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BS: And then in 1951, as a junior in high school, a guy named Jean Navarro, he was the dispatcher for Local 37, the cannery, the seafood union. Most, most of the cannery workers at that time were also Filipino, took over the industry from the Japanese and Chinese from before the war. So I got my first job being dispatched to Alaska in 1951 to a cannery called Ugashik on the Ugashik River, and there's a old JA guy, Japanese American guy that took me under his wing. His name was Roy Hashimoto. And he's still around. He's eighty-five, ninety years old now. And he took me under his wing, and I'm just a kid, a teenager, and we'd go into, we'd fly into, on one of these biplanes, water...

TI: Like a float plane.

BS: Float plane, landing plane. We'd see this cannery and the fish house. They have the warehouse where they stored all the canned goods, and then they have the fish house where you did all the work. You cut up the salmon and you cut off the heads and you do the sliming and do all that kind of stuff. So we land at the warehouse and we take our gear and we walk down the boardwalk, and the first house you see on the little hill is the superintendent's house. It's a white house, two story house with a white picket fence. And then you go down the boardwalk, and then you see these other nice little houses like cabins, and there's a fence along, white fence along there, and that's where the white fishermen live and the mechanics who maintain the machinery. And then, then you walk down the boardwalk and here are the sled dogs in their doghouses. They're owned by the Natives there, and the Natives are on the other, they live on the other side of the superintendent's office in little shacks and cabins. And at the end of the boardwalk is this bunkhouse where the Filipinos live, and we're on the other side of the world, right? We're out in the tundra where the flies and the mosquitoes and all that kind of stuff, and so they put eight of us into a bunkhouse room, eight of us. Had four double deck beds, so we're crammed into them, so that was sort of a growing up kind of thing, growing up experience. The dining hall also was used in the evening as a gambling hall, so some of these sharp gamblers would get their way up to Alaska and become the dealers at these gambling, at the gambling tables. And a lot of these guys, a lot of these cannery workers would lose their whole check, their whole season's salary in a week, and that was part of life. These guys went up to Alaska to earn enough money to come back and feed their families for three or four or five or six months, and they'd lose their whole check on the gambling tables.

TI: But these professional gamblers, it sounds like, were they workers or were they just up there?

BS: They were workers. They were the waiters. They were the, they call it the bull cooks. They're the ones that cleaned the outhouses. They didn't actually work in the fish house. They had, they had certain roles when they went up to Alaska.

TI: But the ones who were really, really good at cards, the dealers, were they also workers or did they just go up there to gamble and take the money?

BS: They had jobs, but they weren't in the fish house.

TI: I see, okay.

BS: They were... I don't know, they talked their way into jobs that they didn't have to get their hands dirty.

TI: Well, in a similar way, so I've interviewed --

BS: Excuse me. Let me... [reaches for a tissue]

TI: And while you do that I'll ask this question, so I've interviewed Japanese Americans who, before the war, did the cannery work.

BS: Yeah.

TI: And they talked about, also, the gamblers, and so they were always told, don't gamble. I mean, like, just like, because literally in a week or even in an evening you could lose all your money.

BS: Oh yeah.

TI: And so I think what happened with lots of the Japanese workers because of that, they were actually paid at the end. They wouldn't be given their money 'til the very end just so that they wouldn't get the money and then gamble it and things like that.

BS: Well, there were ways of bookkeeping that, even all the, it was the same way. We got our check at the end of the season, but they had record keeping on losses and winnings and stuff like that, so they always got around that. But Roy Hashimoto's the one that kept me away from the gambling table. He made sure that I never got to sit down. And a lot of my father's friends were pretty protective of me not getting involved in drinking or partying or hitting the gambling tables. I always came away with some money.

TI: So were you about the youngest up there?

BS: Yes. Me and a kid named Ben Simon, we were in the, we went out about the same time, and he was a year younger than I was. And Ben Simon became a colonel in the U.S. Army after his, his career was military.

<End Segment 3> - Copyright © 2011 Densho. All Rights Reserved.