<Begin Segment 1>

TI: Okay, so Bob, we're gonna start the third interview, and today is June 30, 2011. In the room we have Dana Hoshide on camera, Nina Wallace, who's observing, I'm the interviewer, Tom Ikeda. And where we finished the second interview was right at the time when you had joined InterIm, and you talked about going forward and getting a large grant, and right about that time you became executive director. And that's where we ended, so I thought we'd pick up the story there, and with the question, so now that you're executive director of this fairly new organization with some money, what do you do?

BS: Okay. Well, this is the most interesting time that, during the Civil Rights Movement and during the beginning of the Asian American experience and that movement. InterIm was -- InterIm, acronym for International District Improvement Association -- was started by the business community and property owners, as a quasi chamber of commerce. And it was funded, they got a little grant from the Model City Program because the International District was in the Model City boundaries. It's like it was a bird and it covered most of the Central Area, but the feet part, the leg part of the bird was down into the International District. So we applied for and got just a small grant. And when they started opening up meetings beyond the membership of the property owners and business owners it was open to the community, to the public, so the activists, those of us who were in the Civil Rights Movement, Latino/Chicano Grape Boycott, the Black Movement, the Native American Fishing Rights Movement -- [coughs] excuse me. All the Asian activists gathered in the ID. We met at St. Peter Claver Center for a couple of meetings and decided that the International District, Chinatown, Japantown, Manilatown, was under attack. I-5 was built, I-90 was being planned. This is, this is the mid '60s, early '70s. I-90 was planned. The Kingdome was a brainchild of the business community, and they were thinking about a multipurpose stadium somewhere in Seattle. The business community wanted it downtown, so the land that was affordable, available seemed to be on the railroad storage tracks, south of the government center of downtown, which is where the King Street, Union Street, King Street Station was. So all this is happening and I'm hired by InterIm because of the activists infiltrating InterIm board. There was enough people on the board when my name came up for executive director opening, I got voted in. And there was a lot of, little bit of turmoil inside the InterIm board who really didn't want me, and I think Tomio was one of those.

TI: So these were the business, property owners who weren't really sure about you and your activist group.

BS: Right. Well, because we were demonstrating, we came from the Civil Rights Movement, we must be a bunch of Communists, and there was really a lot of tension. And so we're in this, we're in these meetings at InterIm and part of the board, I'd say one third, maybe even more of the board members left. They didn't want to deal with us. Tomio, Shigeko Uno, Don Chin, who was president of the Chinatown Chamber of Commerce, Wesley Tao, a couple other folks stayed on. They stayed with the InterIm board 'cause they were very interested in the energy and the smarts of these young people that were there to protect the International District from being displaced, from being destroyed by all this public development. We were surrounded by all this concrete. And so one of the first things that happened was there were lawsuits filed by young law students, Peter Bacho and Norris Bacho and some of those, to stop the stadium. Of course, that didn't work. I mean, the suit was thrown out. But the businesspeople and professionals found at that we weren't just gonna hit the streets. We also had legal expertise that were helping us so that it brought us to this little bit, little bit of sophistication, little level of sophistication. In the meantime, when the state built I-5 through the district it was elevated over Jackson Street to Dearborn, I think it was. It's elevated, so you have all this airspace between King Street and Jackson Street and this, this large airspace, and InterIm decided to go to the governor and try to work out a deal where the community that was impacted by the construction of the stadium, as a small mitigation, the community should get rights to the airspace under the freeway, right? Some of the activists were saying, "What will we do with it?" They said, "We'll build a parking lot for the businesses," and the activists are saying, "Baloney. You guys just want, InterIm just wants to acquire the airspace to build a parking lot for the stadium people. They don't care about the business community or the residents of the ID." So there was give and take about that, and the thing was, let's get, let's try to get that parking lot, work out this other details later, the pros and cons of who would be using the parking lot.

TI: But what's interesting is there's lots of, I guess, tensions, suspicions about each other in terms of motives, "What are you doing and why are you doing this," at this time.

BS: Yes, yes. Right.

TI: Okay. Go ahead.

BS: And then this is about the time I become executive director, so I became sort of the negotiator, right? I've never led a demonstration. I was always in the background, and when people were arrested and busted, except for a couple of times, I'd be left at the bargaining table negotiating what, what the needs were, why we were marching, why we were taking over offices and throwing tantrums and stuff like that. So I was hired by InterIm and I became this negotiator, and we figured out that we could build two hundred and thirty-three stalls under this freeway, so even activists, radicals, have a little business sense, right? They've all gone to school. They do the math and they're thinking, well, that's not a bad deal, if the parking lot, the priority is for the residents and the businesses in the community rather than stadium goers when the stadium would be built, 'cause it was being planned then. So everybody agreed that would be a good idea, so that was the first time that we sort of came together with a major idea of InterIm acquiring a parking lot. Now, I don't know how many nonprofits are in the parking lot business, but it's a good business. Most of the funds that nonprofits get are probably, if they're public funds then there're restrictions on what you can do with it. With the revenue from the parking concession, wow, we could lobby, we could fly to Washington, D.C., and hit all the offices and do that kind of work. So it was unrestricted.

TI: Unrestricted funding, right.

BS: Unrestricted funds. The first, the first year or so we couldn't give a parking stall away. We were charging -- and the state paved it and they striped it, two hundred and, two hundred and twenty-two, two hundred thirty stalls -- six dollars a month that we were charging for a parking stall per month. And for the residents it was, it was probably half of that. And we couldn't give it away. I hired a guy named Ed Hidano. He just got out of graduate school from Washington State University, and we loaded him up with these fliers. Well, we couldn't, we didn't get much movement there that we got this parking lot. Then Mayor Uhlman came up with this idea of developing a magic carpet service downtown, free bus service so that people working in the downtown area could jump on a Metro bus from one end of downtown to the other end of downtown, at lunch hour or something, and it would be good for the businesses. And it was a good idea, except the boundaries of the magic carpet service were Virginia on the north and Yesler on the south. So we got our folks together, especially the elderly, and we marched on the mayor's office. "You're discriminating against our elderly. Our elderly should be able to ride a bus." And so the mayor's office would say, "Where do you suggest the magic carpet line end, or start in the International District?" We said, "Eighth and Jackson." That's where the parking lot was.

TI: So the parking lot would be right on the edge of the magic carpet.

BS: Right. We invented park and ride. You know, park six dollars a month, jump on the magic carpet service downtown. Now we've tried to figure out where park and ride was first started, and I think we were one of the first in the whole world.

TI: Now whose idea was that? Was that --

BS: It was just sort of, it was just, we heard about the magic carpet service and then InterIm said, hey, well we should take advantage of this, and so that's, we...

TI: Now, did you have any pushback from the activists, saying, hey, now all of a sudden the land will go to benefit people working downtown and not the residents, not the businesses?

BS: Well, that's why we set up, we set up parking rates to benefit the business, the residents first and the customers of the business in the ID first, and then monthly parking for those that worked downtown who jumped on the magic carpet service. But that was an InterIm innovation.

TI: And so was it successful? Did all of a sudden people --

BS: We still have it, and it's packed.

TI: A lot of businesspeople who just buy the monthly rate and they...

BS: Yes. They buy the monthly rate and then they send their customers -- we used to have a, we used to have a voucher kind of system, but I think we've done away with that because our rates in the parking lot are, I think, two dollars, two or three dollars all day. It's really a, it's affordable.

TI: Well it kind of works, too, because during the day the office workers are parking there, but then they, after work they come home and they move, then you have empty stalls again for the evening sort of business in terms of restaurants.

BS: Yeah. That's right, for the businesses, and that's been, that's been working pretty well. Because of the problems in the International District with street people and all that, then we have to be very vigilant and we have to step up security so that those that work late and park in the parking lot are not hassled.

TI: So that became a nice revenue stream for you.

BS: That wass the first major revenue source that we had, which allowed me as director to do a lot of lobbying. Most of the nonprofits are under a 501©(3), and because we were in a business, the parking lot business, we applied for and received a 501©(4) designation, which allowed us a little more leeway in this unrestricted fund that we were collecting.

TI: That's a good story. Okay, so now all of a sudden you've figured out a revenue stream so you actually have now resources to focus on the issues within the International District.

BS: Right.

<End Segment 1> - Copyright © 2011 Densho. All Rights Reserved.

<Begin Segment 2>

TI: So let's talk about some of those key issues that you focused on.

BS: Housing was the number one priority. We came into the International District, after the freeways were built, when the Kingdome was being planned, but at the same time there was a major fire in downtown Seattle in the Ozark Hotel, in downtown Seattle. And many lives were lost, so the city came up with a very stringent fire code that included new construction, any residential apartment or hotel in downtown Seattle, the owners had to build in a sprinkler, water sprinkler system, and the existing hotels and apartments in the downtown area, they had to build fire doors, and each hotel room had to be a fire door with, oh, I don't know what the limits on smoke and fire, but it was supposed to be flame resistant material. And there were about twenty-eight to thirty old hotels and apartments in the International District, and fifteen of them were closed because the owners couldn't afford to renovate their buildings to the fire code, bring it up, bring up their buildings to the fire code. So we had just a big glut of empty hotels and apartments.

TI: So, one, it was devastating to the owners.

BS: Yes.

TI: But then the residents, where did they go?

