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

<Begin Segment 7>

TI: Okay, so let's stay, so let's talk about the Maryknoll school then.

BS: So the Maryknoll School was, I never really got a, it was about ninety-eight percent Japanese kids and two percent Filipinos. And you know the Matsudaira family, they were center of that community, the Chiharas and the Nakamuras and, and I went, our first year at Maryknoll was kindergarten, and Eddie Laigo, Barbara Abela, and my cousin Adela, my aunt and uncle's daughter, Adela, we were the only Filipinos and the rest of the class were Japanese American. Pauline Matsudaira and Egashira and just, the names, they're all there. But in kindergarten it was pretty cool. We all sort of played together and after school we stayed on the, either the playground or on Sixteenth Avenue between Jefferson and Cherry, Sixteenth Avenue. Maryknoll was between Sixteenth and Seventeenth on Jefferson, and Cherry was a block north, and so --

TI: So sort of where the Providence Hospital is now?

BS: Yeah. So all the families, when you look back on it, Sixteenth Avenue between Cherry and Jefferson, the Japanese kids lived on the east side of Sixteenth and the Filipino families lived on the west side of Sixteenth. The Cassie family, Legasca family, the Beltran family, the Flor family, they were on the west side of Sixteenth. Across the street were the Matsudairas and the Nakamuras and then a couple others down towards the end of the street.

TI: Was there a reason why there was that line?

BS: No, it was just when, when the Beltrans first bought their home, and it was across the street from the Matsudairas, they would tell their friends that the house next door is for sale, and so they started buying homes in the neighborhood by word of mouth and it just sort of happened that way. So we lived on Fourteenth, but all my, I never, I didn't have any playmates on Fourteenth Avenue. They were all on Sixteenth. The Maryknoll school and the neighbors there, so that's where I hung out. I grew up on Sixteenth Avenue.

TI: So when you were a kid, this is before the war, what were your perceptions of the Japanese community? I mean, here you went to school where there's mostly Japanese in your class, and you live nearby, and you're playmates. What were your perceptions of the community?

BS: The only, the only thing I can remember is their rice was different. I think we cooked Chinese rice.

TI: So long grain rice.

BS: Long grain, dry rice. And I just remember that they had the other rice, and the sushi, the other rice that they made out of sushi. So that's the only thing I remember, is rice. Being a kid, and I'm talking about six years old then, so --

TI: Well, how about school? So you were, the Filipinos were, in Maryknoll, in that class, the minority.

BS: We were the minorities.

TI: I mean, you had mostly, mostly Japanese and you had a few Filipinos. How did the Japanese treat the Filipinos?

BS: We were all, we're the neighborhood kids. This is before the war, and we were all, it was just one community. Val Laigo was the leader of his class a couple of years ahead of me. I remember him being one of the leaders in the class. There was a guy named Ron Consego who was a leader in his class at Maryknoll. So the students would elect either Japanese Americans or Filipino Americans as class officers. That's the only thing I remembered growing up, pointing to these two guys as being, they're our heroes.

TI: Well how about in terms of just tension between the Filipino community and Japanese community because of the war? I mean --

BS: Well that's a little bit later on now.

TI: Okay, so at that point there was no sense...

BS: There was no issues, no problems at all. Now, that was in my kindergarten years, right, and I had my eye on Pauline Matsudaira. Even as a little kid, she was the cutest, she was the cutest kid. So we go into the first grade, from kindergarten we go into the first grade, and we have these desks where, square desks where two students sat at the same desk facing each other, and I was in back of the class and Pauline was in front of the class. And when I would go down and visit my dad, and he 'd take, my brother and I would come from, my brother would come Tacoma and we'd visit. My dad became a boxing trainer. He became a trainer, and it was a gymnasium on Seventh and Pike. Seventh Avenue Gym was on the second floor and it was run by this guy named Nate Druxman. My dad had retired. He became a trainer, and he actually trained some championship fighters. And he would bring my brother and I to the gymnasium, and after all the professionals, they would do their workouts and hitting the bag and sparring and stuff, he put the gloves on my brother and I, right, and we'd go out there in the ring and we'd just slug it out. And he was older than I, so he'd always make me cry, and the guys would throw in money, but they'd throw 'em to me, right? A dime, a nickel, a quarter, sometimes maybe even fifty cents, was big money at that time, so I scooped up all this money. And so every week that we'd visit my dad as he's a trainer and then we'd put on the gloves, course I'd cry. "Hey, Sam. Hit me." Boom. "Come on." I'd make all this money, so always had a little bit of money in my pocket, so in the first grade --

TI: [Laughs] So wait a minute, so you learned that if you got hit and cried, these other people would just throw money to...

BS: Most of them, they'd throw it to me, the poor little kid that cried. Throw it to Bobby.

TI: [Laughs] Okay.

BS: So I'd always have a pocketful of money, and when, in the first grade, when, this is before the war now, and we're sitting in class, and I'm paying off Henry Egashira to move up a desk to get closer to Pauline. I was using that money to pay my way to get closer to sit next to Pauline.

TI: 'Cause you wanted to sit, like you said, face to face.

BS: You were sitting a desk, these square desks that were opposite sides of the desk and you'd face each other. And I finally got, I finally paid my way to sit across from Pauline.

TI: So you're a first grader? You had this crush on Pauline? [Laughs]

BS: Yeah, 1941.

TI: That's funny.

BS: And it took a while to get there, right? And I'm in heaven. I can't get any work done, and I remember just drooling and all that stuff. And one day we go to school and Pauline's not there anymore, right?

TI: So we're talking about now, so December 7, 1941 happens, the bombing of Pearl Harbor.

BS: We're talking about into the 1942, February or so.

TI: But before we go to when she leaves, there is that time period after Pearl Harbor before they leave when Japan occupies the Philippines. Now did that cause tension between the Filipino community and the Japanese?

BS: It caused tension with a lot of families, a lot of the families that weren't as tight as the families on Sixteenth. The families on Sixteenth were still close. There was no nationality kind of problems. The problems were with families whose family members in the Philippines were part of the Bataan Death March and that stuff, and there was some animosity there between them and the Japanese. But that wasn't part of our community. Our community was still pretty tight, and I just don't remember, I just, you heard things or you heard from some Filipino mother or father about the problems that another Filipino family had with their neighbor, Japanese neighbor, but I never witnessed that on Sixteenth Avenue.