Pete Dodd Interview

Pete Dodd

Interview Highlights

Pete Dodd arrived at Crewport in 1945 with his family. He recalled the circumstances that caused them to leave their hometown of Manville, Oklahoma. "... we had a farm in ...Manville, Oklahoma ... and we had five years of straight drought. Like Leroy [Leroy Blankenship] said, the Depression was still there; ... we lost five years of crop, right in a row. All of a sudden we had to give up the farm and buy a smaller farm ... My dad went to work in a creamery in town. All of a sudden the house caught on fire and burnt up; and the barns and the cattle and everything burnt. Pete's grandfather also died in the fire. And so my dad left and came out here [Granger, Washington] and worked about four weeks and come back in a truck with a tarp over the top and brought us back here. We had landed at Crewport." Pete contrasted the tragic events in Oklahoma with life at Crewport. "We always had fruit; and that was a great thing for us. We'd never seen fruit before ..." Also Pete recalled the fun they had. "Tons of fun! ... play a lot of baseball. ... they had a recreation hall... And in there they had a nurse; they had a dentist ... then they had this big hall where you'd box, show movies, we'd dance there." As for work, Pete remembers that his family worked as a unit. .. Yea!... What we did when we was working with the family is what a lot of Hispanic people do today. You go out there and you work with the family. You get your paycheck and right there you hand it to your mom. You don't even sign it; she'll sign it for you, you know. .. and that money is to keep the whole family going ..." He recalls that they followed the crops to Oregon. "We lived at Crewport ... [we] cut asparagus and stuff here. Then we head up... to the coast aand pick berries; then swing down into to Oregon and pick beans, and then hoe cucumbers. Then come up here in the Fall for the grapes and stuff." Like many others of his generation who lived at the Crewport Camp in the 1940s Pete settled in Granger, Washington, where he lives with his wife Arvella.

Leroy Blankenship, Pete Dodd, Rose Parker, Narrators

Start of Interview:

Adina: Tell us a little bit about yourselves and about your family history.

Leroy: I Come from a family of eleven children, my mother and father had seven sons and four daughters and I’m next to the baby. I’m Leroy, and my Dad was a farmer in Missouri, place called Mountain Grove, Missouri. … I’m what you would call the product of the end of “The Depression Babies” and we were still in the Depression while everybody else was out of it. We moved to a place called Cherryville, Kansas, and from Cherryville, Kansas we moved to Crewport, Washington, in … 19 and ’45, and lived on a concrete slab, inside of a tent and that’s the way my life began in Crewport.

Susan: Was it called Crewport at the time?

Leroy: Yes it was.

Susan: In 1945?

Leroy: 1945.

Dan: How old were you Leroy, when you got here?

Leroy: I was … ten years old and I was just a kid. When you’re ten years old, moving to Crewport is not a great chore, because there is [sic] other children there, and you just want to play. You don’t even know why you’re there, but you’re there; and everybody in Crewport lived on the same level.

Susan: Was there a lot of children there?

Leroy: Yes, there was quite a few children, in fact Pete Dodd moved to Crewport in ‘45 also and he lived on a concrete slab inside of a tent.

Susan: How old were you Pete?

Pete: I was eight, eight years old.

Susan: Did you two play together?

Pete: Yes, how do you think I know his name, to call him “Treetop”? Let him [Leroy] tell that story.

Leroy: I’ll tell you the story about “Treetop.” You know, kids will tell little falsehoods. A fellow by the name of John Sherwood, who lived in Crewport, lived next door to he [Pete Dodd] and me … I was walking down behind Crewport, into a field, and off in the distance there was a big tree. … as we drew nearer to the tree, there was a beautiful tree house, right in the top of that tree. … I was just a kid … A big tall fellow was walking by my side and I said, “You see that tree house out there?” He said yea, I see that tree house. I said “I built that.” He looked down at me and he said, “You did not! The Boys Scouts built that in 1943.”

Susan: So that’s why you call him treetop?

Leroy: And from that day on, they call me “Treetop”.