BS: There were displacements of the residents, and the hotels and apartments that were in compliance and were allowed to stay, they were all filled up, no vacancy. When they had vacancies before the new ordinance, then they were filled up to capacity after the ordinance. So it was that time we said we can't afford to lose any more residence in our community because of freeways and stadiums and all that. I mean, those are, fire ordinance was bad enough and this would be, if we were to be, if we were to lose more of a resident base because of the stadium, we would lose the district. So InterIm's number one priority was to preserve, preservation of the district and development of new affordable housing for the residents of the community. And that meant working with the public sector, the city of Seattle, the county, the state, and the federal government, to generate resources to renovate the older buildings that were becoming, they were coming to that point of being substandard. And HUD was just a new agency about that time, so we decided to apply for resources from the Department of Housing and Urban Development to build new housing, what they call Section 8, Section 8 housing where the residents would be provided a voucher and they would pay one third of their income. If they were eligible, if they were low income, they'd pay one third of their income to Housing. So we worked with developers in the International, in the International District, private developers who came in and wanted to build this new housing using the new HUD money, the new HUD set-asides for senior housing. So we worked with developers, and the developers loved InterIm 'cause there were a couple of buildings in the International District where this, right on the verge of closing. One of 'em was the Milwaukee Hotel and, Milwaukee Hotel on Seventh and King, it was the largest hotel in the International District -- well, Milwaukee Hotel and the Bush Hotel.

But Milwaukee Hotel was, was closed by the court when it was petitioned by the fire department in the mid '70s to close the building because of fire code violations. There were sixty fire code violations in the Milwaukee Hotel, so Judge Barbara Yanick with the petition from the fire department closed the building. So InterIm and the Housing Alliance and the International District Emergency Center, we got together and we said, "Listen, we got to save this hotel." We, remember now, we don't want any more displacement of our residents. So we petitioned the court, we all went down to the courtroom, and Judge Yanick looks at it and she says, "It's a fire trap. People will die if there's a fire." We said, "We will promise to eliminate sixty fire code violations. We commit, we have a commitment that we'll eliminate these fire codes." And she said, "I'll give you this weekend to eliminate the ten most pressing concerns that the fire department has. Eliminate those ten, we'll come back Monday and we'll consider whether to close or not." So we got our people together, all the activists, some volunteers, some residents of the Milwaukee Hotel, and I called for help from my buddies from the Civil Rights Movement, Larry Gossett from CAMP and the black, young black folks came down. I called Roberto Maestas at El Centro de la Raza, 'cause that had been up and running now, and they brought their folks. Bernie Whitebear from United Indians of All Tribes, and Tyree Scott from the United Construction Workers. So they all came and we, we took out, in that weekend we took out about forty tons of trash and debris from the hotel. That much tonnage, right? And Tyree Scott and some of the other construction workers, electricians and plumbers, fixed up the plumbing as good as, as well as they could, and installed an electrical system that would meet code. But we had to close up half of the building. We couldn't, in that weekend we couldn't eliminate all the fire codes, but we could eliminate at least ten of the pressing ones. That was done. We went back to the court and the fire department did an inspection, and they petitioned the judge to allow us back into the hotel and keep it open, and they trusted us, they told Judge Yanick, the fire chief told Judge Yanick that they trusted this young group, "That have put in all this labor, they worked twenty-four hours a day to get this hotel up to shape." And the judge said, "Well, but the major, one of the major impediments is a fire alarm system. You can't, there's no way to install a fire alarm system. That'll take a month or two or three months to do that, and do you have the money?" And we said no. So we said, "We're willing to have a twenty-four hour seven day a week fire watch system. We'll have two people every four hours walk through that hotel, twenty-four hours a day." And we committed to do that, and for two years we had this fire watch system. And in the meantime we're installing bit by bit the fire alarm system, so we had people volunteering four hour shifts all through the day, all through the night, all through the weekend, to the week and the weekend. It became sort of a party kind of atmosphere, party up 'til midnight and then, and then shut down and have the people, the fire watch people take over the building. And we would walk the hallways, check all the empty rooms. It was really a very tight controlled environment that we set up.

TI: That's good.

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

<Begin Segment 3>

TI: Going back to that weekend where you, all the people came down and you hauled out that debris, what was the atmosphere of that weekend? You guys did lots of work, but I just want to get a sense of what it felt like that weekend.

BS: Well, the thing was we were, many of us knew about the International Hotel issue in San Francisco. It was the last remaining hotel on Kearny Street and it was the last building in old Manilatown. The financial district, I mean, they, the city of San Francisco just came into Manilatown and just, using the power of eminent domain, wiped out about thirty blocks that included Manilatown. And that was the last building, the International Hotel was the last building standing, and it was occupied mostly by Filipinos, Filipino elderly. And there, the business, there was a barbershop, there was Bayani Han Restaurant, and I used to go to these places. And those of us at InterIm would go down to San Francisco and check out what was happening, and it gave us inspiration that we didn't want the International District, we didn't want what happened in Manilatown to happen in the International District, which would be the wipeout of a whole community, and for us it was a whole ethnic community. Most of the people in the International District, the businesses and property owners really didn't understand why we were fighting so hard to preserve this neighborhood, this community. We were fighting to preserve the housing for the people who built it, and that was our parents, our grandparents and great-grandparents. We didn't want them displaced out of the neighborhood that they built. So we looked at other cities similar to ours for inspiration to really fight, fight hard to preserve this neighborhood. So that's sort of what happened at that time, and there was a lot of energy, a lot of excitement that we were doing something. Young people were, young people used to love to go out to demonstrations, right? The Black, with the Black United Construction Workers, with the Indians, and with the war movement, they got out of school and they could march and have fun. But someone had to stay behind after all that, all the marches, and negotiate whatever we needed. The reasons why we marched in the International District was so that we could preserve the housing. We marched so that we could build a health center for the residents of the community. And young people loved to do that, but someone had to do the work behind all these demonstrations.

TI: But they really complement each other because with a demonstration it got people's attention. They knew there was, the community was involved.

BS: Exactly.

TI: And, but you needed that second part. You need someone to, to really...

BS: Right. You need the second part. So I got to be that guy. I got to tell the story about taking over the mayor's office, at that time was Uhlman or Royer, and John Spellman's office. John Spellman was King County Executive, and we always had problems with John and his stadium, and he was a really good guy, but we had to demand some mitigation for stadiums and all this stuff, so we would go, we would go to these offices and we'd sort of take over the conference room, and then the mayor or the county executive would come in, and then the radicals would start in. Doug Chin and Steve Locke and Frank Irigon start, you know, "MF this," and, "F that," and, "You're destroying our community and you're displacing our residents and they're dying of malnutrition," and the phonebooks would be flying and they would storm out, the radicals. And then Uncle Bob would stay behind, and these guys would look at me and say, "We thought the Asians were sort of just going along with things and we didn't know there were any radicals in the movement." And I think they expected me to apologize for them, and I'd say, "No, their parents and their grandparents are being displaced out of their communities, so there's a lot of legitimacy here in their activism. Lot of these folks are getting older and they don't have time for the old people who are either dying off or being sent out of the community to rest homes." So that sort of set the tone for InterIm staff and the community to be looked at as a part of the city that became a priority for the new housing, the new housing for low income seniors to be built. Our neighborhood's one of the priority neighborhoods.

TI: So I want to go back to those sit ins and demonstrations, so, like the sit ins with the mayor or King County Executive Spellman, were they scripted so that when you talked with the radicals you'd say, "Okay, so your role is to raise a ruckus and then when you storm out I'll stay back and talk it through"? Was that all kind of talked through?

BS: No, it wasn't scripted. But when it happened the first time we said, "Oh, this is working," so we, any time we went to a meeting with an elected official we brought those people with us. "You guys got to come back." So it wasn't scripted, but they knew what they were gonna do, and we knew what they were gonna do.

TI: Okay. Good.

BS: And you know who stood behind? It was people like myself, Ben Wu. He was great. He went to all the demonstrations and he was one of us that stayed behind to do negotiating, so he took, he was the Chinatown expert, right? And Tomio went to a couple of them. Shigeko Uno, the wonderful woman who was manager of Rainier Heat and Power, which owned maybe one-third of the property in the International District, she was very key 'cause she managed a lot of properties, and she was very supportive of the actions that InterIm was taking at these meeting with public officials.

TI: Okay. And going back again to that weekend when everything was, where you had to clean up the Milwaukee Hotel, I just want to get a sense, because they, the judge gave you a tall order to fulfill, do these ten.

BS: Yes.

TI: Was there a sense of hope amongst the people doing this that you could actually pull this off? I was just trying to get a sense of where you guys were. Like this is, again, what were people talking about?

BS: We made a commitment to the judge that we would eliminate all the violations, and then when we got out of the chamber we did. We sat around, said wow, we're gonna have to do a lot of fundraisers 'cause we're gonna have to buy equipment, we're gonna have to bring in some contractors to help do some of the work.

TI: This was a weekend. This was like...

BS: The weekend was, yeah. We had to develop a plan, what we had to eliminate, what we had to clean up, and that's when it was decided, that weekend we decided to close up half the building. As we walked through the building we knew we couldn't, we couldn't eliminate those violations within the weekend, so we closed the building. We asked the fire department if that was okay and they told us what we had to do to close off half of the building, so we were able to do that.

TI: But during that --

BS: We brought in, we brought in a lot of our architects that were on the board. We brought in some experts who laid out some of the needs that we, some of the needs that we had to do and equipment that we had to buy in order to pull this off. And so people started pooling their money, and we had a couple of real quick fundraisers. And don't forget, we kept the residents of the Milwaukee Hotel in place. Some of them had to move from the closed off areas into the existing area, but the little old ladies, the little old Chinese ladies and some of the old manongs, the Filipino guys, they would cook dinner for us. And there was a gathering place in the lobby, and so they kept us nourished, and tea and dim sum that they were making in their hotel rooms, so it became sort of a work in progress for a seventy-two hour period of time.

