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TI: So when your parents weren't working in Friday Harbor, you mentioned that they were doing things in Seattle?

HL: Yeah, my mother pretty much stayed home, but when my brother was born they couldn't stop the hemorrhaging. She was really quite sick for a long time, so she was, she was not the strongest person, so she stayed home pretty much and took care of the kids. And my dad worked down at the card parlor.

TI: But then eventually they got the Sprague Hotel?

HL: Yes.

TI: Is this the one on Yesler?

HL: That's right.

TI: Okay, that's kind of triangular?

HL: That's right.

TI: So describe where that is.

HL: Well that's right at the top of the hill, Yesler hill when you come up, and we lived there and one corner was City Light, and then the cable car ran right in front, and then when they put up the, what is it, the housing project, they tore the whole thing down, but then across the street from us was a row house and all my friends lived there. I mean, it was, we used to play kick the can in the middle of the street. And, and then there was this one house up on the hill which had a large yard, and during the summer we'd all go up there and there would be close to like twenty, thirty kids up there, and we'd play cards, or one time we decided we'd dig a tunnel and we started digging in their yard, and then we were, they were told us, we were told we can't do that, that it was not our property to dig up, but we had quite a tunnel dug. [Laughs]

TI: Now, when you say thirty kids, were they all Japanese kids?

HL: Uh-huh, yeah. All the neighborhood kids, all the kids in that neighborhood were practically Japanese.

TI: How about other races? Were there any other races that...

HL: Not in our immediate... and then when we went to school we went to Bailey Gatzert, and that was ninety-nine percent Japanese, one percent Chinese, and a fraction, I think there was just a couple of Caucasians.

<End Segment 4> - Copyright © 2011 Densho. All Rights Reserved.