Pete: And do you ask me the same question, how I ended up there? We were in Oklahoma, … Manville, Oklahoma … we had a farm, and we had five years of straight drought. Like Leroy said, the Depression was still there, it hadn’t left us. And we lost five years of crop, right in a row. All of a sudden, we had to give up the farm and buy a smaller farm, cause the milk cows and stuff wasn’t sweet. My dad went to work in a creamery in town. All of a sudden the house caught on fire and burnt up; … the barns and the cattle … everything burnt. And so my dad left and came out here (Granger), and worked for about four weeks. And [he] come back in a truck with a tarp over the top of it, and picked us up and brought us back out here. We had landed up in Crewport… because my uncle lived there. That’s the way they came out, … relatives being out here. And … I remember we lived in the tents; and they were three dollars and fifty cents a month, to live in the tents.

Susan: Was that a lot of money back then?

Pete: No, not a great lot, but it was some, you know. Ah, you could get a grain bin, … it’s a tall building, but it wouldn’t hold grain. There was too many cracks in it to hold grain. … you could get those for seven dollars a month, and the homes that you lived in was twenty-two dollars a month.

Susan: How did you live in a grain bin?

Pete: Well it looks just like a grain bin, you know; and it’s tall and it’s skinny, and it’s just open in the inside.

Leroy: Just one room.

Pete: They got shellack on the outside, or it’s suppose to be tongue and groove, but it was so old and shrunk, that there was cracks like this [He used his fingers to show a gap about an inch or two wide]. So if you lived there in the wintertime. You went to town, bought a lot of paper, and tacked [it] on the walls and cover up the cracks, you know.

Susan: Wallpapered?

Pete: Wallpapered.

Leroy: … in those days you didn’t have to have it inside, the restroom, because stationed all throughout Crewport was little restrooms. And then they had the main bathhouse, … where you would go into this large building and there was a men’s and then there was a ladies [baths]. And the men’s had stalls for men and then showers all the way across the cement floor … we lived in the cabins and tents, and we went there for our showers and things.

Susan: Where did you cook?

Leroy: We had wood stoves. And out of the end of each was big piles of … firewood. … can still hear my mother today after all these years, my mother is [has] been dead since 1969, and I can still hear my mother early in the morning blowing on that fire to get it going in the morning, every morning. Do you remember that Pete?

Pete: Oh yea! … they had a washhouse, …it connected on to these … restrooms. And they had, must have had, between I say … twenty and forty washing machines. And each one of ‘em cost you, if you washed a load of clothes, cost you a dime. You didn’t put it [the coins] there; there’s just a lady there … [who collected fees for the use of the washers], … they had …ironing boards … and then you had long clothes lines ... They were about probably … eighty feet long. And they must have been a block wide, you know; and they’d be plum full of clothes. And there’s lots of people there; there was hundreds of people there. I don’t know how many, but it was a lot. And … when you got into the homes … or the staff shelters … that’s the first time we ever had a bathroom inside the house. Then we had to figure out we had to flush ‘em you know.

Leroy: The reason Crewport was called a labor camp is … in the entrance … every morning the men and the women would meet up at this place … there would be farmers that would come and take them out on a job. And they would like, hoe mint, hoe carrots, pick fruit. And this is where they went every day, to labor in this camp. And … my dad, he would take all the kids out. In fact I remember all of our family going out and picking grapes … I was just a child, but everybody went out. … you wouldn’t know this … when we lived in this camp, the old Spaniards from old Mexico and their families were there also … they still wore the big sombreros and the light clothes … I remember as a child …the Spanish guitars. You could hear them singing and playing the guitars till late at night … then pretty soon everything would be silence … All you could hear [after that] was the howl of a dog once in a while.

Pete: That was nine o’clock at night, cause if you didn’t Harley Parker put you in jail . He was our constable … at nine o’clock every radio, every radio and everything had to stop playing at nine o’clock or be so low that the neighbors couldn’t hear you. And … if you were caught outside, any child after nine o’clock, your parents could be asked to leave that place. It was really ah …you know you was in trouble. They had a council that was very effective, that … had rules and regulations you had to go by. And if you did not abide by those, you was gone; and they didn’t mess with you one bit. You was just gone if you weren’t good …

Susan: Very strict rules?

Leroy: Yea!

Pete: Very, … very strict. And like I said, [community people] used to call us “Crewport Trash” you know.

Dan: Is that right?

Pete: … “Crewport Trash” that was us you know. And if … you went to town, you went to town very carefully … [if you ] went to the movies, carefully walked in, sat down; and sat there, [until] … you left … my brother came up here and he had an Oklahoma plate on his license. [He] pulled into town, and the cop came over and say’s “how come you got Oklahoma plates?” He say’s “I just got here today” and he [the cop] say’s “No you haven’t; I’ve seen you before,” which he hadn’t you know. And so he grabbed him out of the car, slams him over the car, [and] cussing takes him over [to] the jail.

