<Begin Segment 11>

BT: But you had to come back?

FS: Yeah. And then the American money is no different than today. It was related to the Kennedy side of the family, Skakel family. So what's new for me? My perspective on the world is different than what most people see. The money, people create all the issues, problems. But then what's interesting is we did this work and I got [inaudible] and gives credits and all this stuff. But then the year, they had a statue now in Vilamoura, and when it was founded, well, it was founded about three years after. The master plan, all it did was probably, the work we did would probably just whet the appetites of people with money and the investment and so forth, and helped Portugal develop that place and now it's booming, all these funky hotels all over the place. [Laughs] And so I left. I saw what was going on, and that was what I learned. Try to make a quick story of it, come back, and then my partners, or subsequent partners, these guys and classmates from USC, well, one guy in particular, he had and his wife had traveled with us in Europe, came back, he started a partnership with another guy. And then he recruited me and this other guy that went with us to Portugal, a single guy. So we became four people, Black, Palusa, Sata and O'Dodd. So now I had three hakujin partners, but they already had the contacts, you know, with Balboa Bay Club. So then, you know, that was the elite club at that time. I don't know if it still is, but I think so. Related to all the big developers of Disneyland, you know, the Disney Hotel, the first hotel they built there was one of the guys that, in that network of people that worked through the Balboa Bay Club that are my classmates, another guy. So that's when we got a, there was a chance to get a job. Again, architects, you do all this silly stuff ahead of time, freebies, to get the job kind of thing, which I, also I have a distaste of that.

And we came up with a concept, so we got one of the early to-be high rises in Hawaii. So my partner, this Italian guy, he just loves to live at the top. And first time I rode a first class plane, going to Hawaii and getting fed mai tai and stuff like that. I think those were still prop jets or something, Pan American and things, airlines used to be, a long time ago. Yeah, so we were doing the Hawaii thing, and then, of course, Hawaii, they didn't have all these hotels then, the big one, Royal Hawaiian or something, the tall one in the center of Honolulu. So we used to... and there was already contractors on the site in Hawaii, the big guys had the big work. So our client was ahead of a fairly prominent savings and loan, and he was really growing, so then he got politically ambitious and he wanted this building to kind of stand out. So my world, okay, we got the job, the guy signed us up. Well, without putting a negative side on it, it's the part of the industry, the guy that did Trans-America (William Pereira) is big time, he tried to pull it away from us while we had it. That's how it works because we were small guys, they were already big. But he didn't, they liked art projects. And then we were doing stuff in Kona coast, white sand beach and all this stuff, and planning. I learned how to do all this. I didn't like that because the local people were selling their land to these big time developers, it was always a money thing. And it isn't that I was against people making money, it was the fact that they were losing their identity by giving... and so this whole influx of Texas money is all over Kona coast, which was developed by the movie star way back. And I couldn't be a part of that, and the hotel thing or the office building in Hawaii kind of hit the wall. Because when the guy tried to run for political office, and he had ads for, Shirley Temple Black used to come out and help him campaign. Well, the savings and loan industry went after him because of the way he built his own empire, and he got put in the penitentiary. Not while I was working, I had quit by then. It took me about a year working with the Palos Verdes guys, becoming all this stuff. That wasn't my thing. That's how I ended up in the Bridge.

<End Segment 11> - Copyright © 2022 Densho. All Rights Reserved.