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VY: So let's talk about what happened with your family, with your grandmother and her children after your grandfather passed away.

DS: Well, when my grandfather passed away in 1919, it was a tragedy beyond comprehension. My grandmother had no visible signs of financial support. She had nine children, one that was born after my grandfather died. The older boys were late teenagers, and so she had to struggle holding the family together, living in their small house in South Park, at the same time, trying to maintain a cohesive family. So the boys, the older boys in their late teens left home and traveled throughout the country to earn money to secure temporary jobs and to send money back to support the family. The story goes that my uncle Kenny and uncle Ted roamed as far as Florida and as far north as Alaska looking for work, earning money, sending back money to support the family, now with nine children, my father being the oldest. And he was fortunate enough with his financial support to go to high school. And he was the first of his generation, of his family, to finish high school at (Queen Anne) High School in Seattle. In the meantime, as he was going to high school, he and his younger brother Howard, or "Chip" as we called him, were Boy Scouts. And they were among the first, if not the first, to earn the Eagle Scout badge in Seattle, the first Asians to become Eagle Scouts in the Boy Scouts. So despite the economic hardship, my grandmother was able to hold together the family. She would often travel down to Augustine and Kyer to get free handouts to feed the family. The children would forage in the nearby fields for berries and wild plants. My older uncles, uncle Ted and Kenny, would fish illegally for salmon in the Duwamish River. There's an illegal form of fishing which uses seine nets, or gill nets, and they would stretch it across the river and catch salmon by, through their gills, which is a highly illegal way of fishing. But they were on subsistence level food, so they needed all the food they could get. And the story goes that they would set out their nets at night. And when the boats or tugboats would go up the Duwamish River, they would toot their horn to raise the bridge crossing the river, the boys would jump out of bed, run down to the river, pull in their nets before the nets were ruined by the boat, and thus they saved their gillnets. So they lived hand to mouth. The social workers would come and insist on taking away the children because they were essentially without any financial support. There were friends of the family that wanted to adopt the children, and my grandmother in her broken English would say, "No thank you, no thank you." And she managed to hold the family together. But when you talk to my aunts and uncles, especially my aunts who were growing up under those conditions, they didn't feel deprived, they didn't feel like they were poverty-stricken. Their mother was very successful for creating a home environment, and what they think about is the wonderful times they had playing on the sand flats of the Duwamish River as children. They called themselves Sand Fleas, and they went to camp out at night. They would look at the stores, the constellations, they would forage in the woods for berries. So in some ways it was a very idyllic growing up, despite her extreme poverty.

So when my uncle Kenny, who was a marvelous athlete as well as my other aunts and uncles... my aunt Lulu was an excellent athlete, and even in her seventies and eighties when I would visit and go for my morning swim at the Seattle Athletic Club, my aunt would join me to go swimming. My uncle Kenny was an early advocate of pickleball, which is a form of, sort of like ping pong and tennis. It's a craze that is sweeping the country now amongst elderly people. But he played pickleball in the 1970s until he was in his mid- to late-eighties. And he even celebrated, just before he passed away, his 88th birthday with his pickleball team. So they were very, very athletic. And so getting back to my uncle Kenny, who was recruited as a baseball player by the owner of an Eatonville lumber mill in Eatonville, Washington, located in South Pierce County, south of Tacoma -- east of Tacoma, south of Seattle. It was a small community of, I think, about three thousand. They had a high school, there was an elementary school. But the mill owner had built a Japanese village on the grounds of the mill, and the Japanese village also had a, at the mill, also had a baseball team. And my uncle Kenny was recruited to play on the mill baseball team as well as to work in the mill.

VY: I have a quick question. Excuse me, sorry, David. Was the owner of the mill also Japanese?

DS: No, he was Caucasian. And the mill had a long history of employing Japanese workers from almost the beginning of the 20th century, 1900s. So by 1920, it was a very productive mill owned by the Caucasian owner and there were, and he built a housing for the Japanese workers that accounted for about half the workforce at the mill. So with the job in hand, my father joined his brother, uncle Kenny, and started working in the 1920s at the Eatonville lumber company. And almost within, less than ten years, my father had risen through the ranks and was the manager or the straw boss of one of the major operations of the mill. So by 1932, my father was doing extremely well financially with a stable job with a bright future. And so he and my mother wanted to get married, but my grandmother Misa was very concerned that because my mother had suffered from tuberculosis, and was in a sanitarium for a year, they had to postpone their marriage until my mother was cured, and that was a stipulation of the marriage.

VY: Did she recover?

DS: She did. She was disease free until after the war, and that's a whole different story. But my mother and father were married in 1932 about that time. And as a wedding gift, as an engagement gift, my father gave my mother a family puppy, a family dog. And the name of the dog was Puggie, and in family movies you'll always see Puggie as part of the family. When I look at photographs of my mother and father, they were a handsome couple, striking. My father athletic, my mother playful. She was young at the time, I think she was about twenty-two, my father was probably about twenty-seven. And they dressed in a really very fashionable way when you saw photographs of my aunt, my mother's sister and her husband, they looked like movie stars. They seemed to enjoy life. They went skiing, they went hiking, they went swimming, they vacationed. And this was in the midst of the worst recession that the United States have ever seen. And when you see home movies, you get the feeling of a family moving up the socioeconomic ladder. Even though we lived in a Japantown, a Japanese community, on the grounds of the lumber mill.

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