Susan: Sounds like there is some prejudice there, quite a bit of prejudice?

Pete: ah-hum! A lot of prejudice you know. And … if you was in school and something was stolen, we always stole it you know [they were always suspect].

Leroy: Yea! It was always us that took it. I remember one time when I was in the seventh grade, I still remember the old gymnasium, … the seats [were] … pulled out … somebody dropped some change down under there during a basket ball game. And the next day I was taken into the office, and the principal said ah, “you stole that change that fell down, didn’t you?” … I didn’t even know anything about it, you know. But I was “Crewport” and I was accused of that. But those things are everywhere in some measure. I remember some of the nice things, when the school bus would drop by and pick us up. …I remember when we’d pull out of the driveway of Crewport, and all of the kids on the bus were Crewport kids you know. One of the gals would start singing, and everybody would join-in. And we sang an old song called Michael Finnegan. Said ... [the song], “There was an old man called Michael Finnegan. He had whiskers on his china gin, and the wind came out and blew them in agin. Poor old Michael Finnegan.” We’d sing that all the way to school you know. And … even though we were …as poor and as poverty stricken as we were, there was still a great happiness in Crewport. … when we were children we had so much fun … there wasn’t a lot going on, and children played with one another.

Susan: But how did you handle the apparent prejudice by other people that lived outside of Crewport?

Leroy: Well, It’s amazing! …being called “Crewport trash” was very depressing to me as a child, because in my little old ten, twelve-year-old mind … I wondered; I’m no different from anybody else. Why would they point the finger at me … and call me that? But see, even in those days we had three factions in the school. There was the Crewport children; and then there was a bus of what they called “Children from Boys Town.” These were children that ah …

Pete: Get in trouble!

Leroy: They were trouble kids and then also in those days we had the ah------the “Yakima Indians” [from the Yakama Nation] that we went to school with. There was a number of them that came to our school, here.

Susan: Where did you go to school?

Leroy: Here in Granger; I went to school here in Granger. There was a busload of children from “Boys Town” and then there was ah…

Pete: Boysville!

Leroy: Yea, Boysville, that’s right. And there were a number of “Yakima Nation” children that were in school. And ah, there was quite a bit of prejudice in, ah, all three of these factions …

Susan: Was their prejudice against one another?

Leroy: Well, it was prejudice! Like the prejudice was against us, that we were low class poor kids, with no goals in mind. And also I can’t ever remember anybody taking any interest in me! I had music inside of me … I had all these talents inside of me, but nobody ever recognized them. I got kicked out of [the] band when I was in the seventh grade. Mr. Ralph kicked me out of band, because he claimed I didn’t know how to read notes. … I played by ear … he removed me of [from the] band. And I [have] made my whole life and my living for forty years in music. …I play the piano; I play fifteen different instruments.

Susan: Did you learn by ear or did you…?

Leroy: I grew up playing them.

Susan: But did you…?

Leroy: Yea, I learned how to play the piano in one week!

Pete: Did you play by ear?

Leroy: I played everything by ear; and yet, when the children were playing their instruments, I played the trumpet; everything that they played I could play.

Susan: What was wrong with playing by ear?

Leroy: I have no idea; you have to ask Mr. Ralph. He was a teacher here back in the fifties; and he said, “I don’ t want you in my class, because you don’t know how to read music.” And yet I could play the trumpet as good as any kid in there. The only difference is, every body else played by note and I played by ear.

Dan: You mentioned that kids had so much fun together, how did you have fun, what did you do?

Leroy: Oh Golly, let me tell you. Now this is going to get a little bit country on you, ok. Pete remembers this, the showers? We had like when you’d go in the bathhouse, there was probably ten showers all the way across the slick cement floor. We kids used to go in there together when it wasn’t busy, and we’d soap up the floor and we’d turn on all the showers. And we’d get our feet up against the wall and push back; and on that soapy floor we’d slide all the way to the other end. And all of us naked, you know. But you know, … there were a number of ways that we could occupy our lives. We used to make slingshots. We used to fly kites out behind the, you remember the big pasture back there? We’d build homemade kites and fly them. Those were good days, wonderful days!

