Densho Digital Archive - Bob Santos Interview I

<Begin Segment 1>

TI: Okay, so Bob, I start with just the date and where we are, who else is in the room, so today's June 2, 2011. On camera is Dana Hoshide, observing is Casey Ikeda, and I'm the interviewer, Tom Ikeda, and today we're with Bob Santos. And so Bob, I'm just gonna start, why don't you first just tell me when and where you were born?

BS: I was born in Seattle, Harborview Hospital, to my parents, Sammy and Virginia Santos.

TI: So let's first talk about your father.

BS: Okay.

TI: So why don't you tell me, so Sammy Santos, and tell me where he was born and how he came to the United States?

BS: Okay. Now it's gonna be a little long 'cause there's a little story to tell.

TI: Yeah. No, tell. Please, tell me the story.

BS: So Macario Santos was born at the turn of the century, and he was born in the Philippines in an area called Jose Rizal Province, which is metropolitan Manila. He was a pretty restless guy, and when he was seventeen he ran away from home and he joined the U.S. Navy. So as a seaman and on his way to San Diego, he got into an altercation with a junior officer, a naval officer, and he actually got in a fight and I guess he beat the guy up. When they came into San Diego he jumped ship before they could bring him to the brig, or to the military jail.

TI: Okay, so make sure I understand, so because of that kind of fight with the officer he was gonna be thrown in the brig probably, and so as they're in, they've docked...

BS: They're coming in, yeah.

TI: He just jumps ship, literally jumps ship?

BS: Yeah, when they got near, or when they were docking in San Diego, for some reason he got away and he jumped ship. That's what I hear. I don't know how long, and he never told me how long he was in the brig, but it must've been a year or two years, and when he got out he didn't have any skills.

TI: Okay, so making sure, so he jumped ship and then they caught him?

BS: No, not yet.

TI: Okay, so how, but he was in the brig, though?

BS: No, he was in the brig on the ship.

TI: On the ship, okay.

BS: But once, for some reason he broke loose and he got away. He always says, "I jumped ship. I jumped the ship." So he didn't have any skills, but he did like to fight. He was a scrapper, so he started hangin' out at the gym, at the boxing gyms in San Pedro, and he became pretty good. The promoters would put him into preliminary fights. There'd be a main event and then two or three preliminary fights, four, four, five, six rounders. And he would beat all his opponents in the preliminary fights.

TI: So I'm curious, when you say San Pedro, this is down in Los Angeles, in that area right --

BS: This is in San Pedro, as it were.

TI: So there was a large Japanese community down there. Did he fight against Japanese? Was that part of...

BS: I don't, I don't know that. I know he, in his old clippings, most of the names were American, white fighters, maybe black fighters. I didn't see any Asian fighters. But he got to be pretty good and he became a main eventer. He worked his way up to eight rounds and ten round, ten round matches. And he fought under the name of Sammy Santos. When he jumped ship he had changed his name, so he just changed his first name to Sammy Santos. And at that time, of course, there's a lot of boxers, a lot of prize fighters who were Filipino. Some Japanese, some Chinese, not very many, but a lot of Filipinos. Pound for pound, they could match up with anybody, and so they became, there was quite a circle of boxers, of prize fighters who came from the Philippines, and my dad was one of them. And there was a couple of champions at that same era, a guy named Speedy Dado and a guy named Marino. They were both champions in their divisions, and I forgot, lighter, the lighter divisions. So Sammy starts winning these fights and then he starts to get publicized, and then the navy says, hey, I think that's the guy we're lookin' for. That's Macario. So my dad got picked up at, he says he was fighting a match, he says, "I was winning," and the shore patrol waited until he, the fight ended and he won the fight, and then they grabbed him and they put him in the brig in San Diego. Dad would never say how long he was in that brig, or that jail, but when he got out, of course, he resumed his boxing career. And there were a lot of Filipinos, a lot of boxers in his weight in this southern California area, so he started --

TI: Backing up just a little bit, I'm curious, so when someone, like, jumps ship and it's kind of a military, you're in the military and they do this, is this on their record? Like in the same way a felony conviction would be in terms of civil and so that it's hard to get jobs or it's part of your record that you have to always report? Is that part of what he had to do?

BS: Yes. Yeah. That would be part. I guess he'd be a felon in today's... and I don't know what the charges and the disposition of his trial if he had one, so we don't know that.

TI: Okay. So anyway, so going on, so he's at the brig, he's...

BS: So he started, the promoters started matching him up with the better fighters in other cities around California, and he also made a trip to the Midwest, and he fought in Chicago and he fought in Cleveland, and then he ended up in Seattle. We find a trail of his old clippings, which are lost now. We lost 'em through the years, but his clippings showed southern California and then San Francisco, and then there was a match in Chicago and one in Cleveland, and the next batch of articles were from Seattle, Spokane and Seattle.

<Begin Segment 2>

TI: Now, when he sort of talks about those years, any story that comes to mind that kind of captures the life of a boxer on the road doing this?

BS: Well, yeah, the biggest fight towns were towns, at least on the West Coast, where a lot of minority, fighters from the minority community, the black community, Jewish community, and Asian community, where you had populations, say, a lot of Filipinos. He fought in Stockton, California, and a lot of the migrant workers there, or the farm workers, are Filipino, so any time there was a boxing match in Stockton, California, all the Filipinos would show up at the arena for the fights. So many times the arenas were filled up with Filipinos or other ethnic communities if they had an ethnic fighter. I mean, the whole community would come out. And the promoters noticed that, and so they were promoting fights in all the major cities in California where a big Filipino population was, and Seattle had a large Filipino population because of the seafood industry, lot of the Filipinos were brought here as domestics, mostly men. They worked in the farmlands in eastern, central and eastern Washington, so they would end up in Seattle.

TI: So did your father have, these stories, so like at Stockton, for instance, or any community where there's a large Filipino community, so when he fought, how was he treated by the community?

BS: Well, the main community, the white community, the sports followers, the followers of sports, they would support the local fighters, boxers, local fighters and if they brought someone from out of town that they were, if you're fighting in Stockton and you brought someone in from San Francisco, the local fighters, the ones in Stockton would be the heroes, right, the hometown guys. Unless it was a white guy. And so the Stockton crowd would root for the white guy from San Francisco rather than the Filipino guy from Stockton, but they would be all outnumbered because there'd be more Filipinos at the boxing matches. So he wound his way up to Seattle 'cause he heard Seattle was a good fight town, lot of Filipinos, and he knew that he would be among the main eventers, the elite boxers, in the lightweight, he was a lightweight division fighter. And so there was a guy named Nate Druxman. Nate Druxman was a jeweler in downtown Seattle, and he was a boxing promoter and he latched onto my dad and became my dad's promoter. And this is now, we're talking about the mid '20s, at least 1924, '25, '26, in that era there, and there happened to be quite a few Filipino fighters when he came to town, but he sort of rose above those guys and became their buddies, their heroes. And I don't know the exact number of boxers, but I looked through the old scrapbook and I see at least five or six Filipino guys in the photos that the family had taken. A guy named Joe Calder and a couple other guys, and so Dad was, had his group of buddies and he seemed to be the leader of the, of the group.

