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FM: Now, I want to tell you about the organization of the personnel because, and here, we're talking both about the occupational organization, but also about the social organization of the relations. The A&P, as I say, company, at Waterfall had this contract with the Nakat Packing Company to put out cans of salmon. The Nakat Packing Company ran, I think, four canneries in Southeastern Alaska: Waterfall, which was ours, Hidden Inlet which is farther out, and Union Bay, another, and a fourth one that I don't remember. In any event, the Nakat Packing Company was considered to be one of the more elite of the packing companies in the sense that the layout was good, and the cans were thought to be well-packed and so on. There are, I would say that there are salmon packing companies I've seen in traveling around Southeastern Alaska, whose canned salmon I would prefer not to eat, they were so miserable-looking. But I think our cannery was, as I say, considered to be a model cannery and we were always out trying to set records of one kind or another as an indication of the kind of status we would have among canneries.

Now, the head of this company had... the white personnel had its own lodging area, separate from the Asians and from the Native Americans, and one of the choice areas, so to speak, nice view of the ocean or sea from where their lodging was. And they had a very attractive dining room compared to ours, individual living spaces and so on. The head of the Nakat Packing Company seemed to spend more time at Waterfall than at Hidden Inlet or Union Bay, but every now and then he would take off for these other canneries. Anyway, we saw him from time to time. And they would... they traveled by boat. They had their own yacht which would come in, or leave. The vice president, who spent even more time at Nakat... I mean, at Waterfall, was a man named Bushman. And I remember that his name was well-known here in the Seattle area, in fact, my wife knew his daughter because of the fact that she took piano lessons from the same teacher that my wife had. And then he had sons, one of whom, as it happened, was killed in a fishing boat accident during the season, one of the seasons when I was there. So the Bushman family was, often spent a fair amount of time at Waterfall. It was attractive enough to have them there.

And these were the people at the top. The, at least, I think the Nisei whom I knew looked upon these as people who were way up there on top, doing whatever they were. We didn't understand fully, but they were the top dogs in this system; and in a sense, we knew it. Then there was a white foreman, overseeing the whole canning operation, including, I suppose, relating to the fishing, the fishing boat crews that would bring the fish in as well. He had, in a sense, the management of the whole operation in mind. And I got, because of the kind of function I began to serve with respect to the filling machine that I described earlier, I got to know him pretty well. He and I had occasions to relate to each other, which I will tell about later, a little bit. And he oversaw this crew of mechanics and so on and the head mechanic I described before, who was trying to upgrade the canning machine, related most closely with the foreman. I could see that there were hierarchies of relationship that led straight down, in a sense, from the top dog through, down to us as low workers on the scene.

<End Segment 9> - Copyright © 2003 Densho. All Rights Reserved.