Pete: We had great times together! We used to go to my wife’s grandmothers’, … my wife lived there, and played jacks. John, John wrote a letter or thank-you note. She wrote the letter, John was talking and she wrote it down [He pointed to Rose Parker]. … we had a … lot of fun getting together. We did everything together. If you wanted to play baseball, you grabbed your bat with your glove and a ball, and you started walking towards the ball park, which is down below Crewport. If you start [sic] walking there , when you got there, there’d be two teams there. I remember I played on the team … they didn’t care if you was fourteen years old or fifty. You know [sic] you played on the same team or whatever; even if you was [sic] just good enough to make it. So we went down to the … ball team one day, I didn’t go with them. They was [sic] going down to play Grandview or Prosser, and it was a double header. They got there and realized that they [the other team] were up here [at Crewport] and they were [not] supposed to be there. Well, they had to forfeit both games. I went out and grabbed a bunch of guys and I says, “Hey, let’s go down and play for the first game and the guys will be back.” Well, we got there without a pitcher; I said “You’re gonna have to pitch” [To Pete]. When our guys got back, the score was thirty eight to nothing. I think everybody was hitting homeruns. I was falling all over the stall.

Susan: Great pitcher?

Pete: Tons of fun! That was some of the things they’d do, play a lot of baseball. Then the recreation hall up there, see they had a recreation hall; that bigger building that burnt. And in there, they had a nurse; they had a dentist on one part of it; then they had this big hall where you’d box, show movies, we’d dance there. It was a total recreation hall. We had a daycare center that was in there; we had a basketball court, which was on dirt, but…

Susan: Was it basically, [that] the dancing and everything was that for adults?

Pete: No, this is all for kids.

Susan: For everybody, or kids?

Pete: Well, anybody could go; but mostly it was us kids.

Leroy: You were talking while ago about … [if] three dollars a month [was] a lot of money? I remember we had a grocery store there in camp also, where people could go … and shop, Saint Mary’s. You remember Saint Mary’s?

Pete: Oh yea! …

Leroy: To give you an idea of how much three dollars was, a pop was ten cents; you could buy a pop for ten cents.

Susan: This was what year?

Leroy: In 19 and 50, this was ’50. And I remember Tony Lawson [He turns to Pete Dodd and asked] “Was Tony some relation to you Pete?”

Pete: He’s Arvela’s [Arvela is Pete Dodd’s wife] uncle.

Leroy: … Tony Lawson used to throw baseballs and I’d catch them as a kid. And every day Tony and I would walk up to the grocery store and he would buy himself a bottle of pop. I remember every time saying to myself, “Boy I wish I had a dime to buy me a bottle of pop.” But he always, always had to stand there. And [I] watch him drink that pop, and in my heart I would say “Boy I would love to have a bottle of pop.” And that was in 1950.

Susan: You talked about working out in the grapes, the whole family worked out there, did your dad or your parents pay you anything for working?

Leroy: No, but I do remember mother, my mother at lunchtime. I remember she had made a pot of beans and made biscuits. And at lunchtime, in the grape vineyards, she’d spread a little spread and she’d put that pot of beans in the center of the spread and give us our little plates. And we’d eat biscuits and brown beans for lunch. That’s the way we lived. But you know, it’s amazing! We wasn’t [sic] sick it; must have been very healthy living, you know.

Dan: Tell us a little bit about yourself, Rose; and your interest in Crewport.

Rose: How I got to Crewport, got interested? My family moved out from Texas in 1942, and we lived in Kirkland. I finished four years of high school at Kirkland; and then we moved to Yakima and I met my husband, George Jacques. He has a place here at Granger, and we moved there. And then later he was killed in an accident. Then I met John Parker. His family moved to Crewport, so that’s how I got into this. They started wanting to get together with the people that lived at Crewport, so we started having picnics every year, kind of an annual thing. I kind-a took over as secretary for it, and gave the information out to the people when we were going to have a get-togethers and that type of thing.

Pete: The ladies that didn’t come from back there was the ones that put it together. All of us guys were always saying “We’d like to do this, we’d like to do that.” They got tired of us, so they did it; and that was all the ladies who was from up here, to start out with. You was [sic] talking about the money and what you could make now. In Oklahoma, we made $33.00 in one year, you know, the whole family working.

Susan: In one year?

