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TI: So I'm going to jump ahead to your childhood. Although you were born in Connecticut, where did you grow up? When you think of your childhood memories, where is that?

JS: Well, we traveled a lot. In fact, when President Reagan appointed me as the Commissioner of Social Security in 1981, I got a nice letter from the congressman who was from southeast Connecticut. And he said it was really great to have somebody who knows the problems of southeast Connecticut and things like that. So I sent him back a letter and said, "I left when I was two." [Laughs] But I hadn't been back.

TI: Yeah, so not really any memories of Connecticut.

JS: Not really. But we moved a lot because my father was in the navy. And at the end, he was on submarines all during World War II. And at the end of World War II for some odd reason, only the military and the federal government could figure out why they took a newly minted ensign -- because he came up through the ranks and he became and ensign at the end of the war -- they took a newly minted ensign and they sent him to Africa to set up an ordinance facility for an air wing. You say, well, he's a submariner, how come they did that? I don't know, he didn't know. But we left Connecticut, we moved down to Washington, D.C., for about a year. Then we went back to Connecticut for about a year, then we went to Africa for three years, and Morocco. And then I left there and we went to Keyport, Washington, the torpedo station there at the time. Now, it's a big base, but in those days, it was just torpedoes and trying to make them better. Because in World War II, they had a real problem with the torpedoes not going where they were supposed to go.

TI: I saw that. Last week I was in Honolulu at the USS Arizona memorial, they have a submarine museum. And yeah, they talked about, at the beginning of World War II, just that problem of the torpedoes sometimes circling back.

JS: Circling back and hitting you.

TI: And actually hitting the submarine, and that actually happened. I did not know that.

JS: Well, let's see. We went up there in '51, and that's what they were doing. They'd test torpedoes right there in Dabob Bay in Puget Sound, to see how they could make them work better.

TI: That's so interesting, because you probably just see these places differently than I do as a native Seattleite. Hood Canal is just beautiful. I think of that as oyster beds, and you probably look out there and think submarines out there. Because that's where nuclear submarines are testing and doing things also.

JS: Yeah, but Bangor wasn't even somebody's dream at that time, and now, of course, it's huge, and so is Keyport. When I lived there for three years, I guess, it was a great place to be a kid. Because you were on a base, I went to grade school in Poulsbo, but they had all kinds of fruit trees, you'd go fishing anywhere you wanted to, you could get a gunnysack full of oysters. Because it was very sparsely populated in the area at the time, on the base, people couldn't come and do that. So it was only the people who lived there that could go out and harvest oysters and things like that.

TI: Oh, so generally the base people didn't really get to partake of, I think of it as the natural bounty. It is just an amazing part of the country.

JS: Oh, it is, no question about it.

TI: I mean, people could fish for salmon from the shore if they wanted to, and all those different things. Okay, so after Keyport, where did you go?

JS: After Keyport we went to San Diego where my father was a navigator and ordinance officer on the USS Nereus (AS-17), which is a submarine tender. It was anchored in San Diego, and they had to go to sea, I think, once a year. They went to Acapulco or someplace that was very navy.

TI: And so, in that case, so your father was pretty much at home then. He wasn't at sea that much?

JS: No, he wasn't at sea very much at all. They'd go out for a little cruise for a few days. In fact, he took myself and my brother several times out on that.

TI: And so you went to school in San Diego for about how long?

JS: Three years. Everything was pretty much three years.

TI: Okay. Then after San Diego, where did you go?

JS: Went to Honolulu. It was at submarine base Pearl Harbor, and I went to high school there. I got there when I was in the tenth grade, so I went tenth, eleventh, and twelfth grades in Honolulu.

TI: Right. So I'm curious, because your experience is so different than mine. I pretty much lived... we moved once, but I'd lived in Seattle, so pretty much stayed in the same community my whole school career. Every two or three years, you're moving and moving. How do you make friends? Or you must be good at just...

JS: You make friends very quickly and you forget them. I mean, I still have friends in different places, but it's funny. In fact, both of us, my wife and I both, her father was a pioneer captain with Pan American, flew the flying boats across the Pacific. So we both moved a lot, and you got there, you had new friends, and then you left and sometimes you'd catch up with them somewhere else, but sometimes you wouldn't. And you spent some time thinking about, gee, I wonder what happened to so and so?

TI: So you get pretty good at reading people, making friends, but then moving on, I guess. You just had to keep moving on.

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