TI: Yeah, what an amazing story.

BS: Yeah, we've got, we got some, I think there are some editorials that were written about that, and I've got 'em locked in there somewhere, but I got to get, maybe get them out so that you can read them.

TI: Now, was anyone documenting it, just, like someone with a camera, just taking pictures of you working or anything like that?

BS: Yeah, there was some of that going on, too. There were a couple of guys, guys that were, that had cameras. Donny Chin, Tim Otani, Dean Wong, those kind of folks could document stuff. And we found this journal. It was an empty journal, so every, every person that did fire watch, they wrote in a report of the night, of the day or the night of their particular fire watch. Maxine Chan -- you know Maxine Chan? -- so one night she writes in, "Walking down the hall, room 302, Mr. and Mrs. Such-and-Such arguing. Frying pans throwing around the room. 321, door was unlocked. Opened the door. Mrs. Someone from 403 was in the room with what's his name from 204," and she was writing that stuff down. [Laughs]

TI: [Laughs] Everything.

BS: And you had to read this journal to really appreciate what was, what was going on in the building. These guys are, you're talking about people that were a step away from being homeless, and so they really, they had to struggle to stay alive, and many of, some of them were retired, some of 'em were working in low paying jobs, and so they were the cream of the world, I thought, really funny people.

TI: Good story.

BS: Oh, one day I go to the InterIm office and one of the old guys from Milwaukee Hotel is at the door, at the door as I'm unlocking. He said, "Uncle Bob, we have problem. Man sick. Man sick, come on right away. He, I think he dying." So I, before I go to the Milwaukee Hotel I go by the, the health clinic, and I call Edna, one of the nurses. I said, "Edna, you got to come. I think we've got somebody sick." So we go up the stairs, third floor, and we look up and this guy's hanging there. He committed suicide. He's pretty bad shape, he's turning blue. And I said, we cut him down, and I said, "Edna, check to see his pulse." She says, "I'm not touching him. They'll think I killed him," this really funny stuff, but, it was serious stuff too, but we had people with mental, mental problems, not only in the Milwaukee Hotel, but lot of the people who lived in conditions like the Milwaukee Hotel, single room occupancy units, maybe they've left their families and there's been some divorce, and very, some very lonely people in that building. Very lonely people were living in the downtown core, especially if they're single, either the women or the men. So we made a point, the InterIm staff, to talk to every person in the ID, even if you just say hi. You see someone on the street, just say hi. It'll make their day. Some people will, they'll go through the whole day and really not have a conversation. So we became known individually, staff people at InterIm, as this friendly group of young people, just because we did things like that and we went out of our way to help people who have problems, social security checks late, that kind of stuff. We're doing that social service kinds of stuff, even before social workers came in, like ACRS, before they came into the community.

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

<Begin Segment 4>

TI: I want to now kind of move on to the Kingdome and, because you mentioned earlier how there were all these plans to develop the Kingdome, they had checked out the land sort of just west of the International District, right there.

BS: Yeah.

TI: So, and there was resistance. You guys didn't want it there. So what, how did you try to stop it?

BS: At the groundbreaking ceremony the county built this stage, temporary stage, and all the elected officials and all the leaders of Seattle were invited to this big groundbreaking ceremony. And city council Lem Tui, he was there, and John Sato was there from our community, Don Chin, and then all the mayors from surrounding areas, mayors from all the cities in King County. And students from the University of Washington, the Asian students from the University of Washington and Broadway Community College at that time, Seattle Central, and a lot of the high school students, there was word around that, hey, there's gonna be a little demonstration at the groundbreaking, so all these Asian students came down. And the front of the stage were all the big shots, right, facing the stage, and in back of the stage were the activists. And speeches were going on, and the activists had painted up little signs, "Don't let the Dome doom Chinatown," "Hum bows not hot dogs." These signs were up, and we were chanting, we, "No stadium," "We will not be moved," all that kind of stuff. And we started throwing little mud balls. It was in November, October or November, and we started throwing little mud balls up to the stage to get the attention of the elected officials. And they wouldn't turn around, so the mud balls became a little bit, little bigger, and then boom and then the sheriff's, sheriff's deputies came down, hauled off a couple of students. And that was cool, then there was yelling and they're screaming and people were being hauled away. Next morning, front page, "Asian community opposes the multipurpose stadium that will be built, disruption at the groundbreaking." And we said, hey, this is cool, so once a week we would have some kind of a demonstration at that site.

One of the guys, Frank Irigon said, hey, there's gonna be a Boy Scout bicycle rally at that site, and some of us said, "Let's not pick on the Boy Scouts now, come on. Why don't we turn our attention, bring our, bring our elderly and we'll have, we'll march on HUD?" The Department of Housing and Urban Development had their offices on Second and Union, so we took the same people that were going to the stadium demonstrations, we took them down Jackson Street up Second Avenue to the HUD office and to demand that some of the new programs that HUD was, had initiated, that we in the International District would become one of the priorities for the senior housing that the federal government was offering. And so we actually occupied the HUD offices. There were two hundred, led by elderly residents. We walked very slowly up Second Avenue, and once we got there Ben Woo, myself, Norma Aziz, Peter Bacho, Frank Irigon, they only called in ten of us, and we met with the HUD officials, all white, all male, and didn't get very far. And so the word went down that we're not doin' too well, so the two hundred other people that were on the street came up, took over the whole HUD office, just, and I have a slide of that that I'll show you. And we made our point, got it in the press, got a nice little coverage about that. And one of the problems about that time was that Nixon put a freeze on all funding to new housing starts and to put a stop to a lot of programs. There was a freeze, was a government freeze on social service programs and housing programs, and so we had to wait that out. But we would go down to HUD every week and meet with staff, and they got used to us and it became a pretty good situation where, once the freeze would be lifted, the HUD promised us that if the mayor's office and the city would concur then the International District would be high on the priority of new funding. And so the freeze was lifted and we were able to get funds to build the International Terrace by the Seattle Housing Authority, Imperial House where Fuji Sushi is, that building, International House on Maynard and Weller. We worked with the developers to make sure that when they built that housing that our people were first in line. And it just so happened that some of the first people that we signed up for this new housing that would be opened up in the mid '70s were the residents of the Milwaukee Hotel. It was during this time that InterIm, we were trying to negotiate a sale with the owners of the Milwaukee Hotel, Jordan Wong and Don Louie, and their price was a little bit more than what we could afford, so we knew that at some point after occupying the Milwaukee Hotel for almost three, almost four years, that at some point we'd have to give it up because we didn't want to invest more money into a building that we would not eventually own. So we waited 'til these new apartments were being built using HUD money, and then when they were completed and the doors were opened we had our people from the Milwaukee signed up to move into the new apartments. So no one from the, from the Milwaukee Hotel was ever displaced, so that was sort of calculated to do that.

TI: That's a good story. Going back to the Kingdome and the demonstrations, were you able to get any mitigation? Eventually the Kingdome was built and it did impact the International District, but through your efforts or the efforts of others, did the county every do any mitigation for the International District?

BS: What the county did was, John Spellman was there, and the county hired a consultant, a woman by name of Diana Bower. And Diana was an architect, and in fact, she was the head planner that designed the Waterfront Park. Her and her husband helped design that. Anyway, she was a, sort of a Caucasian woman, do-gooder liberal, and she, her assignment was to work with the International District and Pioneer Square to find out how the county and the city could mitigate the problems that would be caused by traffic of the, of the Kingdome. And she started working with InterIm and started working with Pioneer people, Pioneer Square people, but she told me privately that the needs in the International District are a little bit more prominent, so she spent about seventy-five percent of her time with us and twenty-five percent in Pioneer Square 'cause she knew that in the International District we wanted to preserve the housing stock for the people who live there, the low income seniors, low income families, working families, where Pioneer Square, they were trying to rejuvenate that neighborhood to bring in more middle income, higher income people, right, and to preserve the shops there, the artists' lofts and the art galleries and the wine shops and T-shirt shops and all that kind of stuff. And in International District, she just saw a need for more attention because we wanted to build housing, we wanted to build a health clinic. So she wrote up twenty-one resolutions, working with the community, and the resolutions were written to help mitigate the traffic and the problems of the Kingdome. Seventeen of the twenty-one resolutions were passed by the city council, and that was to develop housing. The city would prioritize the International District as a recipient for funds for the federal government, through HUD, that a health center, funds for a health center be allocated, business revitalization funds, seventeen resolutions all supporting our International District redevelopment. And she was assigned to make sure that these resolutions were put in place, and so Diana worked very closely with us.

TI: And how did you feel about these kind of mitigations, the resolutions? Were they, were they acceptable to you? Did you feel pretty good about them?