Pete: One year; and the next two years we went in the hole. So the next year our house and everything burnt down; so we ended up coming up here [to Granger]. … I mean it burnt our car; it burnt our house; … it burnt everything we had. And my grandfather, we lost him in the fire too! … When we got up here, my dad and my brother, just older than I am, they went to work for a dollar an hour apiece. Every body could work you know; the women worked for ninety cents an hour and … I went to work for fifty cents an hour, … I was a water boy and I was only nine years old. So you know, that was $3.90 cents a day; and we worked fourteen hours a day. Did you know that’s $54.00 and 60 cents a day, we [all the family together] made?

Susan: That was a lot of money back then?

Pete: Oh it was a lot of money, yea!

Leroy: We could buy a new car; you could buy a brand new Ford for 1200 dollars.

Pete: We didn’t have a car when we got here, so we went down there, went in to the Ford garage there in Sunnyside. [We] went right in there and bought it off the showroom floor [and] drove it right out. They used to put them in there and sell them dry mouth you know. Big deal, we paid cash for it.

Susan: How did you feel when you were out there working with your family?

Pete: Good, Yea! We worked all our lives. What we did when we was working with the family is what a lot of the Hispanic people do today. You go out there and you work with the family. You get your paycheck, and right there you hand it to your mom. You don’t even sign it; she’ll sign it for you, you know. You’d get money when you need something really bad; and that money is to keep the whole family going and nobody even thought anything about it. Like Leroy, he probably give his money to his folks. But he was wanting a pop, but there wasn’t the money there to do it [to buy a pop]. They had a lot; we [were] like five of us in the family, and there was eleven of them.

Rose: That was just the way it was.

Pete: And some of them are just too small to work …

Leroy: I have to tell you, you were talking while ago about what kind of games did we play? Everybody had a pocketknife; it was just a part of ah, I mean Pete had a pocketknife.

Rose: These were the boys?

Leroy: Yea! All the kids, the older kids, had pocketknives. It was just, ah, kind of a thing; they’d even trade pocketknives you know … There was a little game we played back in those days called “mumble peg” … They would drive a match into the ground and you had to remove that match with your teeth. The first time I ever dug a match out of the ground from “mumble peg” was in Crewport, Washington …

Rose: They drew a circle on the ground, didn’t they? And you threw your knife and … it had to stick.

Leroy: Yes, and when you couldn’t reach it any more, that’s when you went for the peg with your teeth. …there at Crewport they had a daycare center that was really nice and they had the store. Tucked in that building … we’d have movies in there, and they’d have “pie suppers” they call them. You know they’d auction off pies … buy em, and they had a 4-H club that met in there weekly. We had a lot of things like these going on, you know.

Susan: Who started up the 4-H club, do you know? …

Leroy: I know, I think I do. …he used to own … hops out there … this little short fellow, what’s his name?

Pete: Fortier?

Leroy: Yea, Fortier

Pete: Yea! Mrs. Fortier; she started that 4-H club.

Rose: Norma, Norma Fortier! ... Bob and Norma, yea!

Pete: I didn’t remember her name; but she had a lot of people who wanted to get involved with our young people … to help them. We had a church bus come in from Sunnyside every week on Wednesday night and haul everybody down. I think I was saved about eighty five times there, I’m not sure. But you know, you went to church down there every Wednesday night, so many people involved with you. They was [sic] just trying to bring you along, you know.

Susan: What church was that?

Pete: You know where Valley Auto Parts is in Sunnyside?

Susan: Yea! That’s where it was?

Pete: That’s where it was at, right there.

Rose: Fred Settles … did he have a Boys Scouts group there?

Pete: Yea! He did …

Rose: But then, did he live in Crewport?

Pete: Fred? Yea! Fred lived there.

Susan: Wasn’t he the manager?

Pete: Yea; he was at one time. And then, there were these people from the outside. You had teachers that were really interested in you as an individual, that helped people a lot you know. Like we had Mr. Peterson, the Ag. Teacher. I didn’t have a project … some of these guys had … bunches of cattle or …this stuff. And he wanted me to grow weeds, can you imagine that? That sounds easy, doesn’t it? Yea, grow weeds; it sounds really easy, doesn’t it? It’s not; that weed is the only one that can be in there,. So you got to get all the other weeds out of it. Like him, he took a great interest in all of the kids of Crewport. He helped them; … He was here, and he was really an inspiration to all of us. He’s still alive today, and he still lives here.

