<Begin Segment 28>

BK: It sounds like you worked a lot of the, a lot of the time then, though it was at night. It seems, though, most of your adult life...

MH: I've worked all my life.

BK: Can you tell us about some of your other jobs?

MH: Oh, let's see. I know when Beverly was still young, my sister got a job washing walls in the White Henry Stewart Cobb, in the Skinner building, and she said, "Oh, Mary, the money's really good." And at that time it was like $4.75 an hour and that was good money. So, she said it really isn't that bad, so I went down and I worked there for maybe three or four years, washing walls. And to this day I can't believe I actually did it, I mean, we get on double ladders because we couldn't reach the ceilings on some of them, or do the stairwells. I think of it now, I look down a stairwell, I can't believe I got up there and washed that... but at that time there was no health thing, that they worried about us. And there were two crews, my sister and myself and another girl -- two other girls that did it. And we used to do the dumbest things, yet there was no law against it. Where now I'm sure they'd never allow it. Especially when you had to carry your own buckets and your own ladders, kind of embarrassing.

BK: So how long did you do that?

MH: About four years. And then at that time we were trying to get a boy. We had to wait four and a half years for Rodney. And he was being born in Reno, we knew that, and Yoshi Kanemori, if it was to be a girl, she was to get it, if it was a boy we were going to get it. And, of course, we drove the Children's Home crazy, they said they'd never do that again. Because we kept calling... "Is it born yet?" "Is it a boy?" "Is it a girl?" And they said they learned a lesson, they'll never do that again. And we were lucky enough to get him.

BK: Right, right. So when was that?

MH: Rodney's forty-five, will be forty-five so it was '53, I think. And then I, even though then I was working at Trader Vic's, and Trader Vic's -- and when I was working at the wall washing, they were having a, opening Trader Vic's to cocktail waitresses, the first that they would ever hire in Seattle. And I happened to go, and I happened to meet a friend that I went to school with, a Chinese girl. And I had already put in a few weeks at Canlis, just on a in-between type thing, and so I got hired right away. 'Course, I was young and I could remember a lot of things, so I did that for about five years. And then I went to, I worked about a year at a place called Polynesia as a cocktail waitress. And then my good friend, Alice Sakura Water, was working at the Space -- she was one of the first to be hired, the Space Needle had just opened. So she said, "Mary, you gotta come. You've got to come." So I went and applied and they wanted me to quit my job and come right now. And I said, "I can't do that." And they said, "We're opening, we need you." And I said, "No, I can't." So I said I'll be there in a week, so I was a week late of being an original. Which I feel, you know, I have had to live with that all through the time I worked at the Space Needle. I worked there twenty years, I finally got third in line, but boy, it sure took a long time.

BK: You mean, so there was some status to being an original?

MK: Oh yeah. And I never was considered an original, but I was a week late.

BK: Isn't that amazing?

MK: And I just laugh now that I think about it. In fact, they had a fiftieth or fortieth reunion, but I wasn't invited because I wasn't an original. [Laughs]

BK: Unbelievable.

MH: Uh-huh.

<End Segment 28> - Copyright © 1998 Densho. All Rights Reserved.