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This account is drawn from the reviewed working transcript of the interview recorded on . The interview was conducted by Ciara Brady and Gabrielle Gousie, recorded by Joe Brady, and observed by Oliver Brady. Jim is James Joseph Brady in a wartime newspaper clipping quoted during the interview; the family generally calls him Jim. Ramona identifies herself as Ramona Ethel Quinn Brady. Times in the quotation table are offsets in the interview recording.
The interview is an oral-history source, not a fully verified biography. Names, dates, places, and wartime details should be checked against family records before being treated as definitive.
Interview recording
1994-03-05_brady-interview.webm — full interview (~2 hours). Timestamp links in the quotation table open this recording at the cited moment.
Ramona Brady
Ramona's story begins on the northern plains. She says she was born at home near Timberlake and Glen Cross, South Dakota, on . Her early world was rural and practical: family farms, windmills that pumped water for household use and cattle, water carried into the house, and no electric laundry equipment. Her maternal grandparents had made a claim on government land, and her mother had been raised there.
The Depression changed that world. Ramona remembers blowing sand and failed crops. When she was ten, three related families left South Dakota for Washington in cars. Her parents, five children, and a small utility trailer carried everything they owned. The family found work where it could: living in tents while the men picked apples in eastern Washington, and later navigating rented housing and very little money. She recalls her father borrowing five dollars from her Uncle Gene and the family living on that amount for a week. Her account is matter-of-fact rather than self-pitying; hardship is present, but so are the resourcefulness and persistence that got the family through it.
Washington became the setting for her adolescence and adult life. She retained a strong memory of leaving St. Joseph's Catholic School in Timberlake, and later described work that moved from cannery labor and business college into office jobs at Bellingham Ironworks during the war years and Griggs Bookstore. The transcript also preserves a small identity story: family called her "Mona" when she was young, but she asked them to use Ramona as she grew older.
Her path crossed Jim's in Seattle. While boarding at St. Teresa's, she was asked to a fireman's ball by a friend connected to a fireman. Jim arrived with the friend, and, as Ramona puts it, that was when they met. Their exchange has the affectionate rhythm that runs through the whole interview: Jim offers a joking "lonely hearts club" version, and Ramona immediately corrects the record.
Ramona describes family life without romanticizing it. Raising children meant taking each day as it came. She mentions their son John's early bladder surgery as an example of the difficulties parents can meet without anticipating them. Asked about the worst time of her life, she does not isolate one event. Instead, she says that the family had trials and offers her central conclusion: "from trials we grow." Her oral history is therefore a migration and survival story, but also a statement of values—faith, family continuity, and endurance.
Jim Brady
Jim's story starts in Tacoma, where he says he was born on . He grew up at 1031 North Anderson Street in Tacoma's north end, in a family headed by Oliver and Mary Brady. His father worked as a fireman, providing relative stability during the Depression. Jim remembers his own childhood as fortunate: nearby woods gave the children room to play, while his father's steady employment protected the household from the worst deprivation. Even that stability had limits; Jim recalls city workers sometimes being paid in warrants that had to be discounted to obtain cash.
Jim's early memories carry both warmth and an awareness of family hardship. He remembers warming himself by a wood stove after being out in the snow. He also tells of his father, whom he had considered "a tough, hard guy," crying after his own mother died. Later, reflecting on the loss of his parents, Jim says that a person remains young while both parents live and begins to age once they are gone. These passages frame his story as one shaped by family loyalty as much as by work and public events.
Like his father, Jim became connected to the fire service. He worked in a butcher shop while in high school, entered the Navy during the Second World War, and returned to the Tacoma Fire Department shortly after discharge. He says he served for three years, two months, and twenty-eight days. He trained as a carpenter's mate and in Navy firefighting at Pearl Harbor. A contemporaneous clipping read during the interview identifies him as a carpenter's mate, third class, USNR, and places him aboard the battleship USS New Mexico.
The wartime portion is the most severe section of Jim's account. At Lingayen Gulf in the Philippines, he recalls a suicide plane striking the ship's bridge and killing officers, a Time correspondent, British observers, and other men. He then describes another attack at Okinawa in which, he says, about sixty people died. From a fire-drill station deep in the ship, he was later sent up to collect the dead and clear the aftermath. He recounts this directly, alternating vivid detail with the understated humor present elsewhere in the interview.
After the war, fire-department work gave Jim the continuity that his father's job had provided during his own childhood. His meeting with Ramona and their shared family life complete the other half of his story. His skepticism that future generations will spend time with old photographs and tapes is especially poignant because the interview itself preserves the stories he doubted they would hear.
Their shared story
The Bradys describe different routes into the same family. Ramona came west as a child amid Depression-era farm failure and insecure work. Jim grew up in Tacoma with more security, then entered a war that exposed him to concentrated loss. Both remember work as a duty rather than an achievement to boast about: farm and harvest work, office work, the Navy, and the fire department.
Their courtship appears in a simple Seattle social setting—the fireman's ball—and their later family life is described through children, illness, photographs, teasing, and the care of extended relatives. The interview does not supply a complete marriage date or a full chronology of every move. What it does show clearly is their shared practice of turning memories into family instruction: Ramona names growth through trials; Jim offers humor, skepticism, and observations about parents and aging. Together, they give their grandchildren a record of migration, work, war, loss, and attachment.
Selected interview quotations
All quotations retain the reviewed transcript's wording. A duration spanning more than one segment includes the small gaps between adjacent transcription segments. Click a timestamp to play the recording from that point.
Verbatim quotations cited to transcript segment identifiers
Speaker
Quote
Timestamp
Duration
Source
Ramona
I was actually born at home, so I think I was born between Timberlake and Glen Cross.
And there were times when they didn't get paid that they got what they called warrants. Instead of giving them money, they'd give this warrant saying that the warrant was worth so much money.