Leroy: You know, I was also thinking about how, how good fruit taste in those days, … right behind the grain bins. That [is what] Pete was talking about. There was a pear orchard, after they would pick the pears, there is a few little pairs left on the trees. And I can remember as a child, going over there and picking those pears that were left, and how wonderful that fruit would taste. … I remember the following walk from Crewport to Granger; … we’d cut across the fields. I remember one grape vineyard that had the white grapes … I remember we would stop and pick a pot of those white grapes … they tasted so good. That’s really the only fruit we ever got, you know; and we were surrounded by it.

Susan: Were you allowed to get fruit when you were picking, or was this prohibited?

Leroy: Yea! I think they would give you a little fruit, yes seasonal.

Pete: We always had fruit; and that was a great thing for us. We’d never seen fruit before. When we got here, they told us they wanted us to cut grass you know. We thought they was gonna [have us] mow lawns. We didn’t know what grass was then they said they wanted to go and work in the hops. We seen these big beanpoles … and we said “Boy they must grow a lot of big tall beans out here.” … I remember working for the Harrens; they were big hop farmers here at one time. I went out there and I was getting fifty cents an hour as a water boy. They had two crews; they had a Spanish crew and a white crew. … the boy that was working for the Spanish crew that was running the water, he quit. And so I went up there and … Dick Harry he told me the story, I come up there and I said “Mr. Harry, Mr. Harry,” … he say’s “What is it son?” [Pete to Mr. Harry ] “That water boy over there is getting fifty cents an hour and I’m getting fifty cents an hour. And I have to take both of us jobs. I should get a dollar, right?” He say’s “You know, I just couldn’t argue with that …you better keep ‘em watered.” That’s all he could say. He told that story on me a thousand times. But we worked in the hops and stuff, and … to me, from what I had experienced in Oklahoma, it was a blessing. …I was so glad to be here.

Susan: What did you do as a water boy?

Pete: Packed water. You take two of those big sack type water bags you know, put them around your neck with a rope and you carry them. You have to go up about a quarter mile to the house, fill ‘em up, carry ‘em back down and give everybody water. Everybody is going to take a drink, but go “shirk” and dump a little out, I don’t know why, but they’d take a drink and then you run back up “shirk.”

Susan: You did that all day?

Pete: All day long, walk as fast as you’d walk. The ground was soft and you didn’t hardly stop to get a drink yourself. This is what you did; and I was doing it for fifty cents an hour. Then I got into the buck [pay rate of 1.00 a day]; I was happy to do it Susan: How old were you?

Pete: Nine or ten. But in Oklahoma we’d pick cotton and … at time I was driving tractor by myself, when I was six you know. You had to. Everybody had to make a living; you had to work and do well … it wasn’t a matter of choice. You didn’t have choices … this is what you had to do; and it didn’t hurt anybody. You know, they didn’t work me to death.

Susan: Was it true, the same thing for your friends? Did they have to work too?

Pete: Oh yes, everybody worked! Yea; everybody worked. It goes on up to, not for Crewport, cause it closed down. But my son-in-law; they had 18 kids in the family. Every year that they was here, that family, all those kids got best dressed as seniors. And there is 18 kids. They did the same thing, they went out then we got to where we was running a circle [the harvest season]. We lived at Crewport; but we would go from here, to cut asparagus and stuff here. Then head up and go up to the coast and pick berries; then swing down into Oregon and pick beans; and then hoe cucumbers. Then come back up here for the fall for the grapes and stuff. So you’d run a little [in]circles in the summer time; but you never seen a paycheck or nothing. You just worked you know. You didn’t resent it either. That’s the way you made a living; that was with the whole family. I think the same thing goes for the people that was [sic] there in Crewport. You left your house, you didn’t lock your house up. You just left your car set on the street running, with the key in it. Now they is people coming from all states like this, and we got … people thought so much of each other it was just a complete community thing. If anybody got hurt or sick or something happen to em, there was a collection like within two hours. They would take these people over a hump if something bad happen to ‘em. They’d be paying hospital bills or whatever. We really looked after each other …We ‘d have these guys come out to Crewport … [who] were nurses … and they’d come down here in school, those [other] guys would rough ‘em up a little bit…

Susan: Who would rough ‘em up?

Pete: Some of the kids in school you know. … then they had to fight us, you know what I mean? We looked after everybody that come in, just because they came from this camp. We all came from the same place, even though it’s different states. Same situation; same everything, and some of those people today, there’s dentists, doctors …preachers, teachers, lots of teachers, my sister is a teacher. There is lots that’s run into professional life, that’s done really well …

Susan: So the parents then would take the money, and do what with it?

