"There was a two-story house I remember as our first house. It was right across from the tunnel [at the bottom of AC Hill]. They used to rent the down below to my aunt and my uncle, Tía Petra [and Tío Concepción]. Then later on to another family. During the Depression we had no electricity. We had the kerosene lamps. [We had] a wood stove. My dad used to buy some wood and coal. He had a pot bellied stove. There was a big kitchen, a big dining room. They had the big table and there must have been two or three bedrooms. It [bathroom] was on the side of the house. We had to go outside but it was connected with the house. It was right there by the house.

[We took baths] inside the house. My mother would warm up some water and my daddy had a big tub. That's where my mother would give us a bath on Saturdays. We'd let the water out and it was just oozing out. The last one was [in] the dirtiest [water].

We had to wash dishes. If we didn't my mother would get us up at four o'clock in the morning to wash dishes. {We had to] mop. I don't remember ever cooking. My mother done everything. My mother would get up early in the morning and before we got up she already had made a whole bunch of tortillas, and [she] cooked beans and sopas and that's what she brought us up with, sopas.

My daddy had a little garden so we had vegetables like mostly squash. I used to ask my mother, one time, "¿Mamá, tienes un pedacito de carne?" (Mamá, do you have a little piece of meat?) Because that's all we ate [during the Depression] all squash and no carne.

One day I told her, [because] she made us some tea with no ice, "¿Mamá, no compraste hielo?" (Mamá, didn't you buy ice?) She would buy ice for five cents. My daddy had built a box, I remember, one of those boxes where they bring the dynamite. He covered it with gunny sacks all around it and then he would throw water on top of it to keep it cool and sometimes he would have ice, because on Sundays he would make us ice cream. Then he put it on the window by the kitchen. I remember it would sit right there by the window. Then he would throw water on top of it to keep it cool and that's how they kept the food cold.

The family sat around the pot belly stove and talked. I liked to listen to my grandma talk and my mamá and my dad. And the neighbors would come and they would talk too. My cousins would come and then we would just play. One day we played throwing water on each other. Boy, when my daddy came, we scattered, scattered all over. The only one that was caught was Chilo [my cousin]. My daddy took off his belt and whipped him. He was mad. He didn't catch any of us, just Chilo. Do you know what he [Chilo] done? He got underneath the tub and his feet were sticking out so he [Daddy] got him.

One time they beat up Chelino when it was wintertime. He hadn't come home and he hadn't come home so my mother went and got my dad to look for Chelino. He found him passed out by the garages, old time garages over there by where the Ritzes used to keep their lumber [on AC Hill near La Corte]. My daddy took him home. My daddy thought that he was drunk, so he threw him on the bed and then my mother was feeling real uneasy. She said, "Did you find him?" "Yeah, he's lying down but he's passed out." When my mother went to see Chelino, he was unconscious because somebody had hit him on top of the head. He had a big hole on top of his head, so my mother went and I don't know how in the world they took him to the hospital. He was big and my daddy wasn't. He threw him down. But when my mother got up to see [him] was when he started bleeding. It must have been frozen, the blood. It was where the Longfellow Inn used to be, that hospital."