TI: And when you look through these scrapbooks, where in Seattle were they, would they fight?

BS: There were two boxing arenas. One was the Civic Center and one was the armory, and the armory must've been on, right where the Pike market is. I don't know if it was on Western Avenue or the street below Western. It had to be on Western Avenue. And then there was an old swimming pool called the Crystal Pool, Second Avenue and, I don't know the cross street. The facade of the old Crystal Pool is still there on Second Avenue and they built a whole apartment building above it, but they preserved that, the facade of the first, first floor. So I remembered him taking me to the old Crystal Pool and showing me around, and I think it was after his boxing days, but I remembered the gymnasium was set over the pool. Swimming, the water at Crystal pool, they'd get it up from Puget Sound and became a fresh, saltwater pool, and then I don't know, I think boxing probably became more popular so that was probably a better money making venue.

TI: So they actually covered the pool to...

BS: They covered the pool.

TI: And then made that a boxing ring?

BS: Yeah.

TI: And then people could watch...

BS: A little boxing arena, yeah. He became very popular and some of his fights were with top ranked lightweights in the nation, ranked in Ring Magazine, which was the bible of the boxing industry at that time. One, he fought an ex, a former lightweight champion, a guy named Todd Morgan -- [coughs] excuse me -- and that was really promoted. I mean, the whole city showed up for that, local boy fights this former champion. And the word was, and even the articles, my dad won. He knocked down Todd Morgan two or three times during the fight. Todd Morgan was a lot quicker and faster, so he won the match on points, so that was quite a controversy at that time. Most of the writers thought that my dad would've won, and if he had won that, his next step would've been fighting a contender for the lightweight title. Maybe not the championship, but a contender, one of the top two or three boxers in that division.

TI: Now, when you say there was, like, controversy, I mean, controversy like people say, oh, the fight was fixed, or things like that? Is that the kind of stuff that people talk about?

BS: Well, that, a lot of that was happening then, but it didn't seem like that, the controversy on fixing fights came a little bit later. I remember my uncle Joe and my dad talking about a guy named Frankie Carbo coming into town, and after Frankie came into town the Northwest, Tacoma had a middleweight champion by the name of Freddy Steele, and Seattle had a middleweight champion by the name of Al Hostow. That's when Frankie Carbo was managing both of these fighters, so there were payoffs and stuff like that. But getting back to Sammy, I looked at his, we looked up his record, and his record, partial record that they document was forty-six wins, twenty-two losses, and eleven draws, so that was pretty good. And he was quite a puncher, so most of his forty-six wins were by knockout, so if he couldn't knock the guy out the guy would probably win. Part of the twenty-two losses were by points. He was never knocked out or he, according to him, or never knocked down, so I sort of believe him.

TI: So he would be the type, I'm just imagining, that would stand, take lots of punishments because they would just keep hitting him.

BS: Yeah. He liked that kind of stuff. Toe to toe.

TI: Toe to toe, but he would just, like these haymakers, just, like, try to knock the other guy out.

BS: Oh yeah. He was known for that.

TI: But take huge, huge... but, and I'm thinking, we're talking about sixty, almost eighty fights right there. I mean, that's...

BS: And those were the ones that were documented, 'cause we see some of, in the scrapbook, where he had fights in Pismo Beach that weren't documented as part of the last, the later records, his boxing records.

<Begin Segment 3>

TI: So this is all in the '20s, and you were born in '34, so before we get later on in his life, let's talk a little bit about your mother now.

BS: Okay.

TI: So what was your mother's name, and where did she come from?

BS: Okay. Virginia Nicol, N-I-C-O-L, Virginia Nicol was born in Nanaimo, Canada. That's on Vancouver Island, just an hour drive north of Victoria. Beautiful area, if you've ever been to Nanaimo.

TI: Yeah, I have, because that's a large terminal for the ferries, so you go to Tsawwassen, to Nanaimo, I think, and things like that. Right.

BS: Right, the ferry terminal. Yes. And it was several large timber mills there and lumber mills, and that's where my grandfather, Virginia's dad, Cornelio Nicol from the Philippines, settled in Nanaimo, Canada. He didn't come to Seattle. He was one of the very few Filipinos who went to Nanaimo, Canada. We could never trace his name, Nicol, the Nicol family in the Philippines. Couldn't find whether there's a Nicol family and it was always a question mark, what tribe did he come from? And a couple years ago Sharon Tomiko and I drove up to, drove up to the ferry up in Vancouver and took the ferry over to Nanaimo, and the front street when you drive into Nanaimo from the ferry depot, "Nicol." Now, Nanaimo leaders didn't, didn't name their street after my grandpa. Grandpa was running from something, somebody, and he changed his name. So we figured he didn't come to Seattle like most Filipinos; he went up to Canada, I think to hide. And so, "Ah, that's my name," so he changed his name to Nicol. And he married, he married a woman that was part French Canadian and part Native Canadian, Indian, and while in Nanaimo, of course, Sharon, a history sort of major, she starts checkin' out this family, and she finds out that Virginia's grandfather came from Quebec, a guy named LeBeouf. He comes to the Northwest, he comes to British Columbia from Quebec, and he meets a woman, a beautiful woman, Native woman from Alaska named Mary. We don't know her last name. So their children, Caroline is my great-grandmother, and Caroline's daughter, Adeline, her daughter was my (grandmother).

TI: Well, so your grandmother's name was what then?

BS: Adeline.

TI: Adeline.

BS: My grandmother's name was Adeline, and my great-grandmother was Caroline. So the lineage comes from Quebec and Alaska to British Columbia to Nanaimo to Seattle.

TI: Okay, so we have Virginia Nicol up in Nanaimo, so how does she meet your father?

BS: That's what, I guess when the climate was a little bit cooler Grandpa figured he could come, come down to Seattle. And he had two daughters, Virginia and Antonia, and they were, they must've been in elementary school when he moved to Seattle, moved from Nanaimo to Seattle. So some of the photos -- and he, what he did was he moved from Nanaimo to Bainbridge Island in the very early '20s -- and some of the photos that my mom kept, she's about six, seven years old in those classroom, those class photos in Bainbridge. And they went to the schools in Port Blakely. That's where she grew up, next to the lumber, the timber mill in Port Blakely. There was a large timber mill there. That's, the family grew up in that area. A lot swimming. And for some reason, during the later '20s, it must've been, it must've been nineteen, mid 1920s when Grandpa decided to bring the girls to Seattle to go to school, Broadway High School and then to University of Washington. Of course, they all ended through that way.