Pete: Divvy out groceries, pay the rent; … you worked during the summer time. And … in the fall, when we was working my mom and all of them would be working, not my dad, cause he worked in construction … we’d go out …where ever mom was picking grapes, we’d walk there. We’d pick grapes till late at night; then we’d go back [home] and take a bath and go to bed. Then the next morning [we would] get up and go to school, same thing over. Weekends we’d pick … grapes or what have you, anything they is work in you know, we’d pick. And anything that you was working in, we’d go down to bean harvest, we’d eat beans breakfast lunch and dinner, cause they [farm laborers] ate what you picked. They cooked it for you; you’d get so tired of it you could almost die. But, you can imagine all that then. Then my father, what really took Crewport over the hump was that Hanford was running; people started going down there to work, and they were making good money at Hanford. So that made them … the people …lot of them pulled out to Prosser and Grandview, so they was closer to the Tri Cities so they’d be closer to their work. That was the thing that really brought a lot of people from leaving [what made people decide to leave] Crewport at that time.

Susan: Did … did anybody in your family leave at that time?

Pete: Yea, well no. We stayed there. I don’t know what year it was we moved, but my dad worked at Hanford for several years.

Susan: What did he do out there?

Pete: He was a truck driver. Oh yea, remember the rummage sales? They call ‘em yard sales now … people would bring all the clothes and put em on the rack out there in this hall. You’d have the opportunity to buy them at really cheap prices. They the clothes] were used. So that’s how you could survive the whole thing … That’s where you bought 90% of your clothes.

Susan: You would buy them from each other in the community?

Leroy: No; people [would] come in from the outside too … I don’t know if they were just trying to make money … or if they were just trying to help us out, I don’t know which. A lot of the clothing, I’d say ninety percent of it for the kids, was bought right there, cause people, kids, would outgrow them …

Susan: Was it pretty nice clothing?

Pete: Yea! Yea! There was nothing rag-tag about them you know. They was something somebody just outgrown or something like that, you know.

Susan: You said that your sister became a Nurse?

Pete: Teacher.

Susan: Teacher, was there money spent on education or was this something a person had to achieve on their own?

Pete: She got her degree to teach when she was 51 years old, and I got my certification to teach vocational education when I was 53. It didn’t happen back then you know, she happen to marry a guy, and he had some money … She went to school with her children and everybody [in her family] was finishing high school [at the same time].

Susan: Everybody was ditching high school?

Pete: Was finishing high school?

Susan: Oh, finishing high school, I’m sorry.

Pete: … no … our folks all believed in education as far as they could afford to send you, you know what I mean?

Susan: Aha.

Pete: But at that time … when we lived in Oklahoma, an education past the eight grade was unheard of, because you’d have to go to a boarding school in another town and had to pay board and room. Nobody could afford that sort of thing; if the school wasn’t … where you could get to [easily and inexpensively], you couldn’t go.

Susan: Was that different then out here?

Pete: Oh yea. Here you go right to high school you know. The whole thing was here, just like the high school set right here and the grade set over there, just like that. So it was you could get educated, it wasn’t that big a deal now today. Back there you know you had to go; but it might be three hundred miles to a school. And one place we lived in Texas, there it was ninety eight miles to the nearest school from where we lived. … Any way, I ended up graduating from high school when I was almost 20 years old, because where we lived in Texas we couldn’t go, you know. Buses wouldn’t come out, and we couldn’t afford to go to town….

Pete: [Recalls his life at Crewport, as part of a sequence of comments about the annual reunion of former Crewport residents] I met some of my dearest friends there; we are still friends today and always will be. …I think …[that it is] the closeness that we had that meant so much. … You got out of the truck you come in on, you got off a turnip truck, the first thing you had to do was fight somebody you know. Somebody is going to be there to see how tough you was; and it turned out it was going to be your best friend when it was over with, you know. And I remember going out to Liberty School, which that Liberty School is a great school, we all went out there to the fourth grade, and it’s a small little school.

Susan: Where is that located?

Pete: About three miles out, and so it’s still there. An individual owns it though. And we loved that school …but boy, then we had to come to Granger to the big school. …That was a dramatic change.

Susan: Who attended the Liberty School?

Leroy: We all did. I attended it when I was a kid. It was a great school.

Pete and Leroy [answer together] Everybody out in that area.

Susan: I mean was it just people from Crewport, that came to Crewport?

