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TI: The, again, talking to the people who went up there, it was really hard work, but it was lucrative. I mean, people will talk about literally working for two, three months and using that money the rest of the year because it was pretty lucrative. Was that the same for you?

BS: For me it was, it was really cool. I was able to buy a car when I came back home that first year, my first car. '39 Chevy.

TI: Good.

BS: The first year, 1951, I was in the warehouse and my job was filling these machines with tops of the cans, and the cans would come around this belt and then they'd go down -- it was a machine, right? -- and the tops were stacked, and they'd press down on the can and then it'd turn around, and the next can. My job was to fill that thing with tops. All day long that was my job. I was called the topper, was what the hell they called that. It was really tediously boring work, but I was just thinking the money I was making was pretty cool. The second year I went, 1952, I had to work in the fish house and it's called the slimer. The fish came off, the fish came off the, onto a belt. Someone would be in the bin hoisting the fish onto this belt, and the fish would come off the belt and the butcher would take the fish and place it into a section of the belt where the heads were chopped off and the belly was slit open by a machine, and it came down the conveyor belt to four or five of us on each side of the belt, and we would grab a fish and we'd clean out the inside. You had a water spigot and a knife and crusty old gloves, and our job was to clean out the guts of the fish. All day long. Boom, boom. Well, being the rookie, my first year as a slimer they put me at the end of the conveyor belt, and every once in a while they would sort of let every other one go by and they'd just pile up, and I'm going like crazy and they're laughing, you know? And I didn't think it was very funny, but that was sort of the introduction into the sliming business when you're in Alaska. And you, of course, they'd do that a couple times and then they, the joke was, it was laughed out.

TI: And this was also your, right, your first exposure to the cannery workers union and things like that?

BS: Yes.

TI: Tell me about that, how that was structured.

BS: It was, the leaders of the cannery worker union, say the president of the union, there was always, they were always the big shots in the community. The most important roles in the union in the seafood industry was the president of the union and the dispatcher. He's the one, when the workers came in to sign up, he's the one that pointed out who would get selected to go to a cannery, and so when you wanted to get selected, of course, you paid off. Under the table you had to pay the president -- this is Filipino politics, of course -- you paid off the president and you paid off the dispatcher. Well, my dad was still very prominent as that hero, and so I got to go up without having my dad pay off the dispatcher or the president. It was sort of an honor for them to have Sammy's son work at the cannery, so I never had to go through that. But that's how it worked. You, it was more like a seniority system, but you had to pay it off. You had to pay off. And years later, there were some problems with the union, cannery workers, reform movement, Selmi Domingo and Gene Viernes got caught up in that. And the gambling industry really started to take over the gambling in Alaska, so they would hire their shark dealers, which, who were gangsters, and they would be dispatched to Alaska, bypassing the seniority system.

TI: Oh, so they were in cahoots with the upper management.

BS: Yeah, the dispatcher, the president, who happened, when I went up it was Tony Baruso. And that whole, we can get into that a little bit later.

TI: Yeah, we'll get that later, because of the murder of Gene and Selmi.

BS: Yeah. But that's when that started, and it seemed like the president of the union was always a high ranking official in the Filipino community incorporated, the larger Filipino community. Either the president or one of the officers, because he... almost every family, or every other family in, Filipino family in Seattle had to have someone, a dad, an uncle, cousin, brother, sister, that wanted their kids to be dispatched to Alaska, so you always owed it to these two, the president and the dispatcher, to pay them off to get your kids dispatched to Alaska.

TI: And they got their power because they worked with the owners of the canneries?

BS: Who were lookin' the other way, of course.

<End Segment 4> - Copyright © 2011 Densho. All Rights Reserved.