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some. But we would visit them and bring gifts for the children and all that kind of stuff.
Our own Christmas, well it was, we'd all get up and go into mom's and dad's bedroom
and climb in bed, they had a big, big bed, and we'd sing carols in our squeaky voices, and
then dad would go down and bring up the stockings, so we'd do the stocking and that was
always great fun, taking turns around to go through the stockings. But nobody could go
into the living room where the Christmas tree was until after breakfast. So we would rush
down to breakfast, which was always nice, and it was lovely. There was always, in those
days, there was the gramophone with records, which was marvelous, and so we always
had some music and that was Christmas. And it kind of went on all day, but before
Christmas, the weekend before Christmas, was our traditional open house for mother and
dads far flung friends, not just the ones here in Ventura County but friends would come
from Santa Barbara and Los Angeles for Christmas. They'd come at noon and be there
until the small hours, and we kids were all sent off to bed, but of course we peeked, and
so it was always a big thing. That went on really until WWII.

MD: Were the people that came to the parties, were they other fellow ranchers?

SRL: Yes, yes, mostly ranchers. And so as far as having friends to play with, when we had our
school here, there were the four ofus, my older brother, my sister and myself and my
younger sister. Boo and I are only a year and two weeks apart, so we are almost like
twins, we are both in April. But were both different, cause I'm an Aries, and she's
whatever the next one is. I can remember mother saying, "Get out of the house and stay
out!" so we get out of the house and we'd confer, well what are we going to do? Well we
could climb the trees, we could hike across the river, we could saddle up the horses
depending what age we were, or we could play games, and we could roller skate, dad had
build this cement here and so we kept busy. I never remember being bored about
anything sitting around not knowing what to do. But then later when we went to grammar
school in Fillmore, I was in second grade, Boo was in first, and of course then we had all
kinds of friends that would come. But you know people, friends would come and stay the
weekend, you just weren't rushing all these miles back and forth, they would come and
later on when we were going to school in Santa Barbara even more so, the friends and
sometimes their parents would come and we would just play kick the can or capture the
flag, all kinds of wonderful games.

MD: Oh I'm sure you could have had wonderful games of hide and seek.

SRL: Oh gosh yes! And croquet, we always had a big croquet game going, whacking away, and
that kind of thing, but we would do a lot of hiking on both sides of the valley, up into the
hills and the back canyons, and that was great. And then sometimes when there was a
group of us, dad would hook up this wonderful coach that he found, and hook it up to a
tractor, the kind with wheels, not tracks and we would tear around the ranch in this coach,
it was such fun. A cloud of dust, Hi Ho Silver! That was fun. Of course we did spend a
lot of time in this big walnut tree, there was a big heavy rope that came from the very top
of the tree all the way to the ground and we could get on that and swing from one big
branch way over to another little branch. And if you notice a lot of the lower branches go
out and they're supported, and we learned to walk and run up and down those branches,

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