, well Fort Shafter is right above Pearl Harbor, like here, standing here you can see… and it was the day, December 7th was the day of the bombing, and my husband was at Fort Shafter packing up, he was, to get out, these men served a year in the army, so was packing his gear when Pearl Harbor happened so all the men at Fort Shafter were handed guns and shooting, the bombing came right over Shafter, at that time, they, or since then we’ve learned that there were two men on Fort Shafter killed, and then of course the mayhem at Pearl Harbor and the soldiers at Shafter were my husband and a troop or whatever were to go down on trucks and pick up the dead and the wounded, so that was it, and then, of course he didn’t get out of the service either, and then he was selected to go to officer’s… OCS, Officer’s Candidate School, in Pennsylvania back east, and so we had a few dates, because he lived in Oakland, in North Oakland on 61st, and so he had, as I say, I met his family and then we became more acquainted and so, he was selected as, the name… one of his… see, I don’t know…
RM: Like his platoon, or something, captain or a lieutenant or something like that, or a general?
BY: Yeah. Number one man of his…
RM: Company or something like that?
BY: So that was quite a… oh, and then he was given the saber for being first captain.
RM: Wow.
BY: And so then he asked me to marry him, ‘cause he was thinking he would soon be sent overseas, and I couldn’t get a train ticket, so we weren’t married then, so he went overseas to the China-Burma-India, CBI, and spent two years there, then when he came home we were married, and he came home in ’45, and we had a big wedding, and, ‘cause things were in a hurry then, you know, and you never knew when he was going to go back into service or what, so we were at the mortuary at our living quarters writing invitations to our wedding, and there’s a lot of fire engines and things, and we ran to the front of the house and we could see on 10th Avenue where the 10th Avenue Baptist Church was, that’s where we were to be married, it burned to the ground. So we had our invitations already printed but my mother and I, we’d go the next day to get another church, and the First Congregational Church in Oakland near the lake, do you know Oakland at all?
RM: Sorta, I know where the lake is, and I know that area, yeah.
BY: Okay, so we were married there and had printed on a little card, “Due to fire, location changed”, so we were married and then we went on a honeymoon to Yosemite, that is where we met, then when we came home, we lived at the mortuary up on Third, an then my husband went to embalming college, San Francisco Mortuary Science and became an embalmer, so I must tell you that when we met at Yosemite, at one time we were all around the campfire and the kids and my mother and her friends, we were all chatting and asking the young kids, the men, what they wanted to be when they grew up, and my husband said, I wanna be a California Highway Patrolman, so here he is, an embalmer, indoors, with funerals and whatnot, doing well enough, but he said he couldn’t work indoors, so he joined, or put in for the Highway Patrol and made it, so he became a highway patrolman, and enjoyed his career there very much. However, as he was in the reserves, he was recalled to Japan, and by this time, we had a little girl and we were living in Concord, so he was sent to Japan and my daughter, our daughter, lived alone a year, and then Don got transferred to the Philippines, Clark Field in the Philippines, and so there was dependant travel there, and that was taken care of, so we were at home and we lived in Concord then for a year before we were sent overseas to join my husband, and we lived at, let’s see, he was a captain that time, and we lived in a nice house on the base, and I taught dancing on the base, so I was very busy, dancing and making up programs for different affairs at the base, and then when we came home, we lived at the mortuary for almost a year, and then found this place. We bought the lot, and then you know we had seen the homes and then you selected your furnishings and location, and we liked this view over here, so that’s why we selected this lot.
RM: It’s gorgeous. So about when you went to the Philippines, was that in the fifties, or…
BY: 1950. We were there for a year, and we came, yeah, 1951, and it took, we moved in here then in 1953, and then I taught dancing at Palmer’s School in Walnut Creek, it’s a private school, and I taught dancing for 20 years there, then I started in this room, the… oh, I missed the Junior Women’s club in Oakland when we lived at the mortuary, I will still going to the women’s club so when we move here, we would drive in every month for meetings and the different affairs the Women’s Club, Juniors we were, we had, and got to be through the tunnel and… so I invited a neighbor down there and a next door neighbor, if they would like to go to the women’s club in Walnut Creek, join the women’s club, and they said, well yes, they would, so the three of us went to a meeting, we had a nice time, they were very nice but they had to tell us that in their bylaws that their members were from Walnut Creek, they had to live in Walnut Creek, so I said to the gals, well, let’s start our own, so we had a lot of neighbors here, I had a meeting then, 1953, here and with the help of the district, they hired officers, they helped us form our bylaws and become a club, so I was president for two years, and then we had another year, then it grew so fast, we couldn’t meet in homes anymore, just got too big, and so we decided to form a senior group, and then the Lafayette Junior Women’s Club, so that happened, and the Lafayette Junior Women’s Club is still going strong, and they do a lot of things, and the juniors and the seniors did a lot of things for the Lafayette Community Center, I mean we put on teas, fashion shows, etc., money to give to the community center, and the senior group had disbanded,, 2012.
