My brother Robin was so different from me in personality, temperament, interests. We tormented each other. I remember his being so upset. When were on the boat coming over from England, I grabbed his sunglasses of his face and threw them over the side. I don’t remember why I did it, except I knew it would piss him off.

When we lived on Fourth Street in Atwater, California, and my brother collected coins. He used to keep the loose coins on top of his dresser.

I got home from school before everyone else. I’d be home by myself and the snow-cone man came by. I wanted an ice cream so bad. I know that if I went in my brother’s room, there would be coins on his dresser. I figured he wouldn’t miss a quarter. I took one to get an ice cream. That night he realized that quarter was gone, and that quarter was not worth a quarter. It was worth $10; it was a rare quarter. I remember him taking my head like it was a basketball, and bouncing it off the wall in the hallway.

At night he used to claw on the bedroom walls. I used to scream and cry. For a lot of years, I slept in my parents’ bed. He’d make these horrible noises at night, and even thought I knew it was him, I was terrified of the dark. My parents got so tired of me doing this that they kept a sleeping bag in their closet. I’d lay it on the floor next to them. It was every night for a lot of years.

Sometimes he would go out in the middle of the night and put finger prints on the outside of my window sills. When I woke up in the morning, I saw those prints; I thought someone tried to get into my window at night. I was terrified. We did horrible things to one another.

In Texas, we lived in San Antonio. My father was stationed at Lackland Air Force base. I think we lived in Houston for a short period of time. Most of my memories of Texas are of going to the beach with my parents. Then my grandparents came over and we spent time on the beach. That was the only time they ever came to visit us in the US. I think my grandmother died about 10 years after that visit.

Father was in the Air Force; Mother Ran a Nursery School

My dad was still working for the Air Force, but not as a pilot. Since the War he worked in supply. He had a deviated septum, and it affected his flying. He got severe headaches, so they grounded him.

My mom wasn’t a qualified nurse; she was a volunteer. She never went to nursing school. She ran the nursery in Atwater—Gene Brent Nursery School in Atwater. She ran it for 25 years.

While we were in Texas, my father got a 1 year assignment to Alaska, but no family was allowed to go. We stayed behind in the base housing. There was a woman whose house was close to ours, and she befriended me. I believe she was Filipino or Asian. I thought she was very nice; I went to her apartment and played with her baby and helped her.

One time she told me that my father didn’t really exist, or that I was adopted, or that he was dead. I was very emotional about that. They called my father in Alaska and he talked to me on the phone. From that day on I always had doubts that I was adopted. I always had doubts in my mind because I was so different from my parents.

That was a cruel thing for her to do. I think back now—my mother thought she was crazy. My father came back and he got stationed in Atwater, at Castle Air Force Base. That was in 1963.