BS: Most of the resolutions, when the radicals, when we first marched on city hall there was an organization put together by Al Sugiyama, Frankie Irigon, the Bacho brothers, a bunch of, bunch of activists, had an eight point program which included housing, health care and all that, and they marched, we all marched on, when we marched on John Spellman's office the eight demands were placed on his desk, and those eight demands were included in the seventeen resolutions passed by the city council. And I'd have to dig that out 'cause I forget each one of 'em, but Diana Bower took those resolutions as a marching order and so she worked very closely with InterIm. And this little old white lady, she became one of us, she was a sista, you know? Doug Chin, "She's a sista," and Diana loved that, and we got a lot of, we got a lot of the demands or the recommendations funded. And so that was the lever; we used the stadium as a lever to get some of the stuff accomplished, some of these resolutions accomplished. So I'd say that the stadium, you couldn't, we couldn't stop it, but once it was there it impacted, like on a Seahawks Sunday where most of the, lot of the families outside of the International District want to bring their kids and the families want to come in for a dim sum afternoon on a Sunday. When there was a Seahawk game all the parking spaces were taken up by stadium goers 'cause they would come earlier, so that was one of the impacts that we said, hey, the businesses aren't gonna benefit from people going to the stadium. It's a detriment, it's not a positive element. Our parking lot might do well, but people from the parking lot don't stop into the restaurants before they go into the stadium. There were a few restaurants that had deals, ticket deals, parking -- Four Seas, park here, have lunch, go to the stadium, come back, have drinks -- so they worked out some pretty good deals with their clients, but very few of the other restaurants were able to do that, or wanted to do that.

TI: Okay.

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

<Begin Segment 5>

TI: So I want to move to another issue that even kind of rages today in terms of, what do you call the area?

BS: [Holds up glass of water] Vodka.

TI: [Laughs] Traditionally, or historically, it was called Chinatown. At some point after the war it started to be called the International District by some people. Now there's this hybrid, the Chinatown/International District. I mean, tell me about that, the issue of what should the area be called?

BS: "Chinatown, get a life." Back in the '50s there was a, there was a Mayor Clinton and a Mayor Brahman who ran the city, and there was a Chinatown. I mean, the core, Weller Street, King Street, Jackson Street, that was Chinatown. Nihonmachi was north of Jackson Street up to the hill, all the way up the, to Twenty-third or whatever that was, Yesler, Jackson. Manilatown was right within the Chinatown core, along Maynard Avenue, along Sixth Avenue. Filipino businesses were along there, and all the hotels in the whole Chinatown area were filled with Filipinos. And so we had these three major Asian ethnic groups. There was a black, a very prominent black population down here, and as you might have remembered, this was the jazz capital of the West Coast. Being at the end of the railroad lines, Union Pacific, Northern Pacific, all the porters, cooks, everybody, all the black folks that worked on the railroad line, when they came to Seattle they'd come to Chinatown International, this International Settlement. And during the war years the soldiers, the black soldiers and the soldiers of color would gravitate to the International District. So the mayor at that time in the '50s said, "This is more than just a Chinatown, it's larger than just a Chinatown," and didn't want to exclude people, so they said, "We'll name it the International Settlement," which includes Chinatown, Japantown, Manilatown, whatever. And a couple of years later there was, there was a flier that went around, rickshaw races. I think it was, had to be the late '50s or so. There was a bright idea from, I think, the Chinatown Chamber of Commerce to have a rickshaw race, and when it was publicized in the local newspaper it says, "Rickshaw race in International District." That's the first time anybody saw that term.

TI: And interesting it came from the Chinese community.

BS: It actually came, it actually came from, the rickshaw race was sponsored by the Chinese community, but it was publicized, picked up by other people outside the Chinese community as in the International District. We were the jazz capital, Jackson Street was, the Embers, the Black and Tan, all these clubs up and down Jackson Street and some around King Street were owned by black entrepreneurs, Chinese entrepreneurs and black entrepreneurs. And then, course, you had the fishermen, the white fishermen that would live in the International District during the off season. The lumbermen would come into town, would stay in the International District and Pioneer Square. So it was really a mixed neighborhood. It wasn't just Chinatown. So now the word is out that Bob Santos wants to eliminate Chinatown. Duh. I don't know why I get credit for that, but I keep telling people, "Call it what you want, just don't force other people to call it what you want," right? And there was a little controversy a couple years ago when those of us from InterIm and the PDA -- InterIm created the Chinatown/International District Preservation Development Authority, we created that as a low income housing developer -- and when the Village Square was built and the health clinic was built and the library was built, some leaders in the Chinatown area said, "We don't want it to be called International District Health Clinic. It should be Chinatown Health Clinic." Back and forth. How about International District/Chinatown? No, it's got to be Chinatown/International District. And I said, "Hey listen, if you build something you name it. We built the International Village Square and we're gonna name it." So we decided to go halfway and name it the International District/Chinatown Village Square. Chinatown, International District/Chinatown Health Clinic. We went halfway with them. And it's still not, it's still not good enough for some of the very small leadership in the Chinese community. Others are saying, "Yeah, they built it, they should name it." But it's, this controversy crops up every once in a while and I tend to try to forget about it, but they keep pounding on us that, "This is Chinatown, this is Chinatown." It's not true. There is a Chinatown within the International District.

<End Segment 5> - Copyright © 2011 Densho. All Rights Reserved.

<Begin Segment 6>

TI: Okay. I'm gonna kind of move on. We could stay in the International District for hours and hours with different issues, but I want to move on to some other issues. One was, in the early '80s there was a tragic murder, Gene Viernes and Silme Domingo.

BS: Yes.

TI: And it rocked the community. I mean, I guess I was, I had graduated by then from University of Washington but knew these guys and wanted to get your sense of why this happened and the cannery workers, and just explain that a little bit.

BS: You know, the Local 37, the cannery worker union, was established way back in the '30s, and before the war -- excuse me [coughs] -- the workers that would file up to Alaska and work the seafood industry were Japanese, young Japanese Americans, some Japanese nationals, students, and Filipinos would go up to the canneries and work the seafood industry for the summer and make some bucks. So for the young people, they earned enough money for a college education. And when the war happened and the Filipinos were left behind, the Filipinos sort of took over that industry, at least from the war years on, and so the unions worked out deals with the seafood companies that workers that would work in the, in the cannery section would be union workers. And the company signed off on that. There was a labor agreement with the companies. And it was good for the companies, right? 'Cause they didn't have to go out and hustle workers to come up; the union would dispatch all these workers that would come into Seattle, from all over the country, mainly from California. They'd come up around May, September, springtime, in May, June, and the president of the union and the dispatcher of the union were very, very powerful figures. If you wanted to go up to Alaska and the many canneries that were really, really prominent at that time, you wanted to get ahead of the line, you paid the dispatcher a couple of bucks, or maybe more than a couple of bucks, so that became sort of the system. There there was a seniority system, but you could bypass the seniority system by paying under the table, and so it was, it began to be very corrupt and the dispatcher held a lot of power over the workers of, up in Alaska. Some of the very shrewd gambling owners, in the International District/Chinatown core there was a lot of gambling operations, the Filipino Improvement Club owned by Rudy Santos, the Bataan Club was owned by a guy named Dan Sarisol. These were big casinos, underground, underground casinos. Well, they wanted to, because all these Filipinos were going up to Alaska, they wanted to establish gambling in the canneries where they would send, where the gambling establishments would send up their people to be the dealers, 'cause all these, here you have all these guys with nothing to do and they come, they'd make a lot of money up there. And there was a system of keeping track, whatever kind of system it was, and a lot of these workers, cannery workers would lose their whole, their whole salary to the gamblers. When they, before they left Alaska and got their checks, there it was, so that became very lucrative. So the gambling industry in the cannery, canneries of Alaska, was very prominent, and so in order for that to happen the gamblers would pay off the dispatcher to get their people up. They were in place when the rest of the workers came up. So, and I was one of those cannery worker kids out of high school, two years, 1951 and 1952 I went to Alaska, but my dad was a very prominent boxer, so he got me in without having to pay off the dispatcher.

So when Silme and Gene and Nemesio Domingo, they're involved in a very progressive leftist political group called KDP. The KDP was formed -- it's a Filipino word, that's an acronym for a Filipino word that I can't remember -- but they're opposing Ferdinand Marcos and the Marcos regime in the Philippines, and they're with the KDP and they're trying to gain support of the American, the Filipinos in America and other people to really question the support, the United States support of the dictatorship in the Philippines. The United States government, of course, had to be very careful how they treated Marcos and those people because we needed the military bases that were in the Philippines. The naval bases and the air bases, that was our protective zone for the whole Far East, all those military bases we have. So from President Reagan on allowed Marcos to do almost anything he wanted to during his dictatorship. These young people said, "No, that's not right. We want a democratic form of government." And so they became very prominent in the anti-Marcos movement. In the same time, Silme and Gene became also very prominent in the union reform movement at the cannery workers, okay? So they were working with the -- well, first of all, remember I talked about Tyree Scott and the United Construction Workers, and he was a super organizer? When that, when the construction industry became open to minorities, Tyree got us together, Nemesio Domingo, Silme Domingo, myself, some other folks, to talk about, now we want to hit the discrimination in the seafood industry. So that's when the Alaska Cannery Workers Association was formed, was formed out of Tyree Scott's office, and then Nemesio Domingo, Gene Viernes, and Silme Domingo, David Della, and a bunch of cannery workers filed a class action suit against the seafood industry. And they became prominent in the union. They were, they were kickin' the seafood industry companies in the butt, and in the meantime they were getting themselves in leadership in the union. They had to take over the union from the corrupt, from the corrupt past. And so you had these, you had these activists, almost radicals, that were embarrassing the leadership of the Filipino community who also had ties with the Philippine government, well, with Marcos and the Philippine government. Many of the immigrants from the Philippines in Seattle came from the provinces where Marcos, the Ilocos Sur province where Marcos came from, and so there were these blood bonds and all that stuff. So Silme and Gene and David Della take over some key spots in the union. One of 'em, Gene Viernes became the dispatcher, and when, when the gambling, the gangs, Filipino gangs wanted to send their people to Alaska as part of the gambling consortium, whatever that was, Gene said, "No, we're going by seniority." So he was targeted, and some folks were hired, but they didn't have money, so they turned to the president of the union, a guy named Tony Baruso, who had connections with the Marcos regime. So that started to form some kind of a plan to put pressure on the union, the new union leadership that included Silme and Gene.