RM: So recently.
BY: And the Juniors are still going, and they just celebrated their 60th year, well now that I can show you, and they had a big celebration with husbands and their families at the Lafayette Community Garden, you know where that is? It’s across from the reservoir.
RM: Oh okay.
BY: In Lafayette, and they honored me as founder, and they have a boulder there like that with a plaque on it, “In Honor of Betsy”, so if you wanna see it, I’m kinda proud of that. That was last… a year ago this day.
RM: Oh wow.
BY: So that’s the Juniors and the Seniors, and then I was told when we first moved here that there’s a girl down the street on Dalkins who likes to dance, so one day while the kids were in school I go down and knocked on the door and introduced myself and asked, “Would you like to dance?”, and she says. “Come in!”, so everyday when our kids were in school I would go down and we would dance, and I tought her several of the Hawaiian numbers that I had learned when I told you we went up… 1938 was… and then we entertained at a few clubs and lounges and things, and I guess we did okay, we got paid five dollars, so that was fun and then Jerry said, “Wouldn’t it be great if we could get a barn, you know, speaking of Mickey Rooney and Judy, and if we could get an old barn and put on a show and I said, “Well Don and I had just been to a program in Danville where one of my dancing friends from college, she and her husband were in a show, and it was played at a high school in Danville, and I said, “Oh, it was great”, you know I said, “It was just neighbors and family stuff”. I said, “I can get the name of the directors and see if they can put on a show for us and… at the Town Hall, so I called my friend Bernadine and she gave me the numbers of Dan and Louise Welty, so I said, “Well, I have them, they said they would do it, if you’ll set a date and we’ll invite them and some people to come and put on a show, so we did, and that was the beginning of La Frantics. 1946 to 1986, that’s when I was the choreographer, and we just made so much money and we did so well, had such a wonderful time, and Dan and Louise Welty, they had told us, they said, “No, you know when these little neighborhood shows start, they do real good for about seven years, we lasted 30 years, so 1956 to 1986, then Eve McLane came in after about six years, the Welty’s, they had a nightclub in the Sacramento area, and so they were quitting, leaving us because they were too busy with their own show, and so Eve McLane came, and she was a wonderful director. My husband was in the show for two years, and he was able to, at that time, his time on duty was so that he could be in the show at 8 o’clock, so that was fun but then his time came, so he was not able to be in the show, and our children, our kids were able to be with us too as they were giving out programs, ushers, and they did that for years. So that’s it, and then I had the La Frantics show, I taught dancing down at the community center and ‘till 1976 I had recitals there, and at Palmer School where I was teaching all classes from kindergarten to the eighth grade, we put on a very large Christmas show every year and of course at a private school, I was working with the owner, the lady owner of the school. She was very clever, she would write a story in the poetic form, and then I would do the choreography, and she would help me with the costumes. I would design costumes, and at a private school, I could just do what I wanted. Now at the public school, I had to be kind of careful, what I was designing for their costumes, and then I gave a night slimnastic causes down at the community center and also at Miramonte Gardens, so senior home, I gave classes there. I was busy. Palmer school, Slimnastics, and then down—oh, I taught at Moncito School too, the recreational group. I think that’s it.
RM: And what type of dancing you did, was it modern or swing at these places?
BY: Ballet.
RM: Ballet, okay.
BY: And then I had hula classes, oh, and at Palmer School I also taught ballroom dancing for the 7th and 8th grade kids. So… oh, and then for La Frantics, the director, we worked together, she making up the numbers until fourth and if wanted a tap number any kind of number that I would do the choreography, and one year she decided she wanted to do a tap number, and I said, “But Adeline, I don’t do tap dancing.” She said, “Well, you learn.” So I took tap lessons from a friend of mine that… who was in the British Ballet, she taught me how to tap dance, and I taught this tap number that she choreographed, so that was fun. Did I skip around too much?
RM: No, no, you’ve done perfectly. I did want to ask when about when you first met your husband, you said you were at Yosemite, and was it people from the neighborhood that got together and went to Yosemite, or…
BY: No, I did get off there.
RM: Oh, no no.
BY: My mother and I went to Yosemite, camping. My two brothers, they drove us up and they set up the camp for us, and then my mother and I would maybe cook breakfast there and then go out for dinner and every night they had dancing at Camp Curry. Have you been to Yosemite, do you know?
