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TI: So I'm going to now move to your parents, and first let's talk about your mother.

DB: Well, Mom, it's interesting, they were both born in Pittsburgh, okay. Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, Pennsylvania and Pittsburgh, Kansas. And Mom grew up in a, probably of the time, a middle class family, probably religious, and probably pretty traditional for the area. She and the family moved to Seattle early on, and remained here. Had a difficulty in the family with the husband, and so her mother, (our) Grandma Werner, really raised these children in very tough times in the Depression.

TI: This was in Seattle?

DB: In Seattle. They lived in, settled in the Green Lake area, and so that's where they were. Mom, Virginia Boyd, had two brothers, Tom Werner and Ross Werner. If you read the annals of sports in those periods, it was Tom and Ross, who were the leaders of the Alpine Dairy Amateur Athletic Union (basketball) clubs. And that story evolved later on with Dad competing with Collins kids against Alpine Dairy, and he, being the coach and manager of the Collins kids as they were called -- and these were men, of course, now -- but they were men that came from Collins, men's senior basketball, and they played with Alpine and the Werner boys. So anyhow, my mother is now married to Dad...

TI: So she has to, whether her brothers or her husband --

DB: Yeah, in Royal Brougham's column it was an issue, "Who is Virginia rooting for?" and all these things. [Laughs] So that was a little bit of a storyline. But she became very interested in handicapped children, and did a wonderful job for the kids in Seattle, especially the hard of hearing kids, getting them mainstreamed, making it a Seattle Public School responsibility. And she was, I'm sure they had her picture on the wall down at the Seattle School system, because I remember about August, I can see the war party starting, how she was going to get Michael into the sixth grade, then Michael into the seventh grade. But she brought along with her all of those other kids that required...

TI: Right. What a tremendous advocate, not only for your brother, but then for all those children that were able to take advantage of it.

DB: Well, she modeled her program after the Spencer Tracy program. Spencer Tracy, (...) not well-known fact, he had (a deaf son), and he mainstreamed in California, that was her model. She did it basically for the Seattle system, and very few people know about that. To her credit, her perseverance, intellect, and drive (got it done).

<End Segment 2> - Copyright © 2013 Densho. All Rights Reserved.