In the meantime, let's see how this, this was working... the anti Marcos, the anti Marcos movement became very prominent in Seattle. We were demonstrating once a week, I think it was every Tuesday at the Philippine consulate for the end of the martial law. Gene and Silme, as part of the union, went to the International Longshore Warehouse, International Warehouse Union, Longshore Union that had their convention in Hawaii, and they got the national, international union to support the resolution from Gene and Silme against, to come out publicly against the martial law and the discrimination of the Filipino workers in the Philippines. So that struck a chord with the Marcos regime that this anti martial law alliance was getting a little bit bigger than they wanted to get big 'cause they were getting international support from unions and officials from all over the United States, so the two guys were targeted. Money was sent from the Marcos regime through couriers, military couriers that came to United States and went to, came to California. And there was a guy named Dr. Malabed, who had a very, he was a very prominent physician in San Francisco, and the money went to him and it was traced, and from there, fifteen thousand came up to Seattle to pay for Tony Baruso and the shooters, five thousand apiece to the two shooters that assassinated those two guys. And so to a ten year period -- the shooters were actually convicted in criminal court almost immediately -- and there was a committee that was formed, the Justice Committee for Domingo Viernes. I was a part of that committee, and we took the president of the Philippines, Ferdinand Marcos and his wife, we charged them in civil court for the complicity of those murders, and after a ten year trial they were convicted. First and only time a head of state was convicted in a U.S. civil court of a major crime, and it was, the guy had passed away since, before the settlement, but that was sort of the victory to the anti martial law alliances throughout the United States that finally caught up with Marcos, and it was because of a lot of this that he eventually was forced out of office, February 26th of that year, forgot what year it was -- '74? -- that he was forced out of office.

TI: What was the impact on you? I mean, so these were men that you knew personally and they were activists and you're an activist, and all of a sudden you see the dangers of being an activist. It could mean your life.

BS: Yes.

TI: So you personally, what, what was your...

BS: Well, I was sort of the spokesperson. Every time the Justice Committee, after the deaths, there were meetings, we had meetings constantly, the Justice Committee for Domingo Viernes, to prepare this civil suit, and it was a ten year period. And knowing that there were agents from the Philippines who were still around, we knew that they were around, so when there, and I, and I wasn't involved in the core meetings right now. I was, every time there was a press conference I would be given a script. And me and a guy named Bill Cate -- he was from the Church Council of Greater Seattle -- him and I would be the spokespeople that opened up the press conference, but I wasn't in the everyday meetings and details of the conspiracy, conspiracy theory of the government involvement in the murders. But when the committees, the small group of committees, when they would meet and when they got home they would check on each other by phone to see if they, make sure that they each got home, 'cause they knew the direction, I mean, the routes that they would take home 'cause it was always a concern that something might happen to the core group of planners for this murder trial, for the civil murder trial. So that was a danger there. You sort of knew that there was trouble out there. I was working at InterIm and right out our window -- we were in the Bush Hotel -- right out our window was the headquarters of the Tulisian gang, whose members, three members were convicted of the murder, the planner, Tony Dictado, a guy named Guloy, and another young guy. They hung out across the street on King Street. That was their hangout, and the gang was still there. They were still formed there. So it was a little bit of --

TI: So that had to be, had to be unsettling for you.

BS: They'd say, "Oh, hi, Mr. Santos. Hi, Uncle Bob." But I knew that they didn't really, we got their three buddies convicted, so we weren't very well liked, but they didn't want to get caught up as being involved in the murder, so they were trying to be nice to us so that we would, we wouldn't bother them. But it was, it was a five to six, seven year period of time where we had to watch our backs.

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

<Begin Segment 7>

TI: So this is a good point to ask this question. We've been, this is the third interview and I've learned so much about your activism, and I guess the question is the impact on the family. I mean, here, these activities you talk about, they take over your life. They threaten your safety. What was that impact on your family, your wife, your kids?

[Interruption]

TI: Okay, so, Bob, go ahead and tell me about the impact on your family.

BS: As you become an activist, as I became an activist and I, and there were times where you're out in demonstrations, you have all this turmoil and you're in the wrong place at the right time and you get busted, you get arrested, and you have to call home and say -- my wife, Anita at that time, and we had six children -- and I'd say, "We got any, is there any money for bail?" And first couple of times she, "The guy's an activist," and she went along with that, but after a while, through the years, I think it started to wear on the family. I wasn't there. With the six kids she took, she took the kids to practice every day, and I would make sure I made it to the games, but not to practice. We shared all the duties at home, three, four days a week I would cook, right? I mean, I made sure I'd get home. There were some days I'd miss those dates that I had promised to be home because of a meeting or a demonstration somewhere, so that started to weigh on the marriage, actually. And there's one, there was a couple of times, one of 'em, Silme Domingo came to me and said, "Bob, one of our brothers is in jail and we need to bail him out because he's, his immigration status. They're gonna deport him. So you're one of the only guys in the movement that owns a house. Would you be willing to put your house up for bail?" And I did. And the first time that happened Sharon reluctantly -- not Sharon.

TI: Anita.

BS: Anita reluctantly signed off on it, but the second time it happened she said, "This is the last time. You can't do that to us. You can't do that to the family. I don't even know these guys." That's what Anita said. "I don't even know who you're, who you're trying to help." And so after a few years she said, "Hey, Bob, sit down here. Why don't you save the world, and I'll raise the family?" And so we parted in a pretty good, pretty good situation where we understood what each of us were trying to do, and I put a lot of pressure on the family. So that's the tough part. You lose, you lose people in your family. You lose your wife, you lose, I never lost my kids. I kept hold of them, and visiting privileges were, were I'd have to let her know when I was, when I wanted to visit the kids, and she would always open, she was always open to that. There was never any problems with that. Everything was split down the center.

TI: So when that happened did that make you pause and reflect about your life and what you were doing?

BS: Yeah. It, it really did, you know? But you look around and you're not the only one. You're lookin' at, a lot of folks in political life were in danger of losing families because of your, all your waking hours are spent trying to serve the people, and for some people that's not, it's really not fair because they don't have that same commitment to serve the people that you're serving. So it impacts you a lot, but you have to weigh it, and you're saying, this is not gonna, these folks aren't gonna need my help forever. There's gonna be a point where I'm gonna be able to spend more time, and it never happens.

TI: And when this happened -- I'm sure it was a low point in your life -- who were the friends who came to you to help you?

BS: Oh, they all did. They all offered, they all offered to help. I had to move out, and my staff at InterIm, they all understood that. They understood her concerns and they understood mine, and so they were always, they were always there willing to help me in this period of time. And sort of, at that time I sort of jumped into a relationship, and it wasn't very good, but it was, kept my mind off of the family problem at that time. And eventually kids grew up and moved out of the old house, and they had their own families, and so my first wife, Anita, kept the house and we became closer. I've been married three times. Sharon Tomiko is my third wife, and Sharon and Anita became very close. And it's hard to hate a guy like me, right, forever. [Laughs]

TI: [Laughs] And, Bob, when did the divorce happen? When was that?

BS: It was in early '80s.

TI: Okay, early '80s. Now, thank you for sharing that, I know that's hard.

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

<Begin Segment 8>

TI: I want to go something that is probably a happier note. In the early '90s -- this gets back to your relationship with Larry Gossett, Roberto, and Bernie -- you took a trip to Japan.

BS: Yes.

TI: And, in 1992, it was called the Multicultural Exchange Trip to Japan.

BS: Yes.

TI: Tell me about that. How did that come about, and what was the purpose of this trip?

BS: Well, as you know, the Gang of Four was formed, we all met each other during the '60s and '70s, during the, all the demonstrations that were happening. We, every demonstration, we happened to see each other. Every, almost every demonstration in the Latino community or the Indian community, black, Asian community, we would bring our people to help out the Indians, we'd bring our people to help Roberto and the Latinos, and so we formed a pretty close alliance. When there would be a city council hearing on funds, block grant funds that would be allocated to the community, and we started to go down to the city council and testify for our programs, and we're in competition with all the other communities. I mean, it was really, it was obvious that we're in competition, so the four of us got together and said, hey listen, we can't be out there cutting each other up and, I can top you and my programs are better and I'm serving more people. So when we're out there and we talk about the need to fund our programs we also, we also want to talk about how the other programs that we're working with need equal, they also need the funding, and it's spread out equally, except we demanded more money for that pot. And so the four of us, we call it the Gang of Four, we became very close politically, as activists, but then we also became very close socially. We just liked each other. We'd get together pretty often for a drink after work or after a demonstration we'd go somewhere and have, we'd be a little bit rowdy. And then Bea Kiyohara came up to me once, said, "Hey, Uncle Bob, we have our community show off every year. Can you come up with an idea, 'cause I know you like to sing and dance and all that stuff, and can you come up an idea with, for a performance for our fundraiser?" So I said, "Sure, I can think of something. I'll do a pantomime or I'll do a lip sync or something," and then I decided, hey, Bernie, Roberto, Larry, would you guys be willing to, if we put an act together -- I'll go to Gary Iwamoto and have him write up a script -- would you be willing to perform at a community show off where we can raise money for the community? And here we have these activists that are gonna let their hair down and go on stage, and they all said yes. They're hams. These guys loved the stage. Never pass up a mike. So we were doin' that every year. Every year we had the Gang of Four perform. One, the second year we brought in Annie Galarosa and we had Gladys Knight and the Four Pips. We were the Pips. And we rehearsed, we rehearsed twice a week for about four months. We never missed a rehearsal. Now, the guys never wanted to miss a rehearsal 'cause Annie was always in her tights, right? I mean, she was... anyway. What can I say? And so it was the hit of the whole show. We kept doing that.

