<Begin Segment 22>

TI: After spending a year with the 52/20 club, what did you do then?

FF: Oh, I decided to go to school. And so I enrolled at the UW in that GI bill, under the GI bill. Actually, I was a freeloader all the way around. [Laughs] Anyway I, yeah, I went back to, back to school. I didn't... to be perfectly honest, I didn't go back with my eye on some career or anything. I was just, I was just in school because there was the 52/20 -- I mean, the GI bill and it seemed to beat working, so I was going to school. There were a lot of guys going to school about the same time.

EG: What were you studying?

FF: Well, I was in general studies and then I was, I was in math for a little while and then I finally decided to, I finally thought I'd, I thought fisheries sounded interesting, so I went into fisheries. And I... well, I was really a pretty lousy student. I mean, just like through high school, I was good in some things and bad in others. And as a result of it, really, I became very personally acquainted with the dean there. He was always chewing my rump. But when the peace treaty was signed in '52, Japan was going to resume some fishing operations in the North Pacific and the U.S. had negotiated a treaty with Japan whereby she agreed to do certain things. And there were a lot of, there was a lot of knowledge that needed to be acquired, really, to truly implement the terms of the treaty. And so they were looking for a guy to go out, accompany the Japanese salmon fishing fleet, to set some of the groundwork for the research that needed to be done with regard to matters associated with the treaty. And of course, I had a foot in the door 'cause I knew the dean, I guess. [Laughs] But he sent me over to the Fish and Wildlife service lab over there in Montlake, and that's where I started my career and I ended it there.

EG: Your education was at what point then?

FF: I was a senior --

EG: You were a senior in the bachelor's program...

FF: Yeah, senior in the bachelor's program in the College of Fisheries.

EG: And the dean says, "Here's something for you to get into."

FF: Yeah. And here again, is another one of those guys that was looking out for my welfare. [Laughs] 'Cause I hadn't planned any of this, but he sent me over there. Mostly because I think, when I look back on that assignment, I think really what they needed, they needed some guy that knew something about... that had some biological knowledge, of course, but in addition to that, they needed somebody that could tough out living at sea and eating a hundred percent Japanese food.

EG: And someone that was fluent in Japanese.

FF: Yeah, that would have been ideal, except that I thought I was pretty fluent in Japanese. But I went aboard the, this mother ship -- I was hauled out there by the Coast Guard. And really, I was given VIP treatment because at the time, I was an employee of the Department of State and they really treated me with a lot of respect. In fact, I was coming aboard... I was at most, a corporal in the army. And I was... in the first place, I got stranded in Dutch Harbor because of some wind, weather conditions. The plane came in, and the wind came up, and gosh... and I was watching us land, and all of a sudden all I could see is sky and the plane just went like this because of the wind, the extreme winds up in the Aleutians. And they finally came down; it finally landed. And boy, the minute we landed, these Marines that were attending the base there, they threw cables over the wings so that the plane wouldn't bounce away. But almost as quickly as the storm came up it died down. And unbeknownst to me, while I was sleeping, this plane took off because they had an emergency, medical emergency, that had to be evacuated to Adak. So off they went. And here I was stranded in Dutch Harbor. And I had an appointment with these, I was gonna rendezvous with a whole fishing fleet, now, the next day and here I was stranded. So I wired back here and then all heck broke loose because my movement through the Aleutian Islands was classified. And then, here comes this plain-language message saying hey, I can't go anyplace. But boy, talk about important, they sent a plane for me from Adak, the Navy did. And they threw me aboard this PBY, which was one of these flying boats. They gave me the seat of honor, the front gun blister. And we took off and we ran out of runway. And gosh, the ocean came up and "splat," it hit this gun blister, and I had really a front row seat of some harrowing experience. But we finally took off. And as I was boarding this Coast Guard cutter, gosh, the captain of the cutter threw me a big salute -- [laughs] -- and it was terribly embarrassing because, like I say, I was really nothing but a, mostly a buck private during the war.

TI: Now why was this a classified sort of trip? I mean, the treaty had been signed, what was the secrecy behind you going up there and talking with the Japanese fleet?

FF: I don't really know. The only thing I could think of really is that they didn't want really the press jumping all over me as I was going through the area, 'cause I never did see one, one newspaper guy. When I came home there was lots of them, yeah, so I think that's probably, they were just trying to avoid publicity.

EG: So what was your assignment then?

FF: Well, my assignment was... the treaty, one of the main conditions of the treaty, they got Japan to agree to abstain from fishing salmon east of 175 degrees west, which is roughly in the area of Anchitka Island, it's kind of like halfway between the two continents, okay? And so Japan agreed not to fish east of there, but that abstinence was conditional, upon studies, scientific studies which determined the oceanic migrations of North American and Asian salmon. And so I was kind of on the ground floor of that particular investigation, which was really quite a fascinating one. And so I was sent aboard there, first to determine if they were honestly going to fish salmon. I mean, there were many people, salmon experts here that were convinced that salmon never got off the continental shelf. And so when they signed, when they got Japan to agree to abstain from fishing east of 175 degrees west, these guys were just chuckling under their mustaches, saying, "Oh boy, we really put one over on these, on the Japanese." But I think the Japanese had some prior knowledge, or at least a suspicion of how far salmon migrated. Because as a result of our study we found that, Asian salmon almost come to... well, they come as far as Kodiak, we know that. And we know that North American salmon now in their ocean migration probably get within twenty miles of the Kamchekan coast. There is a broad area of intermingling there. So they thought they had the problem solved when they said 175 degrees west, but there was no, no way.

EG: So you were in a real pioneering operation.

FF: Yeah, I was. In fact, all my career in the fisheries service, I would say was, really, just filled with those kinds of new discoveries. Because at the time I went in the business, the bottom fish operations, some real high powered authorities described the Bering Sea as a biological desert. And we knew that it wasn't a biological desert. After all, the largest king crab resource in the world is in the Bering Sea. And before the war even, very early in the century, the sailboats -- there used to be a bunch of sailboats in Lake Union -- those guys, they used to go up to Bering Sea and fish cod. And so we knew there was a cod resource up there. But when the Japanese started to utilize mincemeat, surimi, for all this kamaboko-like stuff -- fish meat, fish cakes, then really there was a huge demand for this one fish up there that occurs in huge abundance, a species called pollack. And that's really been the source of a lot of political bickering lately. But it turns out really, that the "biological desert" supported fish that could be harvested in the millions of tons. So I was there when all of this started to open up, so it was, yeah, I really enjoyed what I did.

TI: It also provided you with lots of information for your studies later on, because later on you continued your schooling and used a lot of this information and experience.

FF: Yeah. As a matter of fact, I mean, certain techniques for... I finally utilized some of this information for my doctoral dissertation. I was working on a technique for identifying groups and quantifying, the groups of salmon that are out on the high seas.

EG: So the dean was right, you were someone that should keep on going to school.

FF: [Laughs] No, he was mostly, most of the time I went to see him he was ready to throw me out. But later on, after I began to work and stuff, boy, he was really a... my strongest advocate. Yeah. I really owe a lot to that guy.

<End Segment 22> - Copyright © 1997 Densho. All Rights Reserved.