<Begin Segment 7>

TI: So after you're discharged, what happens next?

BS: I -- excuse me. [Reaches for a tissue] Here we go again.

TI: Sure. Why don't we take a...

BS: Little break. I was thinking about school 'cause I had the GI Bill, but I was in the middle of the school, it was in October and it was after the semester started, so I went back to Boeing and got a job in the, called the hammer shop. They had these big SECO hammers, lead hammers, and you have a flat piece of metal, and the hammer came down to shape the metal, right, and it formed the metal to the shape of the die. And so that was a fun thing to do. And then in that shop they had these rope hammers and the heavy hammerhead came down with the die on it, come down slowly, and then across the aisle were these siegal hammers that were used hydraulically, and they came down hard, like boom. You had to go like this and they'd go [moves arm up and down] and then boom. And I was, I became a hammer operator after the first, after the first year, actually, I made my way up from a B operator to A operator within a year, so I really started making some money. I'd get these raises every other week, seems like twice, twice a month I'd get raises. So this one guy, this old guy, a Nordic American guy who had been there for years, he was a shop steward and he was the jitney driver, and he was just livid that this young kid was making more money than he was making at that time. And I had to have a die brought in to the hammer once and I had to call him, Gus or whatever his name was, and I had to lead him in with this die that's dangling from a jitney, right, on a cable, and it's several hundred pounds, maybe a ton even, and it swaying like this. And he's going by me, and he stops and it starts to sway, and it hits me, right? The die hits me, not hard, but just enough to piss me off, and I, this had been going on for about a month or so, this antagonism between him and I, him really, really mad at me. But so when he hit me, instinctively, I grabbed him off the jitney and I hit him, and he went flying into a bin full of cut up aluminum scraps. And when I hit him I probably hit over here somewhere [points to head], right, and he went in there, and then when I saw the photos when I, when they arrested me and brought me to trial, he's all cut up. It wasn't from me, it was from the, from the metal scraps in that bin that he got cut up, and so I had to, went to trial of course, and I subpoenaed all my coworkers and they stuck up with me, for me. They said this guy had caused me trouble for a whole month and then I just retaliated. And I got, I got convicted, but they, there was no sentencing. They put me on probation for a year, if I stayed out of trouble, so I did that. He got transferred out of the shop and I got to keep my job.

TI: And so it's interesting, so Boeing, as a company, they didn't really do anything to really discipline? It was more a outside police...

BS: It was an internal, it was, yeah, it was the sheriff's department, and the discipline inside the shop was with the foreman, actually. He's the one that made the decision to ship that guy out, and I kept my job. But that was, that was just the only time I got in trouble.

TI: Was that first time you were arrested at this point?

BS: Yes.

TI: Okay.

BS: First time of many. [Laughs] First legitimate one.

[Interruption]

TI: So it was during this time also that you met Anita, also.

BS: Yes.

TI: So let's talk about that.

BS: Now, when the war ended and we all came home -- and all, the whole gang stuck together, from the basketball players, the Filipino kids, and there's a couple of black kids that grew up with us, Bob Murray and Bob Maxie, and we always told the league, the Asian league that they had Filipino blood. You couldn't really prove it, but they went along with that. So our team and our gang, we stuck together, and we would roam the International District, Chinatown lookin' for trouble. We hung out at the Manila Cafe, which is where the post office is now on King Street, right next to Hing Hay Park, and the waitress at the time was Anita Agbalog. And we, you know, I started hustling and we dated. We started dating. And she was pretty popular, 'cause she was, she was just ready to graduate from Franklin High School, and we started going steady and her mother, Mildred, wanted to have a big wedding when the time came for her to have her daughter get married. She's saving up all this money. And Anita and I decided we would elope. We didn't want to go through all this church wedding and all this kind of stuff, we went to Everett to get married, and I had to bring my best, a best man, right, this guy to stand up. And I had to bring someone who wouldn't blab about this marriage, so I asked Bob Maxie to come up to Everett 'cause we were getting married and to bring his girlfriend, Mabel. Well, it just so happened Mabel was married to a musician, right, and seeing Bob on the side, so I knew if I brought Bob and Mabel up they wouldn't blab about me and Anita getting married 'cause they had this thing going. So we went to Everett and got married, and it was pretty cool.

TI: Although your mother-in-law probably wasn't very happy.

BS: Oh, she wasn't very happy at all, especially the dad. The dad wanted his only daughter to have a nice little wedding, but the dad and mom, they liked me, so they got over it. So we had, our union had six children, and that's, those six children have produced nineteen grandchildren, and those grandchildren have produced twelve great-grandchildren, so I've got this group, these, this group. And I don't all their names right now.

TI: That's okay. [Laughs] We won't go through that.

BS: I know their names, but I don't know how to connect 'em with the faces right now, especially the great-grandkids.

TI: That's amazing.

BS: That's terrible, but I'll see 'em and I'll just hug 'em and throw 'em around and stuff, and they tell me later who that kid was.

TI: And you're such a strong connection to their heritage. I mean, you can tell all these stories about their, not only their great-grandfather, but their great-great-grandfather and on and on, so that's, that's neat. So you're at Boeing for, what, about ten years or so?

BS: I was at Boeing for, yeah, just about ten years, probably about twelve years, I think. And it was during the cutbacks from the dinosaur program. I was an A hammer operator, and they, they took my A rating away and gave me a B rating. I could still be a hammer operator, but I lost a little bit of money, salary range went down, and so I decided I was going the wrong way, so I was looking for another job and decided, I had joined a Catholic fraternal organization called the Knights of Columbus. And it was, when I was a member of the Knights of Columbus, it has a really nice insurance program, too, life insurance program, so the director of the insurance program asked me if I wanted to work for him, selling insurance, and I said sure, I'd leave Boeing. I loved that work, but I decided I was going the wrong way, so I hired on as an insurance salesman for the Knights of Columbus and did pretty well, but it wasn't really what I wanted to do. My heart wasn't into it. And so I was hired by another member of the Knights of Columbus, a guy named Bill Herr, to work in his lumber yard. He had four or five lumberyards scattered around the Puget Sound area, and so he hired me and made me the manager of his little store in Everett called the Caboose. It was right by the railroad tracks and I was manager of this lumberyard up in Everett for a couple years. And then I was reassigned to Skyway, the lumberyard in Skyway, and it's the same time I'm starting to get involved in civil rights movement. And I, from the Knights of Columbus I met a guy named Walter Hubbard, and he was an activist in the black community and happened to be also, happened to be a leader in the black Catholic community, and so he, he talked me... let's take a little break here.

<End Segment 7> - Copyright © 2011 Densho. All Rights Reserved.