Densho Digital Archive - Shig Kaseguma Interview (denshovh-kshig-01-0008)

<Begin Segment 8>

RP: You said that your father eventually was employed by the Great Northern Railroad as a cook?

SK: He was what?

RP: He was employed by the Great Northern Railroad?

SK: Yeah, he was, (...) he worked as a cook for the Great Northern Railroad company, which was one of the big ones.

RP: And he, he was kind of a private cook to the general manager?

SK: Yeah.

RP: Tell us a little bit about that.

SK: It was kind of a nice job, I thought. You know, they'd be gone from Monday to Saturday, come back on Saturday, generally. Not every day of the week, but most of the time, he was gone. I can't remember him being home, 'cause I wasn't home either, because we were out playing. But (when) he came back, he liked sports. So when I was doing judo, he was very happy. And I was pretty clever, because I started real young, you know. So I was doing matches, and he would be so proud of me. [Laughs] Other than that, my mother took care of the girls, though. My father wasn't too enamored with girls anyway, you know how fathers are. And make sure the boys are sports. And so... but I remember him as, he would come back on Saturday and once in a while he'd take me to the Husky game, the Washington Huskies playing. And that was my big thrill. And then he would take me fishing, down at the Sound. Because the salmon was plentiful then, and it was edible. And we would walk down four o'clock in the morning from where we lived, all the way down to Dearborn, to the water. And we'd get in rowboats and they would tow all the rowboats out about, oh, a block, two blocks away. And release all the boats and we would fish, catch salmon. (...) Latch on to the boat again, come back in. It was quite an experience. Cold, but it was nice. I thought it was great that we walked back with the salmon. That was one of my biggest memories about fishing. Other than fishing, the kids used to (...) go down there on Saturdays, fish off the docks of Puget Sound. (The Sound) wasn't contaminated at that time. Now you can't even eat the thing. But we would catch perch, shiners --

RP: Shiners.

SK: -- rock cod once in a while. But it was plentiful. People, I think all the young kids who used to go down there, we all had our hand line, you know. Get the worms in the yard and it was quite an experience. We would all go down. And we never, hardly ever swam in the salt water, but that Alki Beach was quite far way. And if you took a trolley, it took a long time to get there and to come back. Our parents would let us go there.

RP: Is that on the shores of (Puget Sound)?

SK: Yeah, it's kind of on the cove, you know, you go around. From Alki, you can see the whole city, looking backwards, east. And that was one of the big deals for us, to go to Alki Beach. But the swimming in salt water is not great. You know, if you're not used to, we used to always swim in the lake water. Salt water, you can float better, but you, oh boy, you gotta keep your mouth closed. [Laughs] I remember that, and it was colder than heck, too. 'Cause salt water never (changes), maybe at the surface it's warm, but not in the six inches below, it's colder as can be. That was my experiences, was swimming at Alki Beach. But it was a nice beach though, they had good sand. (...) The lake wasn't a good beach.