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BY: Okay, let's talk a little bit about your childhood. First of all, do you have any siblings?

SM: Yes. My sister Diane, who's eighteen months younger.

BY: Okay. And where did you grow up?

SM: Well, the earlier -- well, I was born in Wisconsin but I was still a baby when we moved back to Portland. And we lived there until 1955, I believe, when we moved to Seattle.

BY: So you were about ten when you left?

SM: I was in the fifth grade, fourth grade.

BY: And so what was your neighborhood in Portland like?

SM: It was very much an inner city neighborhood. It was, thinking back, it probably was the only neighborhood that my parents could buy a house in. It was about fifty percent Black and fifty percent low income white.

BY: And so then in 1955, you moved to Seattle, and what neighborhood did you move to and what was that neighborhood like?

SM: Oh gosh, that was culture shock. My father came up a few months ahead of us to start working, and we stayed in Portland to finish out the school year. And he was told by his colleagues that the Highline School District was the best college prep district among the public school districts in the area at that time, and so he was determined that we would buy a house in the Highline District. And so we ended up, I believe, being the first or maybe the second family of color to move into Normandy Park.

BY: So it was a pretty white neighborhood?

SM: It was a middle class neighborhood that had restrictive covenants.

BY: So how did he get around that, do you know?

SM: Well, the real estate agent that showed Mom and Dad the house, first of all, all the real estate agents wanted to show us houses on Beacon Hill, because that's where they were channeling all the Japanese and Chinese at that time, sort of a variation of redlining. But he insisted on looking out there, and the real estate agent was new and didn't realize that he wasn't supposed to sell us a house in Normandy Park. So when my parents went to sign the papers to get the house, the owner of the real estate company took the agent aside and said, "We can't sell to them." So the agent felt really bad, and the owner of the house was furious because he had already purchased a new house in another city, his family had already moved, he needed to get -- I think it was Minneapolis where they moved -- anyway, he needed to get there and sell the house here. Turned out he was an airlines pilot that flew the Tokyo route and had a great affinity for Japanese culture and everything. And so he was furious and he got Dad's phone number and called him and said, "I'll sell to you directly." And so it was an owner sale, and he went around to the neighbors and told them that we were coming and they better be nice to us. [Laughs]

BY: That's great.

SM: So we didn't have any trouble with the neighbors.

BY: Yeah, because they were nice?

SM: Yeah, they were all nice. I mean, people brought pies and cookies and things like that to welcome us.

BY: That's a great story.

<End Segment 5> - Copyright © 2023 Densho. All Rights Reserved.