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TI: Because at this point he's like, yeah, in his thirties, so that's thirty, 'cause he was born around the turn of the century, so early thirties. So you have an older brother, Sammy, Sammy Junior. Any other brothers and sisters?

BS: Well, there was some, there were three that my, my mom passed away in 1935. I was born in 1934 and in 1935 she contracted tuberculosis, that bad...

TI: Disease.

BS: Disease at that time. And when I was born in (1934) she had tuberculosis then.

TI: In nineteen, you were born 1934, right?

BS: Yes, and that's when she had this disease. And she refused to leave me to go to the sanatorium at Firland, sanatorium up north. The doctors wanted to put her in a sanatorium to cure that lung disease and she, she refused to go, so you know how tuberculosis works, it just got worse, and she passed away in 1935, April of 1935 when I was about fourteen months old. So my brother and I, my dad couldn't handle both of us. We were two years, I was two years old, he was three years old, and he, being a widower then, he just couldn't handle it. So I was taken by my aunt and Uncle Joe Adriatico, who lived in the central area. My mother's sister, Auntie Toni. And my brother was taken in by our great-grandmother, Caroline Gilbert, who came from Canada and settled in Tacoma. So they split us up. My brother was raised in Tacoma and I was raised in Seattle with my aunt and uncle, and then on weekends and holidays and any time I could I would stay with my dad in Chinatown, Manila Town in the International District. And in 1945 --

TI: But going back to your dad, so where did he stay in the International District?

BS: Well, when my dad and mom first got, when they got married, we see that there's a home that they purchased through his boxing, through his winnings, in the Ravenna neighborhood. There's some old photos of this old brown house in the Ravenna neighborhood, and Sammy and Virginia and others in the family lived in that house. I think about that same time when my dad quit boxing and there was no, there was no income coming in, I think they moved to the International District. And there was a couple of photos of me and my brother. I'm a toddler and he's about two years old, and we're sitting on the stoop, or the steps, of the old James Hotel on James Street, right now where the freeway is. So they lived there until my mother passed away, I'm pretty sure.

TI: Going back to your mother's death, did your father ever talk about your mother and...

BS: Yeah. [Coughs] Excuse me. Yeah, that she was quite a beautiful woman, a great mom. It was quite a loss for him. She was very popular, a very popular woman. And you look through some of the old albums and, and you know when the Filipinos, when they came in, when they immigrated to the United States -- and a large population landed in Seattle, of course -- there were laws passed after the first wave of Filipinos came, there were laws that were passed that prohibited or limited immigration from the Philippines. So the first wave came, they're mostly guys looking for jobs, looking for a stake in the United States, then calling for their girlfriends or their wives that were in the Philippines. And when that law was passed to limit the immigration, actually the limits, then many of the women were not allowed to follow the men to the United States, so we had a population, a real male population, maybe twenty to one, males, Filipino males and Filipino females.

TI: So do you think was kind of a, what's the right word, not backlash, but a result of, like in the Japanese sort of community, in the same way as, early more bachelor men, but then later on, even when they started limiting immigration, there was a loophole called the "picture brides," that if they got married by proxy in Japan they could come over

BS: Yes.

TI: It sounded like they, they didn't allow that for the Filipino community.

BS: Right.

TI: And was that probably because the government said, well, we're not gonna let that happen again, and they just stopped that?

BS: It also could've been that maybe the Chinese and Japanese, when they came they were more productive than the Filipinos who came that were just brought in for domestic work. They, most of the Filipinos immigrated to Hawaii. They were brought in by the plantation owners to work the fields, and then from there they would hop from Hawaii to Seattle, because not only the agricultural industry but also the seafood industry was very popular then. And Asian workers, Japanese, Chinese and Filipino workers, would be sent to Alaska during the Alaska, the Alaska salmon runs, and they would work in the canneries to can the salmon. And Filipinos sort of took that industry over after World War II. Japanese and Filipinos worked side by side before the war, but after the war, or during the war when the Japanese were sent away, then the Filipinos took the industry over, the cannery worker industry over.

TI: But going back to just the governmental policy of limiting women from coming over, so do you have thoughts on why the government did that? I mean, have you done the research?

BS: You know, Dorothy and Fred Cordova, they've done a lot of research on that and it just, it's gone over my head. The reasons why, the years that that happened, it was just, it wasn't just the women, but there was an exclusion act on Filipinos in those, I don't know, early '30s until nineteen, until the war, and then in the mid '40s more of those, of the Filipinos started to immigrate into the United States.

TI: But then going back to your mother, so she was, there weren't that many women in Seattle.

BS: That's right. Filipino women, there weren't very many.

TI: Filipino women, and so she was...

BS: Yeah. Most of the, lot of the Filipino men married Native Americans or white women, which was frowned on, but they could get away with it for some reason, and many of the young kids in my era, that grew up in my era, there were very few pure Filipino kids in my era. Most of 'em were mestizo, mestizas like myself, Filipino Indian, Filipino white, in our, growing up in our neighborhoods.

TI: Okay.

<End Segment 5> - Copyright © 2011 Densho. All Rights Reserved.