Leroy: No, it was a country school.

Pete: Everybody out there that was fourth grade, fourth grade and below. And then, if you was above that, you’d come into town. Then they changed it over into just … to fourth grade school. We had some really nice teachers out there. We used to have a teacher out there, which helped me a lot, as we were coming along. …Mrs. Russell is her name … she is cross-eyed, really bad … you don’t know who she’s looking at you know. … she took me under her wing and she gave me a job, that I’d go out to her house and hoe her corn and stuff. Every night they farmed. And so, I’d go out there, and she’d pay you about double the wages… She was doing something nice for me, she felt sorry for me, I guess. But the people that came here … they had shoes that were sewed together at home you …[they] just didn’t have nothing. My uncle got here, and I remember the whole side of the [his]overalls …there was nails stuck through it to hold it together you know.

Susan: That was when he came from Oklahoma?

Pete: Aha. So things had to get better…

Leroy: Well, I really like what Pete said a while ago …Crewport was just one big family … there was no status … big I’s and little U’s. We all stood on one platform, and on the same level together …

Susan: Was it true that when the Mexican workers came out from Texas, they came out at about 1945?

Leroy: Course, now there was even the Spanish and … the Caucasians … in those days we, we never knew how to decide for the difference outside … they were people from old Mexico and ah. ...

Susan: Could they speak English?

Leroy: No, very little. They wore the big sombreros and played the Spanish guitars, and worked in the fields.

Susan: How did you communicate with them?

Leroy: Well, there were a few that could talk English.

Pete: You could talk, you could communicate.

Leroy: And …we all learned how to cuss in Spanish and count you know.

Pete: You know … back in those days these people would bring them out, and it be a contractor. They would take a truck, go down to Mexico, get these people, bring them up here, get them housing at Crewport. And he [the labor contractor] was totally responsible for them. They work for the summer, he hauled them around, got a percentage of their wages. Then when fall came, he’d haul them back to Mexico. That’s … so they wouldn’t [spend] the winter up here. But every once in a while … a few stay … I don’t guess you’d say we didn’t really notice that they were Mexican and we were white. You know what I mean? We just … was trying to get together.

Leroy: No, we didn’t. We were all in one level.

Susan: Do you still stay in touch with any of the Mexican people from back then?

Pete: Oh yea! Yea!

Susan: Do you think that … how you lived in Crewport and how you guys were, like bunched together … that if you lived outside of Crewport, and like [in] a regular rural area, do you think you guys would have been all right with the people around?

Pete: They wouldn’t let you.

Leroy: I don’t think so. I think [in] Crewport, there were so many things that bound us together. First of all poverty; we were all, I would say, … poverty stricken. And number two, we all wore the same kind of clothing, you know. I mean there was no new dress or new jeans; we all wore the same clothes. We all put cardboard in the bottom of our shoes, that was just a common thing. We had so many things in common that just bound us together. Pete and I could name many, many people. Johnny, his wife, we were like family. I mean we grew up that way. And then, after all these years, now Pete and I don’t see each other but maybe once or twice a year. But we are still close.

Susan: Like brothers?

Leroy: He married the girl I was in-love with, when I lived there.

Susan: Is that why you left her at home?

Pete: That’s why I left her at home, I seen old Leroy down there. I tell you, I looked out there at that big motor home and I think, that preaching don’t look bad to me. No, but … it is the closeness and everyone of those people, and the funny part of it, we see each other you know, you can’t just shake hands and stuff you know. You just hug everybody; you know what I mean? Because that’s the way you felt; just like family. It was good you know … always looked after each other. And … if you got out of work, like my dad would get out of work, as soon as he got out of work one of those guys would find him a job the next day you know. They looked after each other really close … you’d get in the car and ride with them … that’s the way you looked after each other …

End of Interview

Leroy Blankenship, Pete Dodd, and Rose Parker

Interviewed February 25, 2000

Crewport History Project

Yakima Valley Community College

Yakima, Washington

Credits and Interview identification Data

Narrators: Leroy Blankenship, Pete Dodd, Rose Parker

Place of Interview: Granger, WA.

Date: February 25, 2000

Interviewers:

Dan Groves

Susan Bolton

Also present: Chris, Ron Fleming, Gary Brownlee, Adina Walker, David Buchanan, and

Andrea Cardenas, all from Granger High School

Transcribed by: Tomas Escobar

Edited for Publication: by Mario C. Compean