And then we started to go on speaking circuits. The four of us would be asked to speak at different conferences. Teresa Fujiwara, who was at ACRS then, had a friend from Japan who, she went, I think her graduate school or something, she, one of her classmates was this guy from Japan that was, became an entrepreneur kind of thing. And he came to Seattle and Teresa introduced him to me, and I said -- name was Toro, and I forgot his last name -- "Toro, I want you to meet these other guys too, because we're involved in this Gang of Four movement where the major ethnic groups are, we cooperate on some stuff." So he met with Larry and Roberto, Bernie, and I, and he said, "Would you be willing to bring your presentation, your panel discussion to Japan if I could arrange to have you come to Japan through the," it's the equivalent of a chamber, a Tokyo chamber of commerce, whatever that business group was. And he got the government of Japan and that business group to pay our way to Japan to speak to a couple of groups in Tokyo and a couple of groups in Kobe, Japan. So along with the four of us, Teresa Fujiwara, she led the delegation, Alice Ito, Don Williamson, who was editorial writer for the Times, he found out about this so he got the Times to send him with us to Japan. So that was the trip of a lifetime, red carpet everywhere, and we were featured on their national or local TV stations during our presentations, and so that was great. One story is when we were in Kobe, and there's this, before the earthquake, and there's this five star hotel, four star, five star hotel with a restaurant on top. And you've been to Kobe you might've been there. It's really one of the, you know, Kobe beef is the thing there, and Maestas keeps getting a waiter over here and saying, "I want some more wasabi. Wasabi." Four, five, six times the waiter, okay, okay, and brings over the wasabi. Finally, about the sixth time, the chef from the kitchen comes in with a bowl of wasabi, a heaping bowl, just to see what's going on here. And so Maestas takes the bowl and he dumps it on top of his bowl of rice like it's gravy, and he, and he eats it, and the whole kitchen staff just went, just busted out laughing. They thought this is the funniest thing they ever saw. It just so happens when Maestas was growing up his grandparents raised the hottest peppers in New Mexico, so everyone in New Mexico knew about this Maestas family and the peppers that they grew. They would, they would find the hottest peppers from this region, from that region and grow 'em in their yard, or in their farm, and mix and match and all that kind of stuff.

TI: That's a good story.

<End Segment 8> - Copyright © 2011 Densho. All Rights Reserved.

<Begin Segment 9>

TI: I want to talk about the Gang of Four. I mean, I've traveled to lots of different cities talking to different communities, and the Gang of Four is very unique.

BS: It is.

TI: You have the leaders of four major ethnic groups, not only working together, but such good friends.

BS: Right.

TI: I mean, have you seen that anywhere else?

BS: No, we really haven't. I spoke, I mean I went to a conference in Portland a year ago, maybe a year and a half ago, and on the panel was a new group that was formed with a Latino, African American, and a Native American. And there was no Asian up on the panel and they had formed a group, and when I asked the question, why don't you have representation from the Asian community, and the answer was -- and this is the housing conference -- the answer was, "Well, most Asians own their own homes." It didn't register with me, but I said, at that time I said, that's not right. That's not true. And so I think, like, Portland was trying to get these communities together, but they didn't quite make it. So I've never, none of us have ever seen a coalition, and we formed the Minority Executive Directors Coalition, which from four members has turned into about a hundred and sixty individual members that represent their organizations or agencies.

TI: But it was that combination of not only working together but really, socially, really liking each other and doing things together.

BS: Socially, yeah. You know, and Roberto, he was a worldly figure. He traveled to Cuba, and when he became sick just last, this year, right? He passed away several months ago, but when he became sick, the word came up from Cuba that invited Roberto down to Cuba and they would take care of him with the medical expertise that they have. But he would've had to move his whole family there and he decided he was eventually gonna pass away, it's gonna be here. But he was also involved, El Centro, when it was formed, soon as they, after they occupied the Beacon Hill School and it became El Centro, there was an earthquake in Nicaragua and devastated Managua, the capital city of Nicaragua, so El Centro, they packaged all this foods and stuff and they sent care packages down to Nicaragua. So there was an immediate relationship from the government of Nicaragua to the, to the staff at El Centro, and Roberto became very close to the Sandinista government. So when Reagan was president and the U.S. forces were stepped up to eliminate the Contras, the Sandinista government, Reagan actually wanted to invade Nicaragua. Well, Maestas would organize delegations of Americans, locally and eventually nationally, to visit Nicaragua to actually observe the kinds of treatment the people in Nicaragua were having under this regime. And the Gang of Four, all four of us, were on those delegations. And Roberto, I mean, myself, I almost give him singlehandedly one of the reasons why Nicaragua was never invaded. We had more Americans there than we had here in Seattle. They were always on these delegations.

TI: 'Cause he thought that would be a way of protecting the country, by just having Americans there observing, that it would cause such an uproar if Reagan or whomever decided to do that.

BS: Exactly. I mean, the guy was an amazing guy. Roberto, he was, course, he spoke to all the leaders in Central and South America because of the connections of family background, Spanish background and all that.

<End Segment 9> - Copyright © 2011 Densho. All Rights Reserved.

<Begin Segment 10>

TI: Okay. So this next part, 'cause I'm gonna, your life keeps changing.

BS: Yeah.

TI: And in '94, up to this point you're the activist, you're doing all these things for the community. In '94 you become the regional director of HUD, an organization that you've worked with in the past and you've done things, but they were always kind of the establishment, the government.

BS: Right.

TI: And now you're asked to join that side. So talk about, talk about that and why...

BS: We marched on HUD, too, remember I told you that? Early '70s.

TI: Yeah, you marched on HUD, and now all of a sudden they're asking you to be, to come on that side. I wanted... go ahead.

BS: I ran for office in 1985, I think. Do you remember that?

TI: You're right. I do. Go ahead and talk about that.

BS: I ran for office, and I lost. I ran for office three times. I have a perfect record. I lost all, every, each time. But in that race for county council was, Ruby Chow was there, right, and I wanted to run against her. I wanted to beat her badly. I just, her and I just could not get along. And Ron Sims also was in that race, and I didn't care about running against Ron. I just wanted to run against Ruby. So I declared to run, and about that time Ruby decided she didn't want to, I don't think she wanted to campaign against Ron and myself, so she retired and Cheryl took her place. Instead of backing out, I kept my campaign going, and I lost, lost to Ron Sims. So I was out of, so I'm out of a job, and so the PDA, so I left InterIm and InterIm started up the PDA, so PDA had the executive position open, so I applied for the PDA executive, their director position and was interviewed, and the board was split. People like Tomio thought we should have someone that was more business oriented. We didn't need any more activism. And I sort of lobbied my way in to get that one vote that I needed. And Tomio, we're okay with that. We talk about that all the time. But it was the same time that Metro property at Eighth and Dearborn was surplus, so I was hired and my job was really to see if we could acquire that property at a deep discount. So I worked out a deal. I worked out a deal with Metro. I said, "Since you have your maintenance facility, Metro maintenance facility in our property and it's been a negative impact, you bring nothing positive to the International District, when you surplus it we in the International District, through the PDA, should have first opportunity to apply for the, to buy the property before you send it out to public bid." Metro said fine. "We understand that. We haven't been a good neighbor. One of the problems, though, is that the federal government, through the Department of Transportation, lent us the money, two thirds of the money to purchase that property in 1974, so you'd have to talk to them to see what they're willing to do." So I met with a guy named Terry Ebersol. He was regional administrator for UMTA, Urban Mass Transit Authority, and they're the ones that had the reversionary rights of the property. So I went to Terry. We had lunch at the Four Seas. "Terry, the DOT really need the 1.7 million dollars that the property was appraised at." It was sixty-four thousand six hundred square feet of property divided by Eighth Avenue, two half blocks. He says, "Bob, you know how that, you know how the government works. We have to get, we have to either get the money or get it off our books." So boom. Called Bill Nishimura. I said -- he was regional administrator for HUD -- I said, "Bill, would you be willing to come to a meeting with Terry Ebersol with Department of Transportation?" Sure. "Sure, Bob." And Bill was good. He always... I called Sue Taoka, who was working then with Mayor Norm Rice. She was like one of the deputies up there. I said, "Sue, why don't come to this meeting?"

