I was born in East Los Angeles, about eight miles east of Los Angeles in a little town called Montebello. It’s between Los Angeles and Whittier. I was born in 1923.

William Dolph was my dad—Bill. We understood that it has originally been DeWolf, but that somebody way back there had stolen a horse and that made the name not good, so they changed it to Dolph. And we all laughed. “Yeah, sure, that happened.” Well, we found out that was true. We found that out when one of my nieces did a study of our name, Dolph, and she came up with that story. So it must have borne some truth at least. That’s back when they shot horse thieves I think.

So he just changed the spelling of his name that one did. So then my dad was a native Californian. My mom came from Ohio. And I grew up—my dad worked for the Japanese—and this was before World War II. Japanese could be here but no matter how long they’d been here they never could be citizens, and they couldn’t own land. So they leased land, and they lease all this acreage up above where we lived in East Los Angeles. My dad was their maintenance man. He kept the reservoirs going—they were truck farmers and they had about five acres each—and he kept the reservoirs full without overflowing. (Laughs.) When they would overflow, we were in trouble. And they couldn’t go dry because then that was terrible. And he welded—he learned to weld so he could weld their pipes, and he just maintained that whole area of about 47 Japanese families. And they were so kind to me and so good to me.

I can remember at the holiday times, Daddy had to stop in at each house, and they wanted him to sit down with them and have a slug of sake. Well, my dad didn’t drink, see. But he had to do that. So I went along with him and we had a Model T Ford and after about the third house his cheeks got pink. He said, “Dot, I think you better drive.”

So between the time I was ten and fourteen, anytime it was that time of the year, I went with Daddy and then I’d drive him all the way around and would get him home safely, and he’d sleep it off. (Laughs.) But they were such wonderful people. And of course then, you know, when World War II hit I saw all of those people given three days’ notice to leave their homes. They had to leave their animals, their pets, everything. All they could take was what they could carry in two hands. And they brought all kinds of stuff to my house, to my dad’s house. Big portable radios… those big, you know, radios. And furniture, and personal items, hoping that friends and family who lived other places would pick them up.

And Daddy, when he sold anything like that then he’d take it to the place where these guys were, and they put them in Pomona behind barbed wire and we visited. And I’m so grateful Daddy took me. I was in my early teens—not too early—and we went down there and through the barbed wire we gave this money to these Japanese friends of ours. And these were guys who had gone to college, I’d gone to high school with, and they had gone to college and their fathers and mothers and grandmothers, and they were all put in one room about this long. Thirty, forty feet, like a classroom. And they had no privacy. They were given a little cot with a one inch mattress that they could put on their beds. Grandmas, grandpas, moms, dads, children were all in one area until they were shipped into the other inland states. This was a holding area in Pomona. You could visit them but you couldn’t actually go through the, into the camp. You had to pass things through the wire fence.

These were people I respected highly. They were outstanding people, you know. And at that time it was the first time… we were very romantic about our country at that time and that we felt that we were really the good guys… and that was the first time I doubted my country’s acts. I thought, “Hey, something’s gone wrong here. This is not right.” And it wasn’t. But of course the Japanese are a very proud people. And so it was just recently that that has been acknowledged by our government that that was wrong. Yeah, and they paid $20,000 or something like that.

And then Grandpa became an outstanding farmer. He was the cabbage king of Montebello. (Laughter.) And he let me ride the big horse. He had a big old fat gray horse. He let me ride the horse when he was cultivating and stuff. And we always—we ate melons—and whenever we ate a melon that he was growing, why, if it was a really delicious one we’d save the seeds. And then he had a regular room there where he put all the good seeds. And then those were the seeds that he planted the next year.

We were doing seed selection. And anybody that got a melon from Grandpa had instructions. It worked very well because gosh he had good produce. And he let me sell out on the street. It was Beverly Boulevard, which was one of the main highways like Whittier Boulevard, and he let me sell down there. He said, “Always, if people stop to taste something, you give them a good slice and you cut it like this, and you hand it to them this way.” And he said, “And then if they like it, why then you show them the other melons.” So he let me work down there and take the money in. Oh, I loved it.

So I worked at our little farm stand, and I got such a kick out of that. I loved my grandpa. He was just—Grandpa and Grandma Pedro were… well, my folks were very poor. His name was Dominic DePietro when he came here, but when he went through Ellis Island. They just called him Nick Pedro. So he went by Nick Pedro from then on. And it was a great way to grow up, with Grandpa being there and Grandma, because they were so good to me. They were for me. I got to go to college because of them. He could help pay for that. My dad was a laborer, and he worked with the Japanese but he really got peanuts, you know, and so we couldn’t have made it.


I have a brother, Bill. He’s four years younger than I am. He was just here the other day. I love it. We haven’t been able to be together for a long time. He’s up near Seattle now. I always thought of him—he was a blond, pudgy kind of kid—and he always has felt that Daddy would have liked to have had a real fighter. And yet I remember coming home from school and there were three in a family, and they were bullies. And they were bullying me. And one of the kids pushed me. And Bill was out of the street—and he was in kindergarten, and he was in my raincoat, which buttons the wrong way—he came barreling across there, gave that kid a shove, and clunked him in the nose and made his nose bleed. He said, “Don’t you EVER touch my sister again.” And I can remember being so startled that this pudgy little blond kid had that kind of an anger in him.

Well, I told him about it the other day and he just roared. (Laughs.) So that was fun.