<Begin Segment 4>

TI: I should back up a little bit, so not only Broadway High School, but they, your mother attended the University of Washington?

BS: Yes, for a short while. I don't think she ever graduated. I think she got married in, you know, real... she went to Broadway High School, and she would work during the summertime and then save enough money to go to University of Washington, to save enough money for tuition. And she worked in a restaurant in the International District called the Rizal Cafe. I cannot find what side of the, King Street the Rizal Cafe was. My feeling was Rizal Cafe must've been in the Atlas Hotel building.

TI: Oh, so where the old Atlas Cafe or that restaurant was, that corner right there.

BS: That might've been, that might have been it, across the street from Tai Tung. 'Cause the photos that she had would be taken on the corner, of her and this young boxer that she was dating, guy named Sammy Santos. In the background you could see the Milwaukee Hotel. You could see the sign, the Milwaukee Hotel sign. So she'd be in her, she was in her waitress uniform and she'd be arm in arm with this boxer, Sammy Santos. And that had to be about 1928, 1929, and I think they got married soon after that. He was... athletes at that time were pretty popular, and my dad being a boxer was, I hear, quite the ladies' man. He had a crop of cauliflower ears, and that was a status symbol at that time, just like these, some of these fighters that, the cage fighters nowadays. You look at professional boxers today, no one has a cauliflower ear, no one. None of the boxers do, professional boxers. But the cage fighters, the, whatever they are...

TI: Those extreme, yeah.

BS: Extreme, yeah, extreme fighters, they all have cauliflower ears. That's their badge of honor. But back in the old days everybody that fought, wrestled or boxed, had cauliflower ears. I had an uncle named Tommy, my dad's younger brother, who would follow my dad around and he just, he was just enthralled with all the attention that my dad had walking around town, especially with the ladies, would just, wanted his autograph, wanted to date, whatever. So Tommy decided, hell, he'd get himself a pair of cauliflower ears, and so he became a boxer. And we looked up his record, and it was eleven losses. No wins, eleven losses. [Laughs] But he had his crop of cauliflower ears, and he was a very popular guy, not in the community of sports followers, but he was a popular guy in the community and with the ladies, so his goal was reached. So Dad and Mom met, and she was pretty popular. She ran for the queen in the Filipino community. They had the coronation of the queen every year, and she ran as a princess in 1928 for the Seattle title of queen of the Filipino community of Seattle, and we have her photo, her portrait of, in her regalia and all this kind of stuff. And I guess she lost, and Dad said if it was up to him she would've won.

TI: But it sounds like your parents were quite the couple in the community.

BS: Yes. They were.

TI: Your dad was a well-known boxer, and she sounds like quite the beauty, your mother.

BS: Yes. So they got married and started a family almost, soon after they got married. They must've gotten married in 1930, '30 or '31, and their first son, Sammy Junior, was born in 1932, and that's when my dad quit fighting, in that year. I think it was 1932. His last, we have an article about him. I guess he quit for a while. My father had lost eyesight in one of his eyes due to boxing injuries. You know resin that they had on the canvas? Some would fall down and they wouldn't wipe it off, and so the boxers would get the resin in their eyes from the boxing gloves. And so my father, his eyes started to deteriorate, both of 'em, but he lost sight in his left eye, and I think that's when he quit boxing. He couldn't pass the medical exams for the matches, so in 1932 he had four or five fights in Spokane, and soon after that he retired from boxing. And I have an article from those last four, five fights. Someone came up with that article and sent it to me about a year ago, so that was --

TI: And these are written from Spokane?

BS: Written in, from Spokane, yeah.

TI: Okay.

<Begin Segment 5>

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.

<Begin Segment 6>

TI: So let's go back to you, so now you're living with your uncle and aunt in the Central District.

BS: Central District.

TI: And so what are some early childhood memories?

BS: After my mom died, the first actual memory that I have living with my aunt and uncle, we lived in an apartment on Ninth and Spruce. That's where Seattle Housing Authority is. We were displaced out of that apartment, Ninth and Spruce, by the Seattle, Yesler Terrace. And living in that building, it had to be right before the war -- I don't know, I was a young kid -- but this, one of the neighbors brought me to Nippon Kan for one of the stage... and I just remember this guy in this white face coming out on the stage. It actually scared the shit out of me, right? And I'm a little kid, and I didn't enjoy that production that was going on, and when she wanted to bring me back to the theater for another production, play, II refused to go 'cause I remembered that guy and that white mask or makeup. And that area there is where the Japanese community, that's where, from the International District, from Main Street all the way up to Twenty-third Avenue, became the Japanese community, so we lived in that neighborhood. And when we were displaced out of the construction of Yesler Terrace we rented an apartment on Fourteenth and Spruce, right across from the youth center. So there's an apartment, the building is still there. It's a block north of the old Washington Hall. So my memories of growing up there are a little bit more, I can remember a little bit more. We were sent to Maryknoll School 'cause my aunt and uncle, our family was Catholic, so we went to this mission school called Maryknoll School.

TI: And before, I'm gonna ask a lot more about that, but so before we go there, earlier you talked about how weekends, whenever you could, you would go visit your dad.

BS: That would be later on, after nineteen, after 1945.

TI: Okay, so then let's --

BS: To the '40s and particularly after '45 when he lost his eyesight.

TI: I see, okay.

<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.

<Begin Segment 8>

TI: So we're gonna start the second part.

BS: This is Maryknoll.

TI: Yeah. Okay, Maryknoll.

BS: We're still at Maryknoll and I think it was before the war and stuff, we would, Maryknoll had these picnics at Lincoln Park, every year Lincoln Park, the big picnic. And I remember we'd have these cone fights. Remember that? They'd tie an ice cream cone, without the ice cream, the cone, put holes on the side and they'd tie it on your head, and they'd give you a newspaper wrapped up and the thing was to knock off the cone from your opponent's head. And they'd say, okay, one, two, three, four, all that, and then all the even side and the odd sides are decided and then we'd attack each other. And I'd be the one that was attacked first for some reason, and I found out later it was because I was a mouthy guy. You know, "You ain't gonna get me," and all this kind of stuff. And so I was, I probably had my cone knocked off the first one of anybody in our age group, and I think they had two or three classes in the same group, kindergarten, first grade, second, and then every year that we had this thing I'd be out there for two seconds and my cone'd be knocked off. So I told these guys, "When I grow up I'm gonna get you guys." There's still time to get even, even today. When they come down to the Bush Garden I'm gonna knock off their cone.

TI: [Laughs] The funny thing is every two years we have a family reunion and we play that same game.

BS: Is that right?

