Interview with my Grandmother- Ruby 

Ruby lives in the small town of Earlimart California.  She is 82, has three sons, and lives on her farm that she owns and operates with the help of her family.  Though she has lived in Earlimart a long time it is not only town that she has lived in and not the smallest either.  Growing up she lived in a small town east of the city of Los Angeles called Colton in the state of California.  She lived there with her mom, dad, and brother for around eighteen years.  She was born there in the year 1926 and lived during the time that the great depression hit America.  Colton now is a thriving city that has grown significantly over the years due to a major rail line that leads to many of California's ports, but it used to be a small town that she could feel safe to walk around in and where she knew many of the people walking or driving by when she went to and from school.  In her own words Colton was the place she was born and raised, from birth to graduation.

 My Name is Ruby.  I am 82 and I am Michael's grandmother.  I live in small farming town named Earlimart, California.  I was raised in Colton, California – born there and raised. I lived in that town from birth until graduation from High School. I started in Grand Terrace south of Colton in first grade then I moved and I went to third grade in Wasco and then back to Colton and all the way through high school. My family included my mom and dad and I had one brother, he was two years older and he was named Frank. We lived at one time on the West side and then we moved from the West side to the East side of Colton and I went to Washington School.  It was just a small residential area, we had a grocery store across the street from us.

I was born in ’26 and graduated in ’43 so it was a much smaller town, I would say maybe four or five thousand people lived in the town at the time.  The city had a very small downtown area. I think that there was just about one main street.  I don’t remember how many buildings were down there and they were just regular stores.  There weren't any town hall buildings that I know of in the town.  All different kinds of people lived in the town, mostly Caucasian.  I think that there was some, very few, black people in our high school and I don’t remember any Hispanic people.

Growing up in a small town was not anything like Los Angeles, it was a safe place we felt like we could walk anywhere.  There were a lot of people that we didn’t know but they weren’t any people that we were afraid of. 

During the Great Depression my Dad and Mom were having a hard time making a living so we moved to Wasco and they picked cotton for my Grandpa when I was in the third grade. During that time period we lived in a tent, a great big tent with a hole in the top and we had cots to sleep on. That was the job they had during the depression.  After the depression my Dad was an electrician. He worked for a man named Quinn, Quinn Electric, and we finally got back on our feet.  But we always had food, Mom and Dad always made a good home and Dad had built this house that we lived in and we had clean clothes and good food. I was about 11 years old when my dad built the house.  He was the carpenter, the electrician, plumber and everything.  It was a two bedroom, a bath in between, with a walk through closet from one bedroom to the other.  It had a kitchen and then a living dining room together with a great big back porch where my brother’s bed was.   The wringer washer and the tubs were out there.

I didn’t spend a lot of time in the shops because we did not have the money to shop that much. When we shopped it was for something special and we would go to San Bernardino to shop.  There was quite a nice shopping area there.  Most people were limited money wise, we had our first telephone when I was in High School and we had our first refrigerator when I was in the sixth grade.

There were several grammar schools- now called elementary schools, a Junior High and, a High School in Colton.  I went to fourth grade at the Grant School and I went to 6^th grade at the Washington School. It was a regular five days a week public school. As far as I remember they were pretty nice schools. We walked from the east side of the town where we lived to Junior High and again to High School.  So there were six years where we walked about a mile across town to school.  The High School had about 400-500 students and there were I would say about 15 to 20 students per class.  Some subjects that they taught were spelling, writing, math, and arithmetic. In High School I took business, bookkeeping, typing, shorthand and others.

When we grew up in our free time we played family games- we roller skated, we played kick the can, we played with the little cars outside, jacks, marbles, hopscotch, jumping rope, and my brother played baseball so I caught the ball for him some- and that’s about it.  I was not any sports teams or in any major clubs, though our high school had sports teams.  I remember going to football games, which were a major event, but I didn’t take part in any sports. We were really school spirited but I don’t remember who we played against but I remember we were always excited about the football games and most of the town turned up.

They had, in the park, they had sports and a swimming pool. I don’t remember whether they had swimming tournaments but I remember that they had baseball because my brother was a member of the baseball team and we used to go watch that.  That’s about the only entertainment we had besides our games.

One of the events that happened was that when my brothers friend Copper lived across the street from us with an aunt and my uncle and my brother went hunting, and Copper went hunting with them and he jumped a canal and the gun butted on the concrete and it shot him and killed him.  They found him in the canal.   It was a narrow canal, like a concrete ditch.

It was during the war when I graduated.  A lot of the boys in high school didn’t finish school, they joined the service and went to war and some of them didn’t come back.  It was a very, very scary time for everybody and for all of us in high school that knew the boys that went and didn’t come back and for my brother who went.  He went to the service when he graduated and then he went overseas.  Anyway, I graduate in’43 from high school and then I worked 18 months in the air depot out at San Bernardino after that.

Today the town is larger the town now goes south to Riverside and connects with San Bernardino and it probably goes towards LA to another town. The freeway runs through it.  I think it is the 66, I’m not sure if it is 66.  I enjoyed growing up here and have had many good experiences.

Interviewed by Michael Lessley