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TI: In talking about supporting yourselves, so when you were growing up you had to have various jobs to, for spending money and whatever, so let's talk about that now. So what were some of the jobs as a teenager you had growing up in Seattle?

BS: Well, one of my first, a friend of ours, Jim Beltran and his family were pretty prominent in the Filipino community, Mrs. Beltran, they're the family that lived across the street from the Matsudairas, and they always had a house full. They had their own children, four children, and they took in foster kids, and so there was always a houseful of kids. And Mr. Beltran owned a gas station on Tenth and Jackson. It's where they have the Vietnamese sandwich shop. That was a Union gas station. And so on weekends I would work for Uncle Jimmy, just putting the air in the tires and just washing the windshields and stuff like that, and he paid me a dime or, a nickel or a dime for the whole day, which was pretty cool for me. Then a friend of ours owned a stall at the Pike Market, and I remember working several weeks selling cucumbers at the Pike Market. And I'm just a little kid, and I was a mouthy kid, so I was like the barker, you know, "Get your fresh cucumbers." So that was the first two jobs I had, and then I delivered the Star newspaper. Remember? We had the Times, the P-I, and the Star.

TI: And the Star was more the union, wasn't that the, a more union paper?

BS: I don't remember what it was, but it only had, they came, they came out on weekdays and they never had a Sunday paper, so, but I delivered papers for a year or two. But those were my really, really early years. And of course, during the summertime we'd go down to Sears parking lot and jump on the truck to go bean picking or raspberry picking. Or in the early summer our family, my aunt, my mother's sister who we stayed with, would pack up for a couple weeks and we would travel to Bainbridge Island and work the strawberry fields, the strawberry fields that were owned by the Filipino farmers. And so that's our summers. Really roughing it, right?

TI: And this was, the strawberry fields, were they previously Japanese strawberry fields?

BS: They probably were. They probably were, and then the Filipinos took it over during the war, and I don't know if they were ever handed back or whether they were just holding them temporarily. I never knew that part of it.

TI: Yeah, I think it was a combination. Some, some...

BS: Some of 'em did, some of 'em hung onto 'em.

TI: And I think some Japanese farmers actually split their fields and gave Filipino families some of the fields, and so it was a variety. Okay.

BS: Yeah. Right. But since my family grew up in Port Blakely, they knew all the Filipino farmers that had farms, even before the war.

TI: Now, do you recall, during the war there was, for some of the Bainbridge Island farms they actually got Filipino workers and they were, I think, married to Native, Natives from Canada.

BS: Native, yes.

TI: And they were, they came down and worked the farms. Do you remember that at all?

BS: I remember some of the kids, the Native American kids, the Indian kids, we called 'em "Indipinos," half Filipino, half Native, half Indian. And they were our neighbors. They were our friends that we played with and held friendships all the way to the '60s and '70s, we knew these kids. When they grew up we were all involved in the movements and all that kind of stuff.

TI: And was this Bainbridge Island or just in Seattle?

BS: Well, the kids in Bainbridge Island that were part Filipino, they were always on the, sort of the leading edge of the Civil Rights Movement in terms of they didn't follow the Filipino side of their family. They followed the Native American Indian side of their family, and they were out fighting for Indian fishing rights very early on in the '50s and into the '60s.

TI: Oh, that's interesting. So they also were probably in some ways a link or connector between the two communities, the Filipino and the...

BS: Yeah, they'd go to the, you know how the Filipinos, we love to dance and we love to party and stuff, and so every weekend on Saturday there would be a dance at the Filipino community club in, on Bainbridge Island. So all these kids would grow up at the dance hall, but in their daily lives during the week they were Indian. They became Native. It's a pretty cool life to live on both sides. Bernie Whitebear was one of those kind of kids.

TI: Because, I'm sorry, he was mixed?

BS: He was mixed. His father was Filipino and his mother was Native.

TI: I didn't know that.

BS: And he changed his name to Whitebear when he got involved in the Native movement, the Indian movement.

TI: Okay. I didn't know that. So going back to you and other jobs growing up, so what else did you do?

BS: My dad got me a job -- I must've been a freshman or sophomore -- as a waiter at the Pier 91 Officers Club. That was really cool because I had to wear this white uniform, and I'm just a kid and I really didn't know how to deal with working face to face with customers, and so I served officers in their officers dining hall, and that was sort of a growing up experience. And all these old timers would watch to see how I would handle this, but I was okay. I was pretty cool.

TI: 'Cause there were other, the other workers were Filipino?

BS: All the, all the workers, the whole kitchen, all the cooks, the dishwashers, the busboys, the waiters, were all Filipinos. And my dad's friend, Julian, he decided I was old enough to get a job with him at the Pier 91, so that was one of my first higher paying jobs, so that was pretty cool doing that.

TI: It sounds like you probably even got a check or something at that point.

BS: I don't remember how we got paid. I think it was under the table or something.

TI: [Laughs] Okay.

<End Segment 2> - Copyright © 2011 Densho. All Rights Reserved.