TI: The cone game, yeah. We put it on there. I'm curious, because my mom was Maryknoll, I wonder if she got it from there?

BS: Yeah, must have. Yeah, I love that game.

TI: Okay. Earlier you were talking about how, so after December 7, 1941, and there was tensions between the Philippines and Japan.

BS: Yes.

TI: The Sixteenth Avenue group still stayed tight.

BS: They stayed, they stayed pretty tight. In fact, all our families, when the buses were lined up for the families to board on their way to Puyallup, all our families, all the Filipino families were there to say goodbye with whatever we, I don't know, pastries or whatever, we gave our neighbors as they boarded their buses, so I remember that. I wish there were photos of that, but I haven't been able to find them.

TI: Yeah, that would've been a great photo to see. What happened to all the houses, the Japanese houses on Sixteenth Avenue? What happened to them?

BS: They were rented out. There was, the Matsudaira house was -- and I don't know who actually owned it. I think the Matsudairas still owned it, and someone took it over and rented it to another large family. The Bozarth family moved into that house, and they were all blondes. Those kids were all blondes and they all went to Immaculate, so I remember there was so much of a difference into the white kids came into that Sixteenth Avenue neighborhood. 'Cause that was still the street that we hung out at and during the war, when the school was closed, the Maryknoll missionaries kept the building and it became more like a community center for the Filipino community.

TI: Because this is, okay, so the war started, the Japanese leave, and so the school was like ninety-eight percent Japanese --

BS: So the school was closed.

TI: Yeah, so before we talk about what happened to the building, what happened to you and your cousin, and where did you guys go?

BS: We went up two blocks north to Immaculate. So second grade, in the second grade, I was in the second, first grade, second grade we go up there to Immaculate, and there's this, I remember this little kid named Nelson kept coming after me. Nelson, he must've been -- I'm in the first or second grade, I think it was second grade -- and he must be a sixth grader, seventh grader, and he'd lift me up and put me up against the wall, and he said, "You're a Jap, you're a Jap, you're a Jap." And he'd start slappin' me. He didn't hit me. He'd slap me, and I'd be cryin' and all that kind of stuff. And this was during the war now, and as soon as we moved up there I remember walking from Immaculate down Jefferson to Fourteenth to the apartment, and there was a black kid that wouldn't let me pass 'cause I was a little, he called me a little "Jap." And his name was, and he's still around, maybe he... oh, I forget his name. Reggie Fry, him and his little brother would never let me pass, right? The Asian kids, we had to wear buttons later on said "I'm Filipino," or Philippines or some red, white and blue button. Chinese kids had the same problem. All Asian kids were enemies, right, to other little kids, and we even had a hard time jumping on a bus to go downtown to a movie. People would complain, so the bus driver would stop and say, you kids got to leave.

TI: Now, this was happening even after all the Japanese had left Seattle?

BS: Yes.

TI: And so I'm curious, I mean, why did they, why would they call you a "Jap" when all the Japanese were gone?

BS: Because people really didn't, don't know the difference that time. You're talking about lot of probably older white folk, maybe Italian, ethnic Italians or, in Tacoma my brother had the same problem growing up during those war years with the Slovak community. They would cuss, come out the door and cuss at little Asian kids. So that's, so after a year of that, maybe eight months or so, we had to wear these buttons. Not that we were proud to be Filipinos, we just didn't want to be mixed up as Japanese kids.

TI: But wasn't it, so this is interesting, so wasn't it really well publicized that the Japanese had been removed from Seattle and Tacoma and places like that, that there were no more Japanese on the West Coast? I mean, didn't people understand that and know that?

BS: I think people understood that, but there was still that, I don't know, it's a racial thing. I mean, I think we sort of prove that this was a racial issue.

TI: It is interesting because, ironically, Japan was fighting against the Philippines and China. I mean, if anything the Filipinos and the Chinese were with the Allies.

BS: Exactly. Right, but in neighborhoods when people looked out their window or were riding a bus and an Asian kid came on that didn't have that button, boom, just like, just like today when a kid, a Middle East kid, all of a sudden you put your guard up. You don't know if that kid is a Muslim or what. It could be Indian, it could be Pakistani, but everything's lumped into, he's an Arab, you know what I mean? That, that...

TI: That's a good analogy, because, yeah, the Sikh community, for instance.

BS: Yeah.

TI: Even though they're not Muslim they were attacked after 9/11.

BS: That's right. The Sikh community, everybody think they're, the other people think they're Indian and they're not. So people just sort of categorize a people of color in one, Asian, Oriental, into one grouping, and so you must be the enemy, you know? It's just, growing up we had, we knew there was discrimination. That's how we found out about discrimination. Not that our neighbors and our schoolmates were sent away, but we also had to bear some of that animosity on ourselves. I had to go two blocks around to get to my home because Reggie Fry and his brother were gonna beat me up. Well, I sort of kept up with Reggie Fry, used to hang out at the Four Seas, so I said, "Reggie, you have one more drink I'll kick your ass when you get out in the parking lot." We laugh 'cause he remembered that story. Sorry.

TI: And so, in terms of discrimination like that, was it distinctly a lot more once the war started? I mean, before the war, did you face the same kind of taunts, or did it really start when the war started?

BS: Yeah, it was when the war started. And some of us, we sort of hung together. We had our little sports teams, basketball teams, baseball teams, and the Filipino kids, we had an organization called Filipino Youth -- not the FYA, it was Filipino Catholic Youth. We're all, so we had our little teams, and then when we played in other playfields, if we played a basketball game, we were taunted. We were taunted. Not as Filipinos, but as, you know, "you guys" or, I don't think they called us "Japs" then, but it was that feeling that we were all them. We were all them. We were always taunted and it always made us kind of think about, what, they know who we are? But it was, it was never, it was a racial thing. We knew that. But it wasn't, like, specific. That's why our comfort zone was always in the International District, the Chinatown/International District area where we all went, hung out there during the war years when we were little kids, 'cause that was a comfort zone. We didn't get attacked by, by other kids. Chinese were goin' through that same era, same period of time, they were having their problems.

TI: Interesting.

<Begin Segment 9>

TI: I want to go back to when the Japanese were leaving. First, for you, what kind of thoughts went through your mind when you saw your classmates, Pauline and your other classmates being removed from Seattle?

BS: Well, we thought that, our other neighbors, we had the Dodenhoelt family on our block and the Schmidt family lived on Fifteenth, and we always knew that they were gonna be next.

TI: So they're German?

BS: The German kids, I mean, the Japanese kids went, and then the German kids were gonna be next, and it never happened. They never talked about it. They were never, I know that they were a little bit hesitant, the families must've talked about it, about being, "Be careful what you do," "Behave yourself," and all this stuff, "Don't bring attention to yourself." But it never happened, and so we, the kids growing up, we started to see this pattern. We're saying the Asian kids, the dark kids are the ones that were uprooted. Our classmates, Japanese American, were uprooted and sent away, and then we're at war with Germany but our German playmates weren't, so we knew something was wrong there, something different was there. So we didn't know the word racism then or even segregation then, but we knew there was something different, something wrong with growing up with two different classifications.