And so we met, and in the meantime I'm talking to a guy named Jim Gonzoles, he was the Washington State coordinator for Brock Adams' office. I knew Jim. I talked to Rita Jean Butterworth, who was the state coordinator of Slade Gorton's senatorial office. I knew Jean. You know how we had to go to all these receptions, and that's a part of our life. We meet people. And every time I met these aides I'd take 'em to lunch. I could never take the senator to lunch, but I could take an aide to lunch, right? They're always willing to find out what's going on. Took down, talked to them, and I said, "I'm meeting with these government officials and I want your support," and I told 'em what we wanted to do. We wanted to acquire the piece of property at Eighth and Dearborn, to build an intergenerational, multicultural, multilingual facility to serve the elderly, low income elderly, families, families with children. And they loved the concept. They said, okay, we'd support that. Let's, I'll call the boss and see if we can support that. So I have these, all these people in the room, so I looked at Terry Ebersol. I said, "Terry, remember our conversation? If you could get it off your books or I get the money? Would you be willing to transfer the interest of your department, the interest of your department over to another federal agency just to get it off your books?" He said yes. "Bill, would you be willing to accept it and immediately transfer it over to the city as a block grant?" HUD, right? A regular community development block grant, and get it over to the city. "And Sue, would Norm be willing to allocate that same parcel of land to us as a block grant?" Right? And, of course, everybody says, "We do it all the time." So we get two thirds of the property. It actually happened with the help of the two senators we got that two thirds of the property transferred through, to us at no cost. Now I had to lobby the county, the Metro council for their one third of the property, which was at that point, what, seven hundred thousand or so. They wanted fair market value and a whole bunch of lobbying went on, and I met with all of them, and I got them to sell their piece of the land to me at a hundred and fifty thousand. Not to me, to PDA. So we got 1.7 million dollar piece of property for one fifty thousand, hundred and fifty thousand.

<End Segment 10> - Copyright © 2011 Densho. All Rights Reserved.

<Begin Segment 11>

BS: Sharon Maeda asked me to write her a letter 'cause she was applying for a job at HUD as assistant to the assistant secretary for public affairs. So I wrote Sharon a nice letter, and couple weeks later I get a call from the assistant secretary. "Who's this Sharon Maeda and is good," and all that, and I give her high marks. Sharon's appointed, right? Couple of months after that I get a call -- no, PDA gets a call from Washington. Since we're in the housing business, can we send six resumes to D.C. of people that we think, housing advocates send resumes of directors of these housing organizations to D.C., 'cause they want to pick one of those, someone from the Northwest as regional administrator out here. So my staff calls around, all the city organizations, gets six resumes, but sends mine along with it. Seven.

TI: And did you know that your staff --

BS: No, I was, I wasn't even in the office then. And for a couple days I was off or something. They sent it out, I came back, and they said, we sent your resume along with the, we thought it'd be a lot of fun. Yeah, I says, "You want to see me leave or something?" Anyway, it went. A week later I get a call. "Mr. Santos, the secretary would like to talk to you." Everybody has a secretary. I said, yeah, big deal.

TI: No, it was the secretary. [Laughs]

BS: The secretary, Secretary Cisneros, Henry Cisneros. And I said, oh, okay. And I didn't really know what HUD was about. We'd go down to HUD and we'd fill out applications and write proposals, and we'd get funds for the housing stuff, but I didn't know, really didn't know all the programs. For the first time in my life I get some manuals of HUD programs and try to study. At that time HUD had twenty, two hundred programs under Department of Housing and Urban Development. And I'm saying, oh shit, this is impossible. In the airplane to D.C. I'm studying. I get up at four o'clock in the morning for an eleven o'clock meeting with Cisneros because I got to study 'cause I want, 'cause he's gonna grill me on what I know about HUD. So I got to the HUD office, eleven o'clock appointment, and I say, hi, my name is Bob Santos. I come from Seattle, was invited to -- she says, "Oh yes, Mr. Santos, but could you wait in the waiting room 'cause the Secretary is over at the White House right now in a meeting with the President." And I do one of these things [pulls out watch], I said yeah, I said, "Oh sure, I could wait around." I come six thousand miles, whatever it is, right, so I'm making this big roll. And so that's eleven o'clock. Twelve o'clock appointment comes in. People Magazine. Henry is being nominated as one of the fifty most beautiful people in the world. You know that, that issue that they come out? So April 1994, he's on the page before centerfold. He made it, fifty most beautiful people in the world. So they come in and I stand up, and they said, no, we're waiting for Henry. So Henry comes in late. "I'm sorry, Mr. Santos." I said, "You can call me Uncle Bob." "Uncle Bob, I'm sorry. I was over at the White House." I said, "I heard." And he said, "I really wanted to talk to you, but we only have a few minutes, so could you sit down?" And I'm thinking, of all the two hundred programs HUD has, there's only three I really know, so I hope he asks me questions on these three programs, FHA, public housing, and block grant. I know them. I didn't know the hundred ninety-seven other programs. So we sit down, he looks at me and says, "Bob, would you work for me?" And I'm thinking, "I thought I was here for an interview. He's offering me the job." So I started telling him the three programs that I knew about HUD. He said, he says, you don't have to worry about that. He says, "The only thing you have to worry about is we have, your name has to go before a couple of committees, IRS, and the FBI." I said, oh shit. There goes that job, the FBI file. Anyway, said, "You don't have answer me right now, but let me know within the next week whether you're... you're the guy I want. You're the top of the list."

So I come home, tell Sharon Tomiko, and she says, "It's up to you." So I go down to the HUD office, just to check it out. And I asked the secretary, I said, "Can I look in that room?" It's the empty office where the regional administrator would be. And this is the old federal office building, so I go and peek in the office, and here is this real wood furniture. We come from the nonprofit with fold down metal chairs and these kind of tables, and at the PDA I was in an office that didn't have any windows that was next to the boiler. And so I see all these windows, American flag, real wood furniture. I walk in, open up this door, and this big old conference room with matching, matching fluffy chairs, big long conference table. I go around, I open this other door and it's, I said, "It's a bathroom." He says, "Yeah, that's the executive washroom." I says, "You mean the person gets his own bathroom?" I'm thinking, I'm gonna take this job. I could deal with this kind of stuff. And so I told Sharon, I'm really leaning towards it, and she said, "Don't forget now, you'd be, you'd be moving out of your comfort zone to go into a bureaucracy. Is that what you really want?" And I'm thinking, I could sacrifice for a term, or two years, if Clinton gets reelected. And I really asked, I said, "What's the pay? What's the salary?" And when they told me, three times more than I was making, that sort of, I said I could sacrifice. So I took the job, and it was a big deal. The deputy secretary, Ron Sims's position, that guy came into town. A guy named Terry, I forgot who it was, but he swore me in. And I go to the new office, and I have five hundred people in four states working for me. I'm in charge of the HUD office in Idaho, Washington, Oregon, and Alaska. And I have people in all these offices, and the first two weeks I travel all, someone picks me up from the office, brings me to the airport, someone picks me up on the other side, brings me to the hotel, then they pick me up and bring me to the HUD office, and that's in every city people are picking you up, 'cause you're at this level. All of a sudden you're the spokesperson for this, for the cabinet secretary for the region. So I'm thinking I'm a big shot. And I'm sitting here and I'm going off to all these places and I'm doing groundbreakings and ribbon cuttings and kissing babies and all that stuff, and I'm thinking, jeez, anybody can do this. I mean, it's a patronage job. Usually, when you get a job like that you've raised a lot of money for the campaign, the presidential campaign. And I didn't. I didn't raise any money. I maybe sent a, two fifty dollar checks to the Clinton campaign, but it wasn't a patronage thing for me. It was, I think they were, they needed an Asian. They had African Americans -- there are ten regions, ten regional administrators -- they had African Americans, Latinos, women, they had a Native American from Colorado, and they were looking for an Asian, so I fit. So when my name went in, actually, Henry says, "Who is this guy?" to Sharon, who is working there, right, Sharon Maeda. She said, "Oh, that's Uncle Bob," so that's, that really got me in. So I'm sitting there with all this power and all this influence, and I'm thinking, how do you use it? How do I, how will I make my presence here felt in the community?

So I said, we got a lot of homeless people out there. How much money does HUD allocate to the state for homeless programs? Boom, "Twenty-six million a year, Mr. Santos, and it goes from the state to the cities to the nonprofits that serve the homeless people." I said, "But there's still homeless people on the street. I walk here every morning and at lunchtime there's, along the waterfront and all that." So I said, "Why don't we, why don't we open up the federal building as a homeless shelter? We have light, we have heat, we have bathrooms, we have showers, and it's a public facility. It's owned by the people. It closes at seven o'clock and nothing happening; we could open up the doors for the homeless people and no one would know." "Oh, Mr. Santos, we can't do that. We have other government offices in the old federal building and we have the neighbors that we have to deal with." And so driving home that night I said, well, I'm not gonna give up. You come from the community, you're always hustling, and I'm gonna use that kind of strategy with the bureaucracy. So I called up Jay Pierson, my counterpart at GSA. They're the landlords of all the HUD, all the federal buildings. I said, "Jay, what if you and I get together and open up the federal building as a homeless shelter?" And he went down the litany. "We can't do that, Bob. We have tenants in the building. Oklahoma City, the bombing at Oklahoma City happened. We just can't do that. It's just too much." And I said, "Jay, come over and let's, check out the building and let's find a place." He came over. We found a, we found a spot on the lower level that was next to the dock. It was a receiving area, and it was open, and Jay said, "Bob, what about this?" I said, we could do that. We could put up these mattresses out there for, we could house at least twenty people. And what we did was we opened up the only, first and only federal homeless shelter, homeless shelter in any federal office building in the country. Never been done before 'cause most people in our position don't think to, think that low, right, to worry about homeless people. So Jay and I opened it up, and it was the same floor access to the bathrooms and the showers, and the folks from the homeless community would come in at eight o'clock. All the federal office workers were out by then. I think it was nine o'clock we came in, and all the federal office workers were out. They could sleep overnight until 5:30, they're awakened and they're out the door at six. No one in the building ever saw a homeless person in that building, so after six months of the operation, other agencies in the building says, "Bob, when are we gonna have this so-called homeless shelter?" I said, "We've been running it for six months and it hasn't impacted us at all." So we were able to keep that going until 9/11. Then they closed up all federal facilities for that type of activity. But it's something that we always get a kick out because it's so easy to think of something like that. All public buildings, school buildings, office buildings, they're owned by the public, and why are they only used eight to ten hours a day, you know? And so I got that sort of in my mind to make stuff different.

