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AI: Well, just before our break, we were talking about elementary school. And you had mentioned that after coming back to Seattle from Chicago, that you started attending Colman grade school. And I wondered if you could just describe Colman grade school a little bit, and just anything that you, that stands out about your experience in elementary school.

RS: Well, of course, now, in retrospect, I make certain associations, I think, with certain experiences. And I think that what I realize about elementary school now, that I didn't realize at the time, was partially due, I suppose, to the location of, of Colman grade school, as well as the other two schools I went to, Washington Junior High and Garfield, that they were sort of survival schools. There was a lot of fighting. And I remember, it seemed like -- 'course you didn't fight much when you were in the first grade -- but I remember the fifth and sixth graders always seemed to be fighting. And then I realized that there was something really significant about that activity that... I almost felt like I had to get into a fight by the time I was in the fifth or sixth grade, because that's what one did. Except, I also remember that it was always the girls that were winning, because the girls were more physically developed than the boys were and it seemed like all the guys that were getting in fights were getting beat up by the biggest girls in the same grades. But that's actually one of my, my biggest associations, and also one of my biggest associations of junior high and high school as well, were the sort of, the physical prowess and the kind of, sort of manliness, that was encouraged at the time. So there were things about the time period that perhaps sticks out in my mind more than school, itself.

I think about, one of the things that just came to me a few, a few weeks ago, because the name Ron Santo came up on radio. And Ron Santo is, was an athlete that went to Franklin High School at the time that I was in Garfield. And we were the same age. He was one year younger than me. And I read in the paper that he was eligible to go into Baseball's Hall of Fame. And he was an athlete when he was here in Seattle, but because we were the same age, we used to play around together all the time. And I remember I had a very low opinion of him, and I'm sure he did of me, as well, because we were always getting into fights. And I remember one fight that we had -- and this was during the time period of elementary school -- that we got into a wrestling match and we had each other in a headlock. And I swear that we were both in that position for two hours without moving, just to see who would give up the first, and we were both very, very stubborn. And I remember, it seemed very shortly after that at Halloween when he came over to the house trick-or-treating and he rang the doorbell, and I opened up the, opened the door, and it was Ron. And he said, "Trick-or-Treat." And I said, "Just a minute." I went into my room and I got what were called torpedoes, and they looked like wads of tin foil, and they rattled, and you would throw these and upon impact they would explode. And they were very lethal. And at the time were legal. They were soon outlawed after that. But when Ron Santo saw me come out with two of these he took off running. And I threw one at him and it hit him in the ankle and exploded. And about ten minutes later the doorbell rang again. And it was Ron Santo and his mother. And his mother was furious, and said, "Where's your mother?" And my mom was right there and came out and said, "What's the problem?" And says, "Look what happened." And Ron's socks were burnt and his skin was burned on the basis of me throwing this torpedo at him. And boy, I remember getting into so much trouble. And I remember Ron just laughing behind his mother's back. And to my recollection, that might have been the last time I saw him. But I used to hear about him all the time, because he was this famous athlete, in both football and baseball. And then he went on to a professional contract and played for years for the Chicago Cubs and established all sorts of records for a third baseman and is now being considered for the Hall of Fame. So that's one of my, my recollections of grade school days was Ron Santo, as well as all of the other kids in the neighborhood. I think I was starting to gain some sense of neighborhood and remember very clearly all the people that were living in the neighborhood.

And I remember building scooters with bicycles, roller skates, and activities like that, and going down to the corner grocery store on Judkins Street, Twenty-sixth and Judkins. And I remember walking up to Panzika's grocery store and buying pastries and candy and things like that, and these long bouts of playing these games like jintori and "Kick the Can" and all the neighborhood kids would play down on Norman Street between Twenty-fifth and twenty-sixth because it was very flat there. And it was a very mixed, biracial group of people, although mostly Asians and Italians. And, yeah, I could clearly remember what houses that those kids lived in and, in fact, just a few weeks ago, when I was up here, a few months ago, when I was up here last, I was down at Sun Ya, eating, and I ran into, I wanna remember, I forget her name now, but Nakano, was it Jean Nakano, or Ellen? But anyway, I hadn't seen her probably in fifty years, it's amazing. And we quickly remembered those days and all of that, and started talking about people from various houses, that lived around her.

And I also remember collecting. It was the first time that I recalled actually having this obsession to claim ownership in a lot of things, same things. And one of them was bottle caps. And we used to get bottle caps and scrape them on the sidewalk until all the paint came off. And then we would shine and polish them until they'd be almost like chrome. And then we'd pull the corks out, put them over our clothes and put the corks back in and wear them like badges. And we'd have them all over our bodies like that. And I remember collecting them and having more than anybody else. And then, I also remember bubble gum cards, collecting them. And they weren't just baseball cards at the time. They were all sorts of different kinds of little gimmicky things that you can collect from bubble gum. So those were my, the seeds were planted in terms of collecting, very early, and then comic books and all different kinds of comics. And I remember one thing unique about my comic book collection was that I seldom read them, but I knew exactly what I wanted because of the way they looked. And now, in retrospect, there was something consistent with most of those comics that I collected. And happens to be the way my paintings look. So there was a connection, a graphic connection very early on between what I preferred to look at visually and what I preferred to make work look like today.

AI: What were some of your early favorites?

RS: Dick Tracy. Chester Gould is the one that did the Dick Tracy comics, and I liked the Nancy and Sluggo, and a lot of the Disney. And I think those are the ones that my work looks most like today.

<End Segment 11> - Copyright © 2003 Densho. All Rights Reserved.