TI: Or when you talk about sort of segregation, I was gonna ask, you mention how you had the Maryknoll school and two blocks away you had Immaculate. So it sounds like at Maryknoll you had the Japanese and Filipinos, and Immaculate before the war you had the whites, and so it was a form of segregation in some ways the Catholic Church did, in terms of school.

BS: Yeah. I think there were a few Filipinos that went to Immaculate, and there was African American families that also sent their kids to Immaculate, so it wasn't segregated that way. It was just neighborhood, it's a neighborhood, it was a parochial school in the neighborhood and the Catholic kids from that neighborhood went to that school whether they were black or white. They were mostly white, but it didn't look like it was segregated. It was sort of a, I think people wanted to go to Maryknoll. It was a classy place, classy school to go to. Not athletic wise or anything, but the school itself, the Maryknoll church and mission school just looked cool. I don't know if you've ever seen photos of it, but it was a cool, cool place to be, and they had bazaars and they had Christmas parties. It was a neat environment to grow up in. It was a really close knit environment with Japanese and Filipino families.

TI: Okay, good. So going back to when the Japanese were leaving, did any of the sisters or fathers or priests say anything about what was happening to you and the students as this was going on?

BS: No, as I remembered it, the nuns were devastated and they said, "Because of the war, your playmates will have to leave for a while." And that's, that in a sense is all I got out of it. Your playmates had to leave. I think they were trying to play down this hysteria and all this kind of stuff. Your playmates had to leave. That's all I remember our schoolroom teacher, Sister whatever her name was, saying.

TI: So no one -- go ahead.

BS: Father Tibesar, he, I think his sermons were pretty, it was probably a little bit more, little bit more sharp. As you're growing up, a first grader, you don't remember sermons, but I remember it as raising his voice about our neighbors, kids from our school and our neighbors being sent away for something someone else, some other country did. And that's, that's the only thing that ever resonated with me, was the anger in his voice. And he followed, I think he followed the families to internment, Father Tibesar and then the Baptist minister who lived around the corner from us.

TI: Reverend Andrews.

BS: Andrews, he lived on Fifteenth and Alder.

TI: Yeah, both Father Tibesar and Reverend Andrews were at Minidoka during that time.

BS: Yeah.

TI: Now, did they ever talk about, I mean, given that you're at a Catholic school, religion or God in terms of, how could this have happened and the fairness of it? Was anything like that?

BS: We thought that, little kids. You're talking about love your neighbor and all that, and it, no one ever, no one ever had to talk about that to us. It was just in our own minds that something was wrong here. The Japanese kids, German kids, brown kids, white kids, we, no one had to tell us that there was something different here, or we just sort of thought of it ourselves that something was wrong. Something's not right with this picture.

TI: And so when things like that happen, does that question religion, your concept of a God, like God's supposed to be sort of just and yet this injustice is happening right in front of you?

BS: You know, I wasn't that sophisticated then. I would've thought of that later on, probably, but at that time I never brought that religion into things until later on when I started saying it's not equal out there for some reason, and even if you're Christian it's not equal.

<Begin Segment 10>

TI: So other changes during the war, now, during this period, when you go down to the International District, how had things changed when you go, when you went down there during the war, and how did it look different?

BS: We knew the Japanese businesses were boarded up. Higo, right? We lived, my dad lived in the NP Hotel on Sixth Avenue, between Jackson and Main, and we lived there. And all the businesses on Main Street were boarded up, and quite a few of the businesses on Jackson Street and even on King Street were boarded up, so you knew that the establishments that were boarded up were from the Japanese families. The ones that were open could've still been owned by Japanese families, but other neighbors and stuff kept, kept their businesses open. I remember the secondhand store, the Jewish guy -- Higo, that building, that family owned that building -- and the guy on the corner had the secondhand store, jewelry store, secondhand store. It was a Jewish man, took care of the building. And we found out later he collected the rents from the tenants on the second floor and it was in a bank account for the family that came back, and the keys were turned back over to the family. We had a few families, a few people like that that were really cool. They knew that they had to acquire the property 'til this, 'til the internment was over and then, and it was all done by handshake, the ones, the families that we knew. So that was different. You had a partial ghost town.

TI: And do you recall your father saying anything about -- so he lived in that neighborhood, some boarded up storefronts and things like that -- did your father have any comments about what was going on?

BS: No. He, some of his best non-Filipino friends were the grocers, the proprietors of the mom and pop stores were his closest friends, and when they left he was, he really felt it. He was devastated by his friends going. And him being Filipino and with his country being at war with Japan, he never brought it up. There was never anything said about the neighbors or the people from the community. It was like our neighbors left. Our friends left. It wasn't them or us, and it was because we grew, all grew up together and we were in that same area, era, and we knew that our kids, kids in their family wasn't part of the war machine. We just knew that. They were, like the Chinese kids, they weren't in the Chinese army either.

TI: In that neighborhood, so there are a lot of people, Japanese who used to live in that neighborhood, with them gone and with Seattle starting to boom because of the war effort and jobs, and housing was pretty scarce, who moved in during that time? When war was going on and Japanese were gone, who moved in to live in those spaces?

BS: Lot of African Americans, lot of the black families, more black families. Now, International District was a very mixed neighborhood. Remember, I don't know if you remember the, lot of the bars. Where Hing Hay Park is, that was Duke's II, a really loud black entrepreneurial bar. It was, always had the best jazz music, but it was loud, lot of fights goin' on. And above it were apartments where a lot of the Japanese, I think it was probably, the buildings were probably owned by Japanese then. And the Japanese families lived on the second floor above the establishments on Maynard and King, and when they left, the families left, those apartments were taken over by black families, as I remembered it. Some Filipino families, but black families.

TI: And so how did the neighborhood change? I mean, when you watched different groups coming in, did, like, different kind of stores appear, or what changes did you see?

BS: Well, during the war years you saw a lot more street activity going, the jazz clubs. And the reason, Seattle became a jazz hub during the war. It may have started even before the war, but during the war was really, it became a hot spot because of the black military army bases at Fort Lawton, Fort Lewis. They always came to Chinatown, to the International District. The navy ships that would come in, all the black servicemen would come there. So the black presence was really expanding then in the International District, and where a lot of the, where I remember a lot of Japanese businesses were taken over by a lot of, a lot more white businesses and a lot more black businesses. The Bishop Drugstore, Nick Nickerson and the dry cleaners, they were all Japanese businesses before and African Americans came in after they left for camp.

<Begin Segment 11>

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.

