When we were very young we had very few friends. When I started high school, the campus was ten miles away. My mother had to drop us off and pick us up every day. It was a catholic school, and my mother wanted to make sure that we went to catholic school. But we loved the public schools because we could talk to people. At the catholic school there were no boys and it was boring. There’s nothing about the catholic school I care to reminisce about.

However, my sister pat, who is five years younger had a totally different experience. She went to college at Notre Dame right after I graduated, a catholic boys school started also and she loved it! It was a totally different experience than what Mary and I had.

On weekends I would either visit my friends at their homes in Santa Rosa, or they would come and stay at our place. So there was more interaction with people. The but before that we never saw any boys at all.

One of the reasons I liked working at my father’s apple dryer was that lots of people came in all the time. I’m very socially – oriented.

The apple dryer was located in a town called Grayton, which is four miles north of Sebastopol. It’s now become a real shi-shi place, but in those days it was semi – dangerous. My parents didn’t want us hanging out there.

The dryer was one block away from the little tiny town, and during the summer, that was my social life.

An apple dryer has big kilns. Trucks filled with apples come to a scale. My job was to weigh the fruit before it was washed and put on a conveyor belt. From there, the fruit was processed by peelers and corers, which was a line of about 40 women. They operated automatic peelers and corers. The apples were then sliced and trucked over to these huge dryers. The fruit would dry all night long.

Now that big apple dryer building is an art studio.