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AI: Well, so then after you, after five years, and you had kind of built up this program, then did you take a break from work for a while, or did you go on to another position?

EH: No, I intended to take a break, I was having some problems with my third one's attendance records and that kind of thing, and when I found out he was cutting too many classes, I thought, "Okay, it's time for me to watch the homefront." And, but, you know, and then I got active in Roosevelt PTA more and that kind of thing, and before you knew it, I was getting calls and, "Can you be on the board?" "Can you help us solve this problem?" "Can you see this and give us some recommendations?" And people were writing grants, and they didn't know how to fill a lot of the gaps. So I, I would go in and help and pretty soon that became almost a full-time job. And I decided after two years, not even quite two years, I decided, "Heavens, if I'm going to be doing this much volunteer, I might as well go back to, to working at least part-time." And even at, even at Roosevelt, I was arranging for black... they always had board meetings on weekday mornings. And black parents who had to work couldn't get to those kinds of meetings, and there was a early part of mandatory bussing kind of situation and I, I decided that this isn't fair. And Roosevelt was a popular school, so I, I made arrangements for transfer parents to have PTA sessions on their own at the YWCA on Twenty-ninth and Cherry. And the faculty was enthusiastic about it, and anybody could come. The faculty was almost 100 percent, there were almost as many faculty as there were parents, because they wanted a chance to talk to parents, and they wanted parents to feel free to ask them questions. And I knew that in a fifty board PTA, white PTA meeting at Garfield, black parents were just too threatened. They wouldn't open their mouth even if they could ask a legitimate question. When we got to the YWCA it was just amazing the fluent amount of questions that came up. And some of them were basic questions that you would expect parents to know, but they didn't. And here were parents that worked all day and they come to a 7:30 meeting, and the faculty got a big lesson, learning lesson from that. They didn't know how, "What do you mean, grade-point average? What, how, how do you get that? How do you know that?" So right then and there, fortunately there's a blackboard present, and we could demonstrate how, how is a grade-point average... "Why do they have to study so hard?" And just normal kind of basic questions. But if they didn't have the opportunity to ask... but in preschool parent meetings, there was a lot of education to do, even among parents.

AI: So then when did you decide to go back to, back to work?

EH: Oh, and then what happened was Dorothy Hollingsworth was told, Walt Hundley had moved from Central Area Motivation Program to, CAMP, to Model Cities. Model Cities was going a whole year with... gee, I can't believe it was a million dollar grant, but it was, they, the government gave them a whole year to plan in detail what, what, how they wanted this. Model Cities was supposed to be city-geared and to change the social system. And Walt was very good at this. And they corralled volunteer teams and housing, health, education, employment, and we worked every, almost every night there was some faction of that group meeting. Hot summer nights in Mount Zion's basement, fellowship hall. There was a Reverend Katagiri, I think a Hawaiian Congregational minister, who was in Chicago, and I don't know how he heard about... well, I guess he was with OEO. That's right, he was with the OEO board, but anyway, I think even in Model Cities, he was still there, because it was almost a continuum. The same population had to, had to almost carry on. And he was good, because there was sometimes very rash, hostile attitudes being exchanged, and he was able to rationalize or point up to them, where the ideas came from, why this group wants this, feels housing was a major issue.

AI: What kind of hostile expressions were made?

EH: Well, all kinds of demands. And you, you couldn't meet every demand; housing subsidies, for instance. Eventually the city housing department, City, City Housing Authority could, could take over. And there was, there had to be a lot of agreements and merging. City, City Housing Authority had to join. One of the big, apparent experiences I was aware of, and probably a lot of people were aware of, that the Asians would not participate. There were surveys taken, door-to-door, and they would not answer questions or allow people to even ask questions. They just, that whole hot summer there was not an Asian -- there was one, there was one Chinese social worker, George somebody, who was there. My sister experienced the same thing in the Bay Area. She would just come out of... I think when she graduated with her architecture degree, my mother supposedly gave her a gift to trans-, to go to Japan, but she also was needing help in traveling. My, my stepfather was seventy, seventy-five, eighty. And he was only -- I know, he was ninety, because he couldn't travel until the doctor said, "Okay, your heart trouble..." you know, I think of old age, because of old age, it subsided or something. He got permission to travel. So then my mother took him to Japan, 'cause, 'cause he hadn't been to Japan in sixty years, since he came. And my mother hadn't been to Japan for forty years. So she wrote Sara with the bait of a graduation present. And Sara enjoyed it, got a lot out of it, because she was seeing relatives for the first time, and but anyway, she, after she came back from that trip, she worked for Model Cities in the Bay Area, and she was having to go door to door to take surveys. And she had doors slammed in her face, because they, they didn't want to be identified as, with poverty programs.

AI: So, so here in Seattle, also --

EH: In the same way, (yes).

AI: -- that Chinese Americans, Japanese Americans, Filipinos --

EH: They didn't want to be considered poverty, and I, I think, basically, they didn't want to associate with blacks. And they didn't --

AI: And the anti-poverty program at that time was, was --

EH: Basically black.

AI: -- strongly associated with...

EH: You know, the black activists hadn't come forward, and write, wrote grants and plans and door-to-door surveys and we wouldn't have gotten where we were. But, oh, two or three years after I joined the Model Cities group, there was a...

<End Segment 28> - Copyright © 2004 Densho. All Rights Reserved.