<Begin Segment 12>

TI: So before we go to the end of the war when the Japanese started coming, anything else during the war years, any other stories or memories that we should talk about?

BS: Well, later on you think back and you remember, a lot of the hotels along the edges of the International District were military establishments. The Downtowner, the Downtowner Apartments on Fourth Avenue, between Main and Jackson, that was the old Richmond Hotel, one of the high class hotels in Seattle built at the turn of the century. And that became, the navy took that over, or I think the army took that over, because don't forget the railroad stations were at the end of the line. Cross country lines, they stopped at Union Pacific or Northern Pacific, and so all these troops would have to go somewhere, so the military would buy all these hotels in the area. The new Richmond Hotel was one of 'em. The Frye Hotel on Yesler was another one. So we had all these military coming in through the International District-Chinatown area night and day, so the businesses started to cater to the military and open up their establishments late at night to serve the, to cater to the service people. So that was really a hot, hot time to be running around International District when you're a little kid 'cause of all the shit, stuff going on.

TI: Yeah, so you're like ten, eleven. Ten, eleven, twelve years old and just, and really without very much adult supervision, too.

BS: Yeah. That's right.

TI: You were pretty much on your own.

BS: Yeah. And I remember being at the NP Hotel with my dad, and I'd always be ashamed to bring my schoolmates to the, we lived in a room that was nine by thirteen. All our possessions were in that room, and we had to share the bathroom, the toilet and the showers and bathtubs down the hall, right? So everything was there, and you had one chair and you had a bed, took up two thirds of the room, you had a radio, and that's what we'd do. We'd sit on the bed and listen to the radio. And I would be ashamed to bring my kids there, my playmates there, but they always wanted to come down to Chinatown because all this activity going on, so I said okay, we'll come down and then we'd visit my dad. And I'd show off my dad's cauliflower ears and the scrapbooks with my dad being a boxer, so it was a popular place for my schoolmates to come. And then we'd hang out in the Chinatown area, go to these different little places where we could, where we were allowed to go. And then I'd point out to these kids where the gambling halls were, Rudy's place and the Bataan Club, the Corregidor Club, and almost every building on the second floor of the International District-Chinatown area was a nightclub and either blacks or Filipinos played the music in these nightclubs. I remember performing at one the nightclubs, doing the tinikling. You remember the bamboo dance? Us kids when we were growing up had to learn all the cultural, the Filipino dances, and so when we were kids they'd bring us to the nightclubs in the International District to perform during intermission, when the jazz musicians would take their breaks. We would come up and we'd do our little dances, Filipino dances, and get paid a dime or a dollar, I don't remember what it was. But we were all involved in that whole war scene.

TI: Wow, this is a whole story I've never heard. It's really interesting.

BS: Vera Eng has those stories, too, because it was her dad that owned the Eight Immortals restaurant, and she was a little girl running around the District at that time. We shared a lot of little stories together when...

TI: And so is Vera about the same age as you?

BS: She's a little bit younger.

TI: Okay.

BS: Maybe a lot younger. You know, when you're between sixty and eighty, we're in one lump group.

<Begin Segment 13>

TI: So let's start talking, so the war ends and the Japanese start returning.

BS: Yeah.

TI: So talk about that. What, what did you see when the Japanese started coming?

BS: Well, we were always anticipating the return. The war was over, the war was just over and we knew the kids were gonna come back. And I just remember being on Sixteenth Avenue when the Matsudaira family came back, and Mrs. Beltran baked a cake, a chocolate cake, and we all followed Mrs. Beltran up to the Matsudaira family to present the welcoming home cake. It was a chocolate cake. And so it was, after a week it was like they never left, except there was more kids then.

TI: Yeah, go back to that, that welcoming back. So how many people were following...

BS: There must've been three families, so maybe ten, a dozen people, but it seemed to be happening in a lot of other areas next to our neighborhood, a lot of welcoming -- there was a lot of animosity, too. There was some frightening moments, too, where cars would come to the... it was, it didn't seem to be the animosity coming from the neighbors so much as other kids or other people from other neighborhoods coming to the neighborhoods where the Japanese were coming back, coming home to. Seemed like there was always these out of neighborhood cars that would come by.

TI: And when one of these cars came by, what would they do? What would happen?

BS: Mostly yelling, screaming, and throwing stuff. I don't remember any, no shots or no firebombs, any of that, so mostly crude remarks. And off course, we knew what those words, and we'd yell 'em back to them. We were better than them.

TI: Going back to the welcoming, the chocolate cake welcome, what was the reaction of the Matsudaira family when you guys came up and welcomed them?

BS: Well, Mrs. Matsudaira was a saint. You know that. A couple years later she was the national Catholic mother of the year, had to be 1951, 1952. I mean, she was a saintly woman, and when she came back a lot of the, lot of the Japanese families would congregate at the house, the Catholic women would come back, congregate at the house, and then the non Japanese neighbors, it always seemed like there was a houseful. 'Course they had thirteen kids, so it was always a houseful anyway, but I just remembered when -- and of course Pauline was back home, right, and we're in, what, fifth, sixth grade, so I tried to spend a lot of time there myself. And my buddy was Jimmy Matsudaira. That was an excuse to be there. So I saw, saw a lot of non Japanese families, parents would come just to say hello, welcome back. Not necessarily go in the house for tea or anything, but just come by to welcome, seemed like sort of a welcome gesture, knock on the door, "Nice to have you back in the neighborhood," and then leave. That was, it was never a, never a group that would come in and impose, and they wouldn't be coming into the house much.

TI: And so, that's interesting, so as people would do this, what would the reaction of the family be? So they come, they greet, and so they thank them, they close the door, and then what, were there any comments or did they talk about people coming to their door or anything like that?

BS: Well, the kids were, they caught up with the environment in the neighborhood right away it seemed like, it's like they never left, you know? Went next door to the Maryknoll playground, start playing basketball, so I don't know what the families talked about, but when the kids came out to play it was, they didn't talk about, so much about their time in the internment camp. Mitch Matsudaira was the only one that ever talked about being in camp, and his big deal was it was neat to have this gang that you were with every day, in Minidoka. He's a little kid, right? And he grew up with the same kids from his, what, his section of Minidoka, so he thought that was, growing up was, wasn't as much of a hardship to him as it was to the older brothers and sisters and the parents. To him it was fun. They had these baseball games, basketball games. We had my, our buddies. Talk to Mitch about that. It was a different mindset than in his older brothers and sisters who had, who were tormented by being there.

TI: And yet earlier you said they came back and after a week it was like they had never left, but did you notice any differences in your, in your friends that were there?

