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TI: So let's move to your father.

DB: Well, Dad was born in Pittsburg, Kansas. Pittsburg, Kansas is in mid-Kansas, and actually, around it, it's a lot of lead mining. And I think he early on figured out that lead mining is not a very pleasant job. I'm sure he didn't have all the health hazards categorized and all that, but it certainly was not very popular. But he was obviously a natural athlete at the time, and he was playing basketball, I presume, in the school playground in Pittsburg, Kansas. And there was a man there standing at the chain link fence and said, "Boys, come over here." He talked to them a little bit, and he says, "Why aren't you in the YMCA where they have a gymnasium?" They said, "We don't have any money." So he says, "You go home and tell your folks that I'll pay your way into the YMCA if you will go." Well, they ran home, he paid. And Dad remembers this as somebody helping a kid in sports get access into the real world. And so he played at the Y, and then he was a Y participant in swimming and basketball, and I'm sure some sports leadership for younger kids and the like. And he used that when he got through high school. He was actually an all-state Kansas high school basketball player when he was young, and then he decided to go on to Chicago. He went to Chicago basically to work for the YMCA, but what he ended up doing, he was a lifeguard at Oak Street Beach. If you've been to Chicago and all the beaches along the way, and if you look out from Oak Street Beach, which is in front of the Drake Hotel and that, there are these water pumping stations out there, (one mile) out. He would swim out, he and a couple other guards would swim out to the pumping station every morning just for a tune up. This guy was a marvelous swimmer. And then he would work at Marshall Field's in the wintertime and stocking shelves, and, of course, be became a historian of Chicago. He said he'd just get on the L, he had twenty-five cents to get on the L, and he'd never get off all day. He'd just go all over town. But he was always interested in people and things and discovering them himself. But then he gets a tip that there's a job in Seattle, about 1928, there would be a job at the YMCA in Seattle. So he actually came to Seattle about that same time as my mother.

TI: And about how old was he when he came to Seattle?

DB: Oh, he was about twenty-four.

TI: So a young man.

DB: Young man, maybe even younger. Younger? Twenty-two?

TI: But he didn't have the opportunity to go to college.

DB: Well, no, it wasn't... back in those days, kids of college graduates went to college. Blue collar kids -- not 'til the GI Bill came along did it really open it up to all of the rest of us. Because you really had to have a family, you had the mechanism to get to college, you had to be geared that way, and you had to have the money. (...) But he did come to Seattle, and he did try college. He was in the PE course over at the University of Washington, so he was trying to go to college. He came out here under the auspices, not a contract, but the auspices that there was a job at the Y, and it didn't pan out for him. I'm not quite sure, I think either wasn't impressed with the programs they had the Y or whatever, but it didn't fly.

But he somehow comes in contact with the Seattle Parks Department, not a hard intellectual leap, but I'm not sure how he did. And they assigned him out to Camp Denny. Camp Denny is now just a picnic area, but it used to be a boys and girls overnight camp where they would send kids from Madison Beach on the ferry over to Kirkland, and they would stay a twenty-four hour period and they would have games and swimming and all kinds of activities. They had a horse, they would ride a horse, and it was an early, one of these slip lines that kids can slide down, and they had a wonderful time. So he was out there in the summertime at Camp Denny for about four years, and then in the wintertime then he was the assistant athletic person down at Green Lake Field House, the field house opened about that same time, and so he was the first... '29, so he was the first one, and he worked down there with...

TI: That's the existing field house?

DB: The same field house, yeah.

TI: Okay, so classic old field house.

DB: Classic old field house. Well, the real classic one was Collins, of course. Collins looked like South Park. I don't know if we have a good picture of that or not. But he worked there as the assistant for four years, and he met the Werner boys. They played on his basketball team. And the Werner boys introduced him to Virginia.

TI: Had a sister, right?

DB: And so that's how that whole connection came.

TI: Well probably you almost needed the Werner boys to, what's the right word, approve of someone. [Laughs]

DB: Well, there was probably a little of that, too. But they stayed together as a fishing group, as a family group, and as a fun group, and we all, it was one family, just that one or two nervous seasons when Collins was playing Alpine at the AAU playoffs, was a little tense.

TI: So where was Alpine?

DB: Alpine Dairy was the company before Darigold. It was stationed in Issaquah, basically, but it was Alpine Dairy, and then it morphed into Darigold. It started actually as Hersheys Horlocks or something like that, and there was a Swiss fellow, the name slips me right now (...).

MG: Hans.

DB: Hans (Forster). And he was interested in sports, so they always had... a lot of industry in those days had these (teams), they were basically semi-pros, nobody got paid.

TI: But where were they based out of?

DB: Oh, they were through Seattle, but the home office, the farm office, was in Issaquah.

MG: Milk distribution, I mean, milk delivery, home delivery of milk.

DB: Right now that farm is under twenty billion tons of cement. [Laughs] So he then went from there to South Park, so his first job where he was the director of the program was at South Park, and he loved South Park.

<End Segment 3> - Copyright © 2013 Densho. All Rights Reserved.