<Begin Segment 11>

MN: Now your family lived in Seattle's skid row. What was skid row like?

RN: Skid row? Well, the skid row in Seattle is different from the skid row here. They're all bums and, all the kind of junkie people, but up in Seattle skid row, well like for one thing, Seattle is all waterfront, the business section comes right down to the waterfront. You've been to Seattle, right? Skid row was there. Now, all the people that work and live in skid row, they all got money. This was during the Depression days when people had no money, but the only people that had the good money was people in skid row. They, and the Japanese had restaurants, clothing stores, small businesses, and they would sell to these, all these single men, because skid row in those days, on weekends all the lumberjacks, people that work in the forest and the sawmills, they would come into Seattle for the weekend, and these men were all single, all white guys. They'd get paid, those days lumberjacks were making, top pay was twelve dollars a day, and there was all single, practically single. They would come into the skid row to spend their money, drinking. And they used to have a lot of, a lot of women in those days. That place's all full of a lot of prostitution and all that, so there was money down there. And they'll eat at the Japanese hotels, Japanese restaurants, Mama and Papa stores, clothing stores. The Japanese made money off of them. [Laughs] And the Filipinos would be coming into town, they would be coming up from California. They worked the fields right up. By the time they hit Seattle they got money in their pockets, and they always stay at the Japanese rooming houses 'cause they got no place else to stay and all the Filipinos used to stay there. So at the end the Japanese all had their businesses in there. It was quite a place. So when I, when I came down here after I, after my father passed away and I couldn't do, I couldn't go back to school so I'd come down here because my two older sisters had come down earlier, and they had already got married right away and they had a family up here in Boyle, in Boyle Heights. So they told me to come on down.

MN: We're not gonna leave Seattle yet, okay?

RN: Huh?

MN: We're not leaving Seattle yet.

[Interruption]

MN: Skid row, you were talking about gambling and prostitution. Didn't the police come around?

RN: Huh?

MN: On skid row, you were talking about prostitution and gambling.

RN: Seattle in those days, Jackson Street, well, this is unofficial, but Jackson Street was the main street for Japantown. It was the main street for all the minorities, everybody, and anything, what they used to say "below the line," which was Jackson Street, anything goes. Gambling, bootlegging, 'cause all those lumberjacks that worked in the, the seamen that -- the boats are right there, the steamers are there -- seamen, weekends they got no place to go. They all come there, they got all kinds of bootleg whiskey, and so like I say, it was what they call below the line, anything goes, gambling, prostitution, well mainly bootlegging, really. You can go out there and the bootleggers would make whiskey and they'd bring it down there and they'd sell it, but those days was popular. Everybody, they'd get, weather's bad and all that, they all wear overcoats, topcoats or what they call overcoats, top to bottom, and on the sides here they got all those pockets. You know, pockets, and these bootleggers, after they make their, make their whiskey and whatever it is, they used to put 'em in these bottles and stick 'em in the pockets and go down Jackson Street or side streets and sell it. Two-fifty a bottle, two dollars a bottle of whiskey, they got 'em in their pockets. So there was money down there and the police, they know that.

And in Chinatown, there were very few Chinese in Seattle in those days, but it was called Chinatown because the Chinese, before 1925, before the law went into effect, they had bought all those old buildings around there. But they call it Chinatown because the buildings were all owned by Chinese, but they were rented by Japanese businesspeople. So anyways, Chinatown is, everything went in Chinatown. Very few kurombos used to come there. It was all Filipinos. Mainly, ninety-nine percent were all Japanese. It was a wild place, I'm tellin' you. Heck, I used to, I would go, I was only about twelve years old, ten years old, I used to go and play blackjack. They had these, what they call speakeasies. Like I say, anything goes, I'd go to the place where they're selling whiskey and all that, I used to go in the back room, walk in the back room when I was real young, twelve years old. I used to bet ten cents. They'd take my money; they wouldn't kick me out. There was, there's all these big old white guys over there gambling. A few, very few Chinese, most a lot of, some Japanese. I'd go up there, we were only twelve years old. I used to bet ten cents, twenty-five cents sometimes. [Laughs] It was nothing, those days. They would call it vice, but it wasn't vice. It was a lot of fun.

We used to go to these, Japanese used to have these rooming houses and for some reason, they're always built above the earth, there's always a lot of space beneath there, and this is where these white guys, these drunks and all and people down and out, they used to go down there to sleep under there, finish drinking whiskey and throw the bottles away. We used to go down there every so often, go down and pick up these empty whiskey bottles. And those, we used to get, we used to sell 'em to the bootleggers, the people that made it, the hakujin people, we used to get twenty-five cents for empty bottles, and they would fill it up and sell it to the guys that want it. So they'd drink and they'd throw the bottles away, we'd go around there and pick up the bottles and get twenty-five cents for 'em. [Laughs] Yeah, everything was, lot of it was all vice, but the gambling... and all, they had all these, they had these prostitute homes like that, and us kids, we used to sneak behind there and we used to peek. Yeah, in a way it got to a point where in those days we were pretty wild, but we didn't do no bad things, but us kids, we were, what, twelve, thirteen years old, and we'd go around the nighttime, we'd get together and we'd sneak around there and we used to peek. [Laughs] But they used to be, well, they had, they had all, Seattle in those days, it was a seaport town, and a lot of students there, and the lumberjacks, and there was a lot of money down there. You know what, well I don't know how they explained it, but they'd tell us, especially these lumberjacks and the seamen, they used to go up to Alaska and work. In the wintertime they'd come down, in the fall, and they got no work, so they have, all these guys, they used to stay at these Japanese rooming houses, one room hot sleeping, you know? They got a hotplate and they used to stay there until springtime when the jobs opened up in Alaska, so they would eat, cook their own on a hotplate. Those days it's, you can get a housekeeping room for five or six dollars a week.

MN: So it sounds like the Great Depression didn't really affect the area. Did it affect your family?

RN: It didn't affect the Nihonjin because we all had our own ways of making money. Like all the hotels, the cheap hotels, cheap rooming houses, they're all owned by Japanese, see? And the Japanese used to live in 'em and they're kept up real nice 'cause they're all always clean. They always kept 'em up real nice, so all the white people and the Filipinos would live in 'em. Yeah, well anyway, there was a lot of money in Depression days, those guys.

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