BS: Just probably, you know, resentment. They had to be, they were regimented into this life of going to the mess hall for your... and there'd be talk, sometimes talk about the bad food. Never, my, the kids in my age group growing up never talked about treatment. It didn't seem like they were talking about the treatment. They were talking about the bad conditions, the bad food. I think they were a little bit young, we were a little bit younger, so they, their brothers, Mike Matsudaira and John Matsudaira, went into the 442nd. Mike never came back, so we'd talk about losing Mike. When I -- and I was baptized a Catholic at Maryknoll -- when I was confirmed I chose the name of Michael after Michael Matsudaira. He was my hero when I was a little kid. So we talked a little bit about some of the neighbor kids that weren't coming back, and they weren't, our kids weren't really telling us, the Filipino kids, just were talking among themselves and we were part of that group. It was just sharing stories among themselves about some of the things that, that came to their minds. A lot of was conditions, food, and their brothers and sisters that didn't come back.

TI: Did you ever notice any, like changes in mood or things that seemed out of character, like maybe in school that some might be quieter than they were before, or maybe, or more loud or more outbreaks, or anything like that? Anything that just, like, you noticed, oh, that's different?

BS: No, I never... no. I wouldn't have been able to tell then. So when they left I was so young and when they come back I'm in the fifth or sixth grade, so I wouldn't be able to tell the difference.

<Begin Segment 14>

TI: Now, going back to the Chinatown/International District, so the Japanese are coming back, you have this whole different sort of change in the neighborhood, a lot more military influence and different communities in there. What happened as the Japanese came back? Was there, what did you observe happening?

BS: Well, Uwajimaya opened, and we stayed at the NP Hotel, and down Main Street the drugstore opened. The, where they made the mochi, right on the corner, Sixth and Main?

TI: Oh, Sagamiya?

BS: Yeah, Sagamiya, that opened up again. The drugstore next to them opened up. Gaigoken opened up again. No, that didn't open up again. It reverted back to the original owners. Maneki opened up in the NP Hotel, in our building. So we saw a lot of new businesses from the old, from the old neighborhood coming back. Higo's was opened. Remember going into Uwajimaya and stealing ginger, and I think it was Tomio --

TI: I'll tell Tomio. [Laughs]

BS: No, they know about it. They, the old man used to tell them, when I came in, they said, "Watch this guy." So Tomio was a little bit younger, but when I came in I was, they were following me around, man. And that's the only thing I took from them, was ginger. They had the jar, and I'd take it and I'd just plop it in my mouth. And then, it's just like when you, you go to Uwajimaya you do it yourself, and you see grapes there, you're gonna test the grape. I was testing their ginger. [Laughs]

TI: Yeah, I think, when I was a kid it was Wah Sang down there.

BS: Yeah, on King Street.

TI: Yeah.

BS: Yeah. But it was a whole, seems to be a revival, but not all the businesses reopened. Not all the businesses. The businesses I remember was Chick's ice cream in the old Bush Hotel, Shigeko Uno's husband Chick. Chick's Ice Creamery, they brought in the new ice cream, the whipped ice cream.

TI: The sort of soft, soft ice cream?

BS: The soft ice cream. They were the first ones to open up, and that became very popular right off the bat. And I never saw, I mean, the families might've, might've felt some backlash or seen backlash, but we as kids, me as a kid, never noticed that, that it would be pronounced that I would remember that. It seemed like it, just one day they were gone, one day everything opened up again, and I never thought about what the repercussions were about opening up, about outsiders coming in, yelling and screaming. I didn't see any of that.

TI: Okay. But going back to Chinatown/International District, changes there, I mean, during the war it seemed like that was a pretty wild place to be, and now with the Japanese coming back, opening their stores, did it start changing, or did it stay pretty wild?

BS: When you're going, when we're going into the '50s, the Japanese businesspeople, I don't know if the Jackson Street Community Council was established then, but when the Japanese came back it restored, it brought back to life the Japanese, the Jackson Street Community Council. Frank Hattori, some, Terry Toda, some of these guys became, they became, back into leadership, the Jackson Street Community Council, and they started working together with Hong Chin, who built the Four Seas restaurant -- Chin Hong? Chin Hong. And a guy named Ken MacDonald, Ken MacDonald's an attorney, and he was sort of a leftist. Ken MacDonald represented a lot of the so-called Communists at that time, and he still has his law practice downtown. His son was Secretary of Transportation under Gary, Gary Locke.

TI: Yeah, Doug, Doug MacDonald. Right.

BS: So that, Ken MacDonald, and they formed the International, the International Improvement organization. It was during the time the Jackson Street Community Council was being incorporated into a citywide organization because they were so successful. It was the Japanese businessmen who came back who really got involved in trying to clean up the International District/Chinatown area.

<Begin Segment 15>

TI: And so what was the role of the International Improvement organization, the one that Ken MacDonald started?

BS: That was like a chamber, that was like an overall chamber of commerce. We had the Chinatown Chamber of Commerce, right? And they were just really concerned about Chinese businesses, and then the improvement organization came along, it was like an overall chamber of commerce that were representing not only the Chinese businesses but the Filipino businesses, the Japanese businesses, and the white businesses.

TI: And so was it because the smaller groups weren't working well together, or they didn't have enough clout? What was the, I guess the benefit of having this larger umbrella?

BS: The Chinese chamber of commerce were really just concerned about the Chinese businesses and working with the Chinese family associations and tongs, and a guy named Don Chin was president of the Chinatown Chamber of Commerce. When the improvement association came in, became a, it didn't become an International District chamber of commerce, but more of a business organization that was started by the Japanese, the guys returning. Shigeko Uno was part of that group because she was manager of the Rainier Heat and Power Company. Terry Toda started up his optometry again. Toru Sakahara, attorney. Fuzzy Fujiyama? Fujimoto? Fujiyama?

TI: I can't remember.

BS: He was an insurance guy on Jackson Street. They became involved in this revitalization of the International District. We talked about prostitution. We had cars that would come in, circle Jackson Street down south on Seventh Avenue, west on King Street, and then north on Maynard. These cars would just circle the area, and the streetwalkers would jump into the cars. [Interruption] But that became a highlight for all these young college types and maybe people who were returning from the war to do pickups in the International District area, and it seemed like the police department were looking the other way, so there was a lot of problems that were caused by the, by the streetwalkers and the johns and all that. So this group was there to clean that up.

TI: And when you say this group, what was the group again?

BS: The International...

TI: Okay, Improvement.

BS: They called themselves the International Improvement Club because it started in the '50s. Chinatown was always Chinatown. Japantown, Manilatown, it was always called Chinatown, and the Mayor Clinton at that time coined the phrase, since this is so many different ethnic groups and white establishments and black establishments and Filipinos, that we should call it the "International Settlement." He gave the name of the International District the International Settlement.

TI: This is Mayor Clinton?

