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so they gave him time to get married, then he was sent over seas. It was awfully fine
when he finally got back home. It opened our eyes when we went to school after we lived
here, that people didn't live like we did, on a ranch. We all had our own dogs, we had a
passel of dogs. Mother and dad had their own dogs, actually mother had two, and each
one of us had our own dogs. Mine was a cocker spaniel, my sisters was a little doxen, but
we were heavily into German shepard's, over the years, I still have a German shepard, a
long line of German shepards. A year or so after they built, dad had this school house
built, he built a home up on the Rincon, do you know where that is? It's on the border of
the county of Ventura and Santa Barbara, the line goes right through there, and we were
the second home evey built there. So we spent summers up there and dad would come up
there on the weekends when it got beastly hot, but then I would often times come down
with him here, for some reason the heat didn't really bother me so much. I remember all
kinds of things like that, I remember one very hot day we came back from the beach
house and it was so quiet, it was the end of a weekend and we came onto the long porch
and here was this huge tarantula, I had never seen a tarantula before, I mean their huge,
and they jump!

MD: Oh I would have been screaming and running off the property.

SRL: We didn't scream, dad always said, he hated a screaming woman, we learned you don't
scream unless it's for real.

MD: That's probably a good thing though .

SRL: I'll never forget that tarantula,jumping down the porch.

MD: Did you move it away and off the porch? Did your dad to that?

SRL: Well it was on a screened in porch, that porch on the other side is still screened in, so we
kind of opened the door for him and let him get out. But you know, we were taught about
snakes, and thinks like that, our workers always had snake bite kits with them, so we
were aware of things that could happen, and we knew what to do. We were also taught to
drive by the time we were ten, for emergencies. And we learned to drive on a, gosh I
can't remember the name of the tractor, the tractors with the big wheels on it and you
could get up to twenty miles an hour on the thing, but it had a standard shift, which
everybody had a standard shift in those days, none of these fancy ones that we have now.
So we all learned to drive. We also learned to shoot. Not pistols, we shot rifles. So you
know, we were just aware of what was around us.

MD: So tell me what school was like, because I know you had your schooling here and then
you went to prep school and everything. How was school here, being home schooled with
your siblings and then as I understand with your school teachers kids.

SRL: We had a marvelous, wonderful teacher, Veronica Casey, she ended up being one of the
head of the education in Denver, Colorado. She taught all three ofus and once a week we
had a French teacher come and once a week an art teacher. Von, we called her Von, she

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