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TI: So let's keep moving, so 1952 you graduate from O'Dea.

BS: Graduated from O'Dea.

TI: What do you do next?

BS: I actually had a boxing scholarship to Gonzaga. They worked out a boxing scholarship to Gonzaga, and I was thinking, I really have to go school and really study, and I boxed at O'Dea for the four years that I was there. At that time boxing was a, was a high school sport, and several schools around the state had boxing programs, but the Seattle School District didn't, so we would travel all over the state boxing, and I got the scholarship. And I decided right after summer, before I went to school, I hired on at Boeing. I wanted to earn some money for school and worked through the summer at Boeing. And all my buddies, before... my buddies were all older, a year or two older, and they had joined the Marine Corps to fight in Korea, during the Korean War, and after I worked that summertime -- and that summertime I worked in Alaska, came back early, and worked at G.O. Gwy's drugstore on Third and Union, and that was the first Seafair torchlight parade, the year that I was working there, and all my buddies came in to the soda fountain, and I'm washing dishes and they're saying, "See ya, Bob," and then they go out the parade and I just felt I'm missing the whole world. I'm crushed 'cause I'm missing this big old celebration. But anyway, I decide to apply at Boeing, and I got a job at Boeing and the salary's pretty good, so I bypassed my first year of school at Gonzaga to work, and halfway through the year I decided to join the Marine Corps, to catch up with my buddies. So I didn't attend college until I got out and just did a couple of semesters there. But I joined the Marine Corps and became, I was an expert on the rifle range, and I thought, oh man, I'm gonna become the sniper. You know, that's the elite when you're an expert in firearms. You have the general medal and then you have a specialist and you have expert. But they assigned me as a mechanic to a helicopter squadron, so I spent my years going to school in naval aircraft schools, in Memphis, Tennessee, and in a base in North Carolina, and I was shipped off to Korea. And the armistice had been signed while we were on a ship to Korea, so I never got in, to see any conflict. And while I was on KP duty -- you know what KP duty is? You work in the kitchen and peeling potatoes -- I saw these guys running, jogging, a team, and I yelled out, "What are you guys doing?" And they said, "We're on the boxing team." So I joined the boxing team when I was in the Marine Corps, and you get all these privileges. You work, you get to eat in the, not the officers mess hall, but the sergeant, the noncommissioned officers mess hall, and you get special treatment, and then you go from base to base and box in certain tournaments, so that was more my life in Korea. And later when I was reassigned to Japan I joined the boxing team there in Japan, and so I had a good life when I was in the service.

TI: And my notes indicate that you were pretty good, at least in the service.

BS: Well that's what I told people, I was pretty good, but I was pretty, just, I won more than I lost, but I was probably like Uncle Tommy. I wanted, I wanted that status without really having the, I wasn't like my dad. I knew how to box 'cause I grew up in the gym, but I didn't have that killer instinct, whatever they call it. But I got along pretty well.

TI: How about things like racism and prejudice in the service during that era? How would, what was that like?

BS: That, that was sort of, well in the Marine Corps, when I went to boot camp in the Marine Corps half of the platoon came from Hawaii and the other half from Texas, so there was always this little conflict going on, and I'm right in the middle 'cause I'm from Seattle, Washington, right? And so I could see this playing out, and the Hawaiian guys were, they were pretty, seemed to be pretty patient in explaining cultures, what they were going through, how fun it is in Hawaii, and growing up, we all play football, and all of that. And the kids from Texas slowly started to embrace, not the culture so much, but the individuals, and so when we first started out, the first week or so in boot camp, there was a lot of tension, and that sort of played out in, after a month or so, everybody in the platoon pretty well got along. So it's always a learning experience when you go into a situation like that. I got into a couple of fights myself when people made derogatory comments about Koreans or Japanese or African Americans at that time, or Filipinos, comments that were made probably, insensitive kinds of things that probably they grew up with notions but not really, really didn't mean what they were saying. It's just part of their life, using derogatory terms.

TI: Now where did that come from in terms of standing up for other people? So here you have African Americans or Japanese or Koreans, I mean, you could think, well, they could just stand up for themselves, but you went out of your way to stand up for others, so where did that come from?

BS: Well, when you're, when you're growing up in Chinatown, International District you sort of know the difference of peoples and cultures and like that, and things like that. And when my schoolmates were sent away to Camp Harmony and later to Minidoka, that's when you know that there's this difference in people of color. That's, we said the Japanese kids and families were sent away and the German kids and Italian kids, the white kids weren't sent away. So you knew automatically that there's some kind of racial difference. There's some kind of difference between brown people, black people or brown people, and white people. So it probably doesn't register until you start hearing comments, and then you're fighting for, you're fighting to stand up for the people that they're saying derogatory things about. You're coming to their, to their defense or behalf. It was something you really didn't think about. You just reacted to it. At least I did.

TI: Okay, good. So I'm gonna keep moving along, so 1955 you were discharged from the military.

BS: Yes. And I'd like to, I loved the service. I probably would've stayed in the service, but I got in a little trouble on the last day in Japan, got into a big brawl in Gifu city. And all the, you know all the bar girls, they were all our buddies, and we'd go out on liberty every night or on weekends, and we had a Marine Corps platoon on an army base, so there were a bunch of us in the Marine Corps and then we always kept to ourselves, but that last day in Japan we had to mix it up with the army guys and got in a big old brawl. And they picked about seven of us off and they brought us before the old man, and he took our stripes away. My sergeant's stripes were on the desk. If I re-upped I would've made sergeant, but he said, "Santos, I got to do something here. It's on the record. You guys got picked up. You got arrested, and I got to take your stripes." I was a corporal then, so they took me stripes away and I didn't reenlist because I was a private then. I went in a private, got out a private. But, and he was one of my, he was one of my coaches as, on the boxing team, and he just shook his head, said, "There's nothing I can do about it. I got to take your stripes."

TI: So if it weren't for that incident you would've probably stayed in the military?

BS: I would've stayed in for, for...

TI: And then you would've been enlisted as a sergeant and then probably...

BS: I would've probably went up for a little bit 'cause I really liked that life, hot shot Marine and all that stuff.

TI: Interesting how one little thing can really change your life like that.

BS: Yeah.

TI: Okay. So, so after that incident, then you --

BS: We didn't win the brawl either. We got beat up like crazy. We're standin' there, all black eye, bloody nose, in front of the old man and we're giggling, and he got, he was pissed off because five, six of us were standing in front of him and we just couldn't hold down the, we thought it was so funny lookin' at each other all busted up. These army guys, they really took us to the cleaners. And so he, the old man just got mad and took everybody's stripes.

TI: [Laughs] That's a good story.

<End Segment 6> - Copyright © 2011 Densho. All Rights Reserved.