BS: This is Mayor Clinton. And a couple years after that there was a promotion that went through the district, the rickshaw races in the International District. The first time we ever saw that term, International District, and that sort of caught on. That was in the early '50s that that happened, the rickshaw races. I don't know if you remember that, but I just remember that term. And it was, I think they were running it, I don't know if you know, Seafair was just opening then, 1951 or so, and each neighborhood was having their own little celebrations. We had carnivals in the International District about that same time. Carnival people would come in and they'd put in the Ferris wheel and merry-go-rounds, and all the streets around the International District were bubbling with all this carnival atmosphere. It was sponsored by the Chinatown Chamber of Commerce, and then that new group saw sort of a revitalization in Chinatown and they wanted that to happen in the other area of the International District outside of Chinatown. So all these businesspeople --

TI: And so what were the motivations of this group? Here you have this white attorney, Ken MacDonald. I understand the motivations of the Chinese businesses --

BS: And the Japanese businesses.

TI: -- Japanese, the Filipino, the African American, but here you have a white attorney doing this. What were the motivations behind that?

BS: You know, I, the motivation to start that, I don't really remember that. I just remember his, I remember a program, and it was sponsored by the International Improvement Association, and they had the board of directors and it was Chin Hong from Four Seas, and Ken MacDonald, and Toru Sakahara, Terry Toda, I don't even know if Moriguchi, Tomio was even involved at that point. It was probably a little bit earlier than him. And their goal was to clean up Chinatown/International District, bring in new lighting, fluorescent lighting, revitalize the restaurant industry. They could, I think they could see that we could become a, quote, "touristy area," a Chinatown, a Japantown touristy area much like San Francisco, much like Los Angeles, and they just saw that it could be a revitalization. And this is the '50s now, right after the war.

TI: Yeah. No, this is fascinating because I, Ken MacDonald is a family friend. My mother-in-law, Casey's grandmother, is Sadie Yamasaki, who was Ken's assistant.

BS: Oh, yeah.

TI: And so there's a strong family connection, and so I never had heard this, so that's why I was curious.

BS: That was, and so then when I saw that, we had a couple of issues in the International District when we wanted to protect the area against the Intermodal Transportation Center. You remember that, at Union Station, right after the Kingdome? We fought that. And the person I went to to get support was Ken MacDonald, and he assigned someone to work with us, but he was involved in that, their law firm was involved, starting to get involved in the land use kind of issues.

TI: Yeah, MacDonald Hoague & Bayless was the, yeah.

BS: So Ken was very helpful even then. But I only went to him because I remember his name as being, as being involved in the revitalization of the community.

TI: Well he's still around. I'm gonna have to go talk to him about this and see what...

BS: I had a good time working with him.

TI: Good.

<Begin Segment 16>

TI: So let's go back to your life, and now after the war you're getting into, I guess, junior high school?

BS: Yeah. It, we're at Immaculate then. The, we're becoming teenagers then, and the middle of our social life was all at the Maryknoll mission church, and it was acquired by the archdiocese and they renamed it St. Peter Claver Center. So we had our, we changed from the Filipino Youth Organization to the FYA or some Filipino group, teenage club, and we had our basketball team and we joined the league at the Buddhist temple. The Chinese Clippers, Lotus, Yosh Nakagawa and all those guys, Frank Fujii, the old Chinese basketball players, Art... Mar? What was his name?

TI: Yeah, I know who you're talking about.

BS: Al Mar.

TI: Right. Was this associated with the Collins Playfield or was this a separate...

BS: We all, we all practiced at Collins, but the league was at the old Buddhist church. And we could never use that during the war because that was a Coast Guard military establishment. And I remember before the war we'd hang out with the kids there because they had the gymnasium there, and after the war that became the hot spot. All the teams played in the league, so the Japanese teams, a couple Chinese teams, and one Filipino team, was us. That was the, sort of the center of our world, was the athletic teams that were established, baseball teams and basketball teams. Not really football teams, we played football games, but not in organized leagues. And then at school most of the Japanese kids, when they returned, also went to Immaculate. They followed us to Immaculate 'cause that was the neighborhood Catholic school, parochial school.

TI: Now do you, by any chance, recall the first Japanese to return to Immaculate?

BS: All I remember, Pauline coming into my, the classroom. I didn't care about anybody else.

TI: [Laughs] Okay. 'Cause my mother's family, Kinoshita, they were the first family to come back to Immaculate, and --

BS: Was Chuck, Chuck was your uncle?

TI: Chuck, yeah. That's my mom's brother, Chuck.

BS: Okay. So you see him every other day at the baseball games, right, front row.

TI: Yeah, so my mom recalls the, actually, I think the, either the P-I or the Times kind of followed the family from Minidoka all the way back to Seattle and it was all documented, going to Immaculate, where she went. And Chuck, I think, went to O'Dea.

BS: He was a football player, but I forgot when that was, right after the war.

TI: Yeah, right after the war.

BS: He was a big, he was a big hero. He was a big football hero at that time. And later on was Charlie Chihara, became a scatback, what they called him then.

TI: What's intriguing to me is I look back at some of the pictures after the war, and you would see a lot of mixing of races. You'd see teams with African Americans, Japanese, Chinese, whites, all playing football together and different sports.

BS: Yeah. And that was, that was unique about Seattle. Even after the kids came back from camp and we started our basketball teams, our teams weren't necessarily mixed yet. We kept our Filipino teams, and then George Cassi, who's half Japanese, he had to go to camp, he came out early, but he was on our team. So we had a couple kids like that, but we had the Filipino team, couple Chinese teams, and all Japanese teams, but we played in the same league and we all went to the same dances. In fact, our Filipino league -- I'm probably skipping ahead a little bit, but our Filipino league, our team sponsored a dance at the Buddhist auditorium, the gymnasium, and

Quincy Jones was playing.

TI: That's a good story.

BS: He was playing trumpet for a guy named Bumps Blackwell. Bumps Blackwell was an orchestra leader at that time, and he played for all our dances.

TI: See, I'd love to get pictures of that, Quincy Jones playing at the Buddhist gymnasium.

BS: I looked everywhere and I couldn't find it. I have a photo of the Filipino queen and in the background, on the orchestra, is Bumps Blackwell, but it was, it was at an intermission, when the queen was crowned, so Quincy and the players were on the side or, on the side or outside havin' a smoke, whatever they did then. But I never could, and we have to look, and there was a Filipino photographer that documented everything. His name was Wally Almanzor, and if I could ever get his son to show me some of the photos in that era I might be able to find something.

TI: Okay. So Bob, I think we're gonna take a break here.

BS: Okay.

TI: For the day, and just end here.

BS: For the day.

TI: And then we're gonna pick up tomorrow, so this was, this was good because we're just getting to a point where you're starting some other things, and I wanted to do that.

BS: That's good. Yeah.

TI: So fabulous. Wow, this was fun.