Densho Digital Archive
Densho Visual History Collection
Title: Orest Kruhlak Interview
Narrator: Orest Kruhlak
Interviewers: Roger Daniels (primary); Tom Ikeda (secondary)
Location: Seattle, Washington
Date: August 3, 2010
Densho ID: denshovh-korest-01-0002

<Begin Segment 2>

TI: But may I make a suggestion? Why don't we -- this is fascinating, your career you went over is incredibly distinguished and you went through it so fast. I actually want to go back...

OK: Okay.

TI: And actually start at the beginning. And why don't you tell us when you were born.

OK: Oh, okay. I was born in, on October 15, 1940, in Edmonton, Alberta, and did all of my education in Edmonton. Primary, secondary, until college when I went off to Western.

RD: Were your parents immigrants or were they...

OK: Yeah, my parents, interestingly, it's actually a bit of an interesting story. My dad came to Canada in 1928. My mother did not come with him. I had an older brother who had been born in Ukraine, and my mother and my older brother stayed in Ukraine when my dad left. She wouldn't leave her mother because two of her brothers had left, and were never heard from again. They had gone, one they believe went to France, another one they think went to Germany, never were ever heard from again. So when my dad said they were immigrating to Canada, her mother just would not hear of her leaving, 'cause she was afraid she would lose another child. My mother, her mother died in the summer of 1939. My mother got out on the last boat that left Poland before the invasion, and came to Canada, arrived in Canada in the fall of 1939, and joined my father in Alberta. My father had joined a relative of ours and worked on farms and other things in the eleven years that they were apart. They were no, my mother was no sooner there than about fifteen months later, he left and went to work on the building of the Alaska Highway that the American government started to build through Canada. And so he was gone again for a good part of the early '40s, the beginning of the war years. Both my parents passed on in the 1980s at very ripe old ages, late eighties.

TI: Going back to your father, can you tell me his name?

OK: Oh, okay. His name was Michael Kruhlak. My mother was Katherine Kruhlak. I have a twin brother whose name is Olesh. In Ukrainian it's Oleh. They, when my father went to register his birth, he gave 'em that name and the citizenship or the birth, vital statistics people in Alberta went from Oleh to Olesh. So his name was spelled O-L-E-S-H, and it was a matter of amusement within the family because there's no relationship between Olesh and Oleh. Both my name and his name were, we were named after two Ukrainian princes who were twins, and so when we were born as twins, my parents decided we should have those names. The interesting thing about the names is in Alberta, they're, my name is very common. You see and hear lots of Orests. Once you leave Alberta, even in Canada, it becomes very much a strange name. In the United States, it's a rarity. You rarely hear anybody with that name, even though in eastern United States there's a substantial Ukrainian population in New York and parts of Ohio, but I never have run into an Orest who was an American citizen. My older brother Terry, we've always, used to kid around in the family, how come he got such a simple name when I've spent not only my life spelling my last name, I've spelled, have spent it spelling my first name most of the time. He was fourteen years older than I was, and so when my father was away when we were, shortly after we were born, and until he came back from working on the highway, he essentially was my father. He raised me as much as my father did. We had a, you know, in some ways a trying childhood because immigrants into Alberta at that time were not exactly looked upon with great favor, particularly if you were of Ukrainian or any east European, they had favorite names for us like "bohunks" and stuff like that. But all in all, I didn't suffer in any significant way from racial or ethnic discrimination, grew up in a very, very, what today we would refer to as a multicultural neighborhood. There was everybody and anybody in the place where I grew up. And I think that formed a large part of who I became as an individual.

<End Segment 2> - Copyright © 2010 Densho. All Rights Reserved.