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DG: All right, Doreen, so I just want to start off with just personal background. If you can tell me where you were born and who's in your immediate family, what your parents did and what your grandparents did?

DR: Oh, yeah, well, actually, I've lived here on Bainbridge my entire life. My mom and dad met one another on the island on one of the berry farms when she came over to pick berries from Canada. And that summer they got married, of July 15, 1942. And I was born August 3, 1943. So I've lived my whole life on the island. Oh, 'course, I went over to Seattle, to Seattle General Hospital to be born, but I've been here ever since. I haven't left.

DG: And what did your parents do?

DR: My dad was a strawberry farmer and a welder as well. And my mom was a homemaker, and raised and took care of us. She was Canadian Indian, First Squamish Nation, and my dad was Filipino. And, well, before the war broke, well, how my dad got here on the island, he came over from, well, first he landed over in San Francisco. Then he worked over there as a houseboy and chauffeur and a cook for this one man over in San Francisco. And from there, he went over to Oregon where he farmed for a while. Then he went to Seattle where everybody, like the Chinese, worked on the railroads. The Filipinos worked at the fish canneries in Alaska. So, basically, most of them stayed right there right in Chinatown in the International Hotel. Stayed there in the winter months, then went to Alaska in the summer. But then they found out the Japanese farmers had, you know, cabins over here and berry farms, so they needed workers. So they came over here and they worked, stayed in the cabins and worked the berries over here. And then Dad decided that he wasn't gonna go back to Alaska again, so he, he and Tom Almojuela leased a property, the Furukawa land, and they did some strawberry farming there. And that's about the same year that my mom met my dad and Tom Almojuela met Dorothy. And they all got married that summer.

DG: All right. I want to sort of back up a little bit and hear more about your father's background and even life in the Philippines.

DR: He was saying life was okay but everything was so limited, you know, and he said it was a very poor country and his family seemed to have, have more than a lot of them did. But it wasn't, it wasn't the life he wanted. He wanted to be free and come over to the U.S. So, actually what he did is my grandfather wouldn't let him come over, but he got a passport. And he went and jumped on a ship, and so he was a stowaway. And then the cook decided he liked him, he liked him, but he took care of him, he fed him all the way across to United States.

DG: And then he got off in San Francisco.

DR: Yes, he did. [Laughs]

DG: And what did his, his parents do for a living in the Philippines?

DR: Actually, they had a rice plantation and fruit... just a, they had a rice plantation and then they had, they had a lot of tenant farmers working on their property, you know, and they just got a percentage of the produce from those farmers. So they did have that.

DG: So your, your father had a background in farming...

DR: Yeah, he did. He did. He had a... yeah, he did.

<End Segment 1> - Copyright © 2007 Densho. All Rights Reserved.