Densho Digital Archive - Bob Santos Interview I (denshovh-sbob

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TI: This is all really interesting. I'm wondering, before the war, I hear stories in the Japanese community of lots of places to gamble, and with them leaving did gambling, it sounds like gambling would probably still be a popular thing during the war, but I'm curious who would run the gambling?

BS: The Filipinos took it over.

TI: Oh, so they, all the, there used to be like the Tokyo Club, all these gambling joints that Japanese --

BS: Became Filipino Improvement Club, the Bataan Club. No, that's the truth.

TI: Oh, that's interesting.

BS: Rudy, my Uncle Rudy owned the biggest gambling in the state of Washington, and it was in the basement of the old Freedman Apartments on Maynard, the Freedman Apartments owned by, it was owned by... oh god, Kaz, but I forget his last name. But it's the Freedman Apartments and that whole basement area was a gambling hall, and I would bring my dad to the Filipino Improvement Club because they had lunch every day, free lunch. But you'd go to lunch there and then he'd take all your money on the gambling tables. But even if you didn't have any money anymore you could still go there for lunch when you're, when you didn't have any money. And that establishment was owned by Rudy Santos and a Japanese businessman. They went in partnership in the late '30s, I guess, or real early '40s, to operate this gambling hall, and then when the war came, Uncle Rudy bought this guy out for just pennies on the dollar, and Rudy became a multimillionaire 'cause he, when the families came back he never sold back the partnership to this, to his ex partner. Rudy, he bought a fishing boat, he bought a cannery, he bought hotels in Pioneer Square, orchards, cherry orchards in Wenatchee. He became a multimillionaire, and he, and during the war years, that's when he started really making his money 'cause the Filipino, all the Filipinos that came up from California and everywhere else to go up to the canneries in Alaska would stop there first, right, before they went up. And then when they came back with all this money working in the canneries for two or three months, he'd take all their money then, too, and they'd go back home to California all broke.

TI: So it sounds, it was really, for that area, really boom years, The gambling, the jazz clubs.

BS: It was boom years.

TI: The other thing that I hear stories about, at least before the war, was prostitution too. There were houses of ill repute, brothels, in that area also.

BS: We lived in NP Hotel, right? And every hotel, and most of the people that lived in the hotels, SROs, single room occupancy units, were all, mostly male. Remember the Filipinos couldn't bring their brides over, so he had women that worked the hotels. I mean, they didn't have to go outside the hotel. They worked, there was two or three at this hotel. In the NP Hotel we had Marge, Dixie, and someone else.

TI: And they just had their own little room?

BS: Dixie changed her name to, remember Dixie Crosby or whatever her name was, Bing Crosby's wife? She changed her name to Dixie, and she was blonde and good lookin', and I'm ten years old and I'm saying, wow, she had this perfume and, and Dad was very popular, right? So on Saturday they'd come to my dad's room. Dad always had whiskey, bourbon, and they'd stop in my dad's room before they went to work in the building. These were call girls, prostitutes. Working women. And I loved 'em. They'd give me a couple of dimes or a couple of quarters when they had a good night. But that was, growing up in that area of town then, jazz music, these women running around, cars would drive around the block, pick up the streetwalkers. It was sort of exciting to young people, but it was terrible to the businesspeople. They couldn't get rid of this problem and once they'd complain about the crime that was in Chinatown/International District, people, the police, members of the police department and the courts would turn a blind eye because they were gettin' paid off.

TI: Probably by people like Rudy and people like that who were into gambling.

BS: Rudy paid off the, Rudy hired a off duty police officer to be his bodyguard. And so when you went to the establishment and you knocked on a door, and the peephole, that eye in the peephole was this blue eyed guy, this old guy named Gus or somebody who was a police officer, and he'd let you in. Well, he was paid off. The prosecutors were paid off, and when a new prosecutor came in -- I forgot who it was -- he cleaned up the old gambling. Rudy Santos got indicted, Danny Woo got indicted, all these, Dan Sarasol got indicted.

TI: Well yeah, when you mention Danny Woo, so Chinese community, what was going on with the Chinese community?

BS: It was a heyday for them, too, because of course, the Chinese had their own social outlets, their own fraternities, their family associations and tongs, and so they were doin' pretty well. They captured all the... well, not captured, they sort of, when the Japanese restaurants went down the Chinese would take over the restaurants. In particular, I remember Gaigoken. It was my, our favorite restaurant of all time, owned by Japanese, right? And the Chinese cook there took over the restaurant when the family had to leave. So Main Street became an expansion of the Chinatown, Chinatown area. The Golden Pheasant, restaurants like that expanded Chinatown into the old Japantown.

TI: So lots of changes happened during the war.

BS: Lot of changes were happening, yeah. Yeah. And I remember music. There was music everywhere. Where the old Mikado is, there's a couple of restaurants there now on, between Sixth and Fifth and Jackson, across from the bank, there's about two or three different restaurants there now, Red Lantern or something like that. That was the Embers. That was a big jazz club. I think it was owned by Asians. Might've been owned by Chinese, but all the performers were black. Then the next block up was the Black Elks Club, above, they were in Toda's building. That's, that's where Ray Charles had his first professional gig. Seventeen-year-old came off the bus -- you see in the movies -- lands in Seattle and he gets a job at the Black Elks Club, and he was seventeen years old then.

TI: When you say the Toda building, you mean where the optometrist is now?

BS: Across the street.

TI: Across the street.

BS: That white facade building.

TI: Got it, okay.

BS: Where JACL offices were.

TI: Okay, right there.

BS: The corner on the east side of the alley, inside of the building, on the second floor of the alley was the Black Elks Club. Then up the street, all the way up the street at Twelfth Avenue is a hot one, Black and Tan. Rocking Chair was around, closer to Yesler. And as I'd go from the apartment on Fourteenth and Spruce to be with my dad, I'd walk down Jackson, it'd take me two hours to get to my dad's 'cause I'd stop in all clubs and all the record stores and all the the black shops. At night, coming back, I would stop at the, see the old Rocking Chair, and the old, the black bouncer would let me sit on the steps, listen to the jazz 'til the boss came. Then I had to go, but they always let me sit there and listen to the music, which was downstairs. Music would come up. And they were, they were selling illegal booze and all that kind of stuff, but that's growing up in that heyday of the mid '40s, all through the '40s and into the '50s.