RM: A long time I’ve been there, but I don’t know off the top…
BY: Camp Curry had that little hut and that dancing and an orchestra there. I would go to the dances in the evening, with a girlfriend, usually and my husband worked as a porter at Camp Curry, and so I went with a date to this dance who happened to be the lifeguard at Camp Curry, and we were dancing and all of a sudden we went by these young, good looking kids, and this was a costume party so they were all dressed up and having a good time and as we went by, they whistled. Then all of a sudden this clown came and tapped my friend on the shoulder saying, you know, they would like to dance and so he was such a good dancer that we just glided around this… and I couldn’t really tell what he looked like but he was good looking. He had clown makeup on and a wig and this big clown costume, and such a good dancer, and he said he asked if I’d like to go swimming tomorrow, so I said yes I did, and I told him, you know, where we lived, Camp 16, so the next day we did make a date, and the next day, my mother and I are standing there waiting for my date, and I said, “Oh, Momma, look at this!” Here comes this very handsome man, and then so anyway, from then on we dated and went steady, and when summer was over he invited me to family affairs and we dated and so forth, until he went to Honolulu, had reservations to go with three of his friends, so then guess it was just mostly correspondence, until I got my mother to go to Honolulu.
RM: About how long between your time at Yosemite and when he went to Honolulu, about how long was that, a year, less than a year?
BY: Oh gosh, it was… how long after Yosemite before he went… ?
RM: Yeah, to Honolulu.
BY: It was only months.
RM: Oh, it was only months.
BY: He had left in… well, we had summer in Yosemite, and then he was working over the May Day holiday, and my mother and I went back to Yosemite, we had dates and danced and then he left in November.
RM: And at that time you were in high school then or you were in…
BY: College.
RM: College? Okay.
BY: Then… I’ll go back to when he was in the funeral business with my family, and then into the highway patrol, and he was of course he had to go to the academy and graduate, then when he graduated, he was assigned to Contra Costa County, and if that isn’t lucky, instead of going somewhere down in the desert all alone, so we moved to Lafayette then in 1948, and we were downtown in a duplex, and we lived there for about a year and a half and then we bought a little home in Concord, and my daughter is not in school yet, she’s about four, four years old, and so then when we lived in that home in Concord, Don was recalled in the Korean War now, so that’s when he went to Japan, and that’s where my daughter and I spent the year alone, was in Concord, then we went to the Philippines, there was dependant travel, I told you, and so then we came back home and moved to this home.
RM: If you’re all right for a few more questions, I was gonna ask about your children, I know you have a daughter, do you only have one daughter?
BY: One daughter.
RM: Just one, okay.
BY: And she went to Burton School, just down the hill, you know, Burton School is the Lafayette Community Center, did you know that?
RM: I didn’t know that.
BY: So that’s where all of the kids here went to school. Burton. So how long has it been a community center?
RM: I’m not sure.
BY: Well anyway, it was a grammar school, and then Springhill, and then to Del Valle, all three schools are closed. Del Valle, they had classes there on that campus, but that was a nice school, nice high school, and then she went to UC Davis and then to dental hygiene school, so I was very pleased that she was a hygienist and worked for many years in Richmond for Dr. Van Dyne, so she retired last year, and she was having a wonderful time with Mr. Bruce Mullen and they’re going to be married soon, right now they are in Europe, from Spain to,,, and then they’re going to Paris, and then he has a daughter who is married and she has three small children, so then they’re going to London too and they’ll be with them, they’ll be home Mother’s Day, so she’s enjoying her retirement.
RM: Sounds wonderful.
BY: She was married, divorced, and she has one son who had one daughter, so it runs in the family. She loved in Berkeley in a nice little bungalow with her one son, then when he married, he went to UC Santa Cruz and when he married after college, married a girl from Atlanta so they moved to Atlanta, and then a couple of years ago, we both liked California better than where she grew up, and so they moved back to stay with Christian in Berkeley, and then her man lives in Walnut Creek, so she moved to Walnut Creek and grandson and wife and daughter moved into her house, so it’s a fine arrangement.
RM: During the World War II years, you were in Oakland at the time, and…
BY: Yeah, living at the mortuary.
RM: And, I was just curious, what it was like living, I’ve never had to live in that type of World War II era, like was there a big change all of a sudden, and you saw your surroundings suddenly, or… ?
BY: Well, it was very tough, I think, for a lot of people. Gas rationing… now, being in the funeral business, we were able to get gasoline, we had to have gasoline, and they allowed gasoline to people at funeral homes and cars and so forth, and… but there was still a lot of rationing for food. Which was… oh, and nylon stockings were hard to get, and, oh during that time, I also performed at the Hotel Oakland, they had dances, and I, some couple of times or so, would go there and teach dance for the men and the hostesses, they were called, or if they had a show on the stage at the Hotel Oakland, I would perform maybe a hula or something.
RM: This is my last question, if… I was just curious when you went in 1938 to Honolulu with your mother, how long did you stay there for the, was it
BY: We were there a month, and we went on the SS Lurline, and Don and I would go to the islands every year, every year, and then we would bring Kristen and then we would bring Kristen and Zachary was the grandson, so we’ve spent… but I haven’t been back since my husband passed away. Five years. Now any other questions?
RM: That’s all from me, unless, do you want to add anything else?
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