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RP: Now, as you were growing up and getting older, did you have some responsibilities or chores around the hotel?

VI: Yeah, we'd have to help around, clean up a little bit. But...

RP: How about your sisters, were they more involved in...

VI: Yeah, my sisters and mother did a lot of that.

RP: And your dad pretty much ran, sort of, the office?

VI: Well, no, my dad would work, and he'd work at this restaurant.

RP: Oh, that's right. And what was this, a Japanese restaurant?

VI: No, it'd be one of the restaurants down in Pioneer Square which was probably the hub of Seattle at that time where if anybody's familiar with Seattle would know that they now really restored the whole area, the Pioneer Square area.

RP: So it's kind of the downtown area?

VI: Right, that's where the underground tours are.

RP: So it was more, sort of, kind of upscale?

VI: No, if you can, if you can envision like going up to Alaska and walk down the street with all these different taverns and restaurants. That was Pioneer Square, the whole area had many restaurants, and most of 'em, most of the people that went down there were single. Not too many families would go down there to eat, so you had a lot of single men down there, and they catered to them.

RP: It sounds like there was quite a flow of transient...

VI: There is.

RP: ...men coming in and going out.

VI: Especially a seaport town like Seattle. Get fishermen coming in, miners coming in, you know, lumbermen, loggers.

RP: Did your dad, was your dad a cook at this restaurant?

VI: He might have been. [Laughs] If I had known, I'd have asked him before... well, he used to go down there and he surprised me 'cause after the relocation, he went back to Spokane because my sister was in business, and he was a baker at the Davenport Hotel, which is one of the first-class hotels in Spokane. I didn't know he was a baker, so he might have baked when he, or cooked, I think.

RP: He might have been a cook.

<End Segment 8> - Copyright © 2007 Manzanar National Historic Site and Densho. All Rights Reserved.