TI: That's a great story.

BS: And the other one was migrant, migrant farm worker housing was not part of the HUD program. It was, if you, if you're gonna build housing for migrant workers, that's in the Department of Agriculture responsibility because they work with the farm owners. So I said, well, it's not working. Too many people are, were living in tents and cars on the riverbanks of the Columbia River. So I petitioned the deputy secretary at that time, I said, "Saul Ramirez, I'm gonna go to these meetings in Central Washington with the migrant worker issue and I want to put something on the table." And this is another thing I said I'm just gonna, just try. So he says, "Okay, Bob, I can give you two hundred fifty thousand to put on the table." I said cool, and so I go to these meetings and we're talking about housing migrant workers during the harvest season, and the money goes through the HUD system and it gets stopped at a, at a senate committee in New York. That money gets stopped by a guy named Senator D'Amato from New York, who's no longer senator, but it was stopped at his committee. And so they called me and said, "Bob, we can't get that money." I said, "That's cool, I'll get it somewhere else." So I find out that Gary Locke has not allocated all his money, HUD money to the communities yet. It's still, so we recaptured seven hundred thousand and we worked with a mayor in Mattawa, Washington, and she said she'd allow us several acres out there, and we worked with a company that donated twenty-three forty foot cargo containers that go on the ships. They're well insulated and all that, so twenty-three of them were sent to Yakima. We had a company that used prison labor, the bikers, liked to work with machines and all that kind of, tools and stuff, they retrofitted the containers, and we built twenty-three containers for twenty-three families of migrant workers that were living off the riverbanks then and moved them into housing. So these are other creative kinds of things that you can do when you have to work in the community. You had to be innovative and using what's ever available out there, so I had fun when I worked at HUD, and the staff never had so much fun. They work in cylinders, and when they find out this crazy Filipino has all these ideas they put extra effort there to help, to help me and our staff pull off these ideas.

TI: Because you're actually helping real people with their issues.

BS: Yeah, that was really a lot of fun.

<End Segment 11> - Copyright © 2011 Densho. All Rights Reserved.

<Begin Segment 12>

TI: Another incident that you dealt with, I mean, earlier you talked about how you and other activists actually did a sit in at the HUD offices, and so you were on that side. Now, during the WTO, you were in a case where now activists were, you were on the other side of the activists. Talk about that and what happened.

BS: When WTO came to Seattle I went to the Tuesday, I went downtown on Tuesday where all the march was, the big march and all the disruption happened at the end of the march, the union people and advocates. They were all pretty calm, but those radicals at the end from the, from the Oregon movement of anarchists... and that turmoil happened all week. The WTO conference ended on Thursday, so Friday, Friday afternoon I get a call from a guy named, "Mr. Santos, my name is Jeff." "Jeff?" I said. "Yeah, just Jeff, and I'm with the, the anarchists here and we're, we've occupied this building in, next to the west precinct in downtown Seattle. This is where we, where our headquarters are for the WTO radicals." It's called their squat. They took over a vacant building from Yuen Lui Studios, and Wah Lui owned the building and he gave them the key originally. He said, okay, you can use the building, but keep it nice and... well, what happened was they trashed the building. So Friday, after the WTO was over, the radicals wanted to stay in the building until there was a negotiation with the owner to have the building turned over to the homeless community. They would not leave until there were, until they were promised that the homeless community would take over the building after they left. So that, so Friday I get a call from Jeff, and he says, "Bob, could you help negotiate this deal?" And I'm thinking, it's 4:30, five o'clock all the offices -- I said, okay, I'll see what I can do. So for a half hour I call the mayor's office, I call everybody else, and I'm put on voicemail. So at five o'clock, well, that's it. So I said, I did all I could do, so I go home. Saturday morning I get a call from the mayor's office. "Bob, there's an issue that's gonna happen here in a couple hours. Still have these young radicals over there at the building, at Lui's building, and the cops, the tac squad is forming around the corner in the parking lot 'cause they're gonna invade the building at noon." So the mayor's office says, "Could you come down and talk to Mr. Lui and the radicals, kind of negotiate something?" I said sure. I'm thinking, oh yeah, sure. So I go and I meet Sharon Lee. She's with the Low Income Housing Institute. She said, "Bob, let's go. I'll go with you and we'll talk to Wah Lui," the owner. We go in and he is pissed. He says, I don't, he says, "I don't want to talk to you about those radicals. I, in good faith I worked with them, had them come in the building. They trashed the building and I want them more than in jail. I want them dead." Well, so we talked. We talk and we talk and we talk, and he's so pissed. He's steaming. And his son is there and, his son is there and he's mad. And he says, you know, these guys have no responsibility. We got a letter from this one group, and that was the SHARE/WHEEL group that works for homeless people, so Wah says, "We got this letter from this homeless group who would like to sit down with us and talk about the future of the building. Now, these are the type of people I could deal with." So I says, oh, okay. That's cool.

So with that, Sharon and I go out, and Sharon says, "You got to go up there." The radicals had locked themselves, barricaded themselves into this building. It's a four story building, and they barricaded themselves and they had booby traps and all that kind of stuff. So they sent me into the building to talk to the leadership, who were on the roof looking down on the cops to see when the cops were coming in. So I go up the stairs, three flights of stairs, and the ladder from the third floor to the roof. And as I'm going up the ladder I'm thinking, "What the hell am I doing doin' this? I'm gonna be a hostage." And I'm thinking all this stuff in my mind, and so I go to the top, and all these young people had their bandanas across their eyes, their noses and their faces, but their eyes were all bloodshot. They were tired. And individually, collectively they wanted to stay there. Individually, I know they would, they would want some kind of excuse to get out of there, 'cause they didn't want to get beat up by the cops that were gonna come in. So they all circled around me, and Jeff, the guy that called me, were all there, and there's a photographer from Life Magazine was among that group. Anyway, he says, "Okay, gang, this is Bob Santos. He's with the federal government." And I hear this groan. "But," he says, "he does a mean Frank Sinatra at the Bush Garden karaoke bar." These radicals were hangin' out -- well, they didn't say they were radicals. They were with the WTO people, but they had gone to the Bush a couple of times, just sort of have a beer or so, and I was singing, so they heard me then. And so when they said that, things sort of calmed down, and I said, "Listen, I know you guys want to wait it out 'til this building is converted over to the homeless. One thing I promise you I will do, I'll talk to the owners because there is a group out there that he might be willing to talk with in negotiating the future of this building as a housing for homeless people. But I'll only talk to them if you walk out with me." I looked around, and everybody's eyes sort of, you could tell they're saying, there's an excuse to get out of this mess. So they did. I go down the ladder and they all followed me out, and as we went out the door there's this big cheer from all these other people, their supporters from outside. They'd gained a victory. Well actually, what happened was that when I went back to Wei Lui, he said he'll talk to the SHARE/WHEEL advocates, but he said he doesn't think they could meet his price, so it never did, it was never converted to homeless. But I got the people out, so that was, my goal was to make sure no one got hurt.

TI: That's a good story. Yeah, that's a good story.

BS: You know, and I looked up at the police officers, they were tired after a week of running around. They didn't want to go in either, but if they did people would've, that would've been a mess.

TI: It could've gotten really ugly.

BS: Really been ugly, yeah.

TI: That was good.

<End Segment 12> - Copyright © 2011 Densho. All Rights Reserved.

<Begin Segment 13>

TI: So, Bob, we're at the end of our time, but I just want to end, is there anything, we've covered so much and you can go on and on about different things, but I guess, what's important to you? I mean, when you think about your life, we went from the beginning, your dad, before the war, and your career, all these ups and downs.

BS: Yeah.

TI: When people ask you what's important in life, what do you tell them?

BS: I, you know, I think about that. I think it's sort of a selfish feeling that you have that you can do something. You can be a radical in some ways, you can be a negotiator in some ways, but every time you're in a situation you have control. I always think I have control over what can happen during a meeting and the result of a meeting, whether it's with the mayor's office or the property owner or something. I always feel inside that I'm gonna control the outcome of this meeting, and maybe one out of ten times that happens. But the one time it does happen, you might have, we might have done something ten or twenty times, that feeling that you have when you come out of a meeting or you come out of a building or you have a, you do a groundbreaking or a ribbon cutting for something that you worked to help start, that is a feeling that you can never... I mean, I imagine if, equivalent of winning a gold medal at the Olympics, I imagine, is the feeling that I have when something really nice happens.

TI: And for you that nice -- I talked to other people and it might be doing a business deal or something -- it's really, for you it's helping others.

BS: Yeah, that's what it is.

TI: It's just like, and that's why --

BS: It's a personal, the personal accomplishment using your wits at spur of the moment kinds of stuff, it really gets your adrenaline going because it's almost like winning a big hand in poker or something. It's about there, but I don't want to show my hand, and I almost got him to say yes, and that's what it's... it's a challenge, and you're in the right place at the right time to make things happen for the, for the better of more people.

TI: Well, that's a great way to end it. And I just feel the community is so lucky that we have you, and so thank you so much for everything you do.

BS: Thank you, Tom. Yeah.

TI: This was, this was wonderful. Thank you.

BS: Sure enough.

TI: That was good. Wow. What a great interview.

<End Segment 13> - Copyright © 2011 Densho. All Rights Reserved.