Ruth: What did you find when you got there? What was the state of the land and buildings?
Faygele: Decrepit old house. It had one electric light, in the kitchen, and when it rained water dripped down the string. We-- I turned the pump on. We didn't get water. Called Patrick in a panic, "The well is dry!" Not being a country boy I never thought, "Drop a rock down," you know. The water is twelve feet down. It was right at the mouth of the Elwha River, the water table is right there. It was-- We had to bring in a wood stove, a wood [hard to hear] stove. We did do some electrical work. We discovered the propeller on the pump just needed replacing.
It just kept going and going and growing.
Ruth: You told me over the phone about how your parents, when dealing with Japanese-American internment, were atypical in that they talked about it.
Jody: Oh, yeah. When I was growing up--and I don't know why this image always sticks in my mind, but I remember sitting in front of the--we had a fireplace while they still lived in [a former] house-- and my mom would be sitting in a chair and I'd be sitting on the floor or something, and she would tell me stories about being in the camps. And she always blamed the camps for killing my grandfather because he had trich-- uh, the thing you get from pork -- and then he ended up with stomach cancer. So he had a lot of problems and she said that when they were in the camps they couldn't give him the right diet and all that so-- She doesn't blame the camps that he had stomach cancer, but he died sooner because he didn't get the right care and the right food.
So I grew up with a lot of anger against white people. It was like, oh this big blob of white people did this to my parents and my grandparents. My father talked about it all the time too, and in fact he would even, when we got older-- My sister was a teacher, so then he would even go to her school and do talks and be a guest speaker, and show some slides and talk about it. But when I was young, it was like, you can't trust white people. This could happen so you got to watch out, you got to stick with the community and watch out for yourself, and all this. And the anger part is like, how dare they do that to my family?
Ruth: Do you know what you were looking at, or reading, or listening to, that made you aware that there was that [art] world out there that you could join?
Don: Yeah. I saw, probably, a picture of some Abstract Expressionists and especially, oh--the one who splashed everything on the--Jackson Pollack, of course. So then I did a painting similar to that in 1952, I think, and I entered it at the art pavilion at the Puyallup Fair and everything there was typical "calendar art," you might say, and here was this Abstract Expressionist thing and it just caused this sensation. People just could not believe and they just actually laughed at it. In fact, I have it here [voice fades as he moves away] I used to [?] I still have it.
Ruth: Oh wow.
Don: And I called it "Rainy City," sort of like looking through the city through a windshield, and--
Ruth: I'll describe it for the tape. There's a black background with splashes of--and streaks of--white and blue.
Don: It was very definitely Pollack-influenced. I don't remember if that's true or not, but I'm sure I saw a Pollack and so-- That was really a sensation and all. The people who worked at the Fair exhibit were inundated with people saying, "Why is that in there?" They were just outraged. So I was very proud of that, even though [it was an influence ?]. But that was the beginning of-- And then after that more people began to get into abstract art, so it was more common. But in '52 this was outrageous. That was a lot of fun.