Densho Digital Archive - Henry Sakamoto Interview (denshovh-shenry

<Begin Segment 18>

JC: So Hank, tell me a little bit about your personal life. I'm assuming you're not all by yourself during all this time.

HS: That's true. I have a personal life. Sometimes it conflicted with my family life, but I have a great family. I had a first wife. We got, and that association provided my three children. My oldest son Scott born on Columbus Day in 1953, October 12th, and he wanted a steak for his birthday on the real Columbus Day in Columbus Day storm in 19, which was in 1962. On that birthday celebration, he wanted steak, a steak dinner, and that's feasible. So, but on the way home from the office, I began to wonder whether we'd be able to do that because this Columbus Day storm had started and the wind was blowing and the atmosphere was this creepy color, but, and things were flying all over the place. But I got home unscathed and proceeded, wife proceeded to fix the steak dinner for Scott, and that part was fine, and she finished cooking and the power went out, but Scott had his cooked steak. My second son Blake, born August 22, 1961. He's a musician, and he does other things really involved with helping other musicians and involved with Portland Taiko, so he's pretty much of a night person like other musicians I know. Then our third child, daughter Nancy born July 1, 1963. And incidentally, Blake is married to Brenda who carries a professional name of Braxton when she broadcasts at Channel Eight in the morning and at noon, and they produced two of my grandchildren, Zachary and Jaden. Zachary is eleven and Jaden is five. And Nancy, married to Joe, Joe Disabido who she met when she was in New York, and they now live in San Francisco where he still works for the same firm but runs their branch operation in San Francisco. And Joe and Nancy produced my other granddaughter Sophia who is three years old going on thirty and has a vocabulary that's hard for me to believe, and she makes up her own language too. One day a story I heard, she was, her dad was getting ready to put her to bed and she starts saying these things, and Joe asks her, "It's difficult to understand you, Sophia. What are you saying? What are you talking about?" She says, "I'm speaking French," so she makes up her own language.

My second wife, Carolyn, who I really met through the auspices of the Oregon Wheat Commission but I'll tell you about that a little bit later, she was previously married. She has two sons, each of whom have two sons, so somewhere there's strong male genes in that family. So she has, Carolyn has four grandsons and I have three grandchildren, so all together, we have seven that we need to pay attention to and go to their baseball, soccer matches, what else, plays, school functions. And my daughter Sophia, I mean granddaughter Sophia in San Francisco, she's into gymnastics as well as ballet, and Jaden's into soccer now and softball, and Zachary's into basketball and was into baseball, so there are a lot of events that seven grandchildren get involved with, and we try to, it's very difficult to give them equal time. Two of Carolyn's grandsons are in Eugene, and we were going to go down there for Halloween because they have an annual request into Carolyn to accompany them on their trick-or-treat journeys, and I guess Carolyn must be good at. I stay home and help, stay in their house and help hand out the candy for the trick-or-treaters who come to their place. But anyway, through the auspices of the Oregon Wheat Commission, I met Carolyn. She formerly worked for the U.S. National Bank and worked up at the Dalles for several years and working at bank in the Dalles, she got to know a lot of the agricultural people up there, and a lot of them were wheat farmers. So every year, the Oregon Wheat Grower's League, they have an annual meeting held here in Portland, and the branch bank at the Dalles has an agricultural counselor who handles agriculture accounts up there and Carolyn knew him real well, and that fellow knows an Oregon State Extension Specialist who works in Salem, who worked in Salem, and they get together annually at the Oregon Wheat Growers' League annual meeting and go to the annual banquet. So the fellow from the Dalles was in Portland, so they both decided and they both knew Carolyn, so they decided to go up to Carolyn's office and, at quitting time and say, "We're going to take you to dinner." So knowing both of them, Carolyn says, "Fine, let's go," and she didn't know she was going to go to the Wheat Grower's League banquet, but she was glad she went because she, they wanted to take her there because they knew she knew a lot of the people that would be there, so she enjoyed that, that outing very much. But it was a banquet also at which the Oregon Wheat Grower's League recognized the Japanese Grain Exporters or Grain Importer's Association because of the volume of wheat they buy from Oregon. And so the Wheat Grower's League made a presentation, gave a presentation to the Japanese trade, and two of the Japanese representatives were there. So after the banquet, I got together with them, and we wandered over to the quiet lounge which everybody goes to and makes a lot of noise there. And going into the place knowing the state extension specialist that co-sponsored Carolyn's dinner, I saw him going in to the quiet lounge, and so he introduced me to Carolyn at that time. But we sat, we didn't sit together. We sat a few tables apart, you know. So anyway, afterwards, the next day, the state extension guy gives me a call, says, "You know, Carolyn's a real, real nice person, so you should try to get together sometime." So I said, "Okay." So I called her and this, the annual banquet is, meeting is in December, so just before the holiday season, so I called Carolyn and said, reminded her that we had met and that I was encouraged to give her a call, told her that, that I'll call her after the holidays since it's a busy, mutually busy time, so she said, "Okay." I did and called her and I'm just trying remember. I think this was, the banquet is in '90, I mean '84 and I called her in 1985, so then we got together and saw each other for a while. Then for a while, we didn't see each other, then we resumed. Then after, so if we started, in 1985 after knowing her for about '85 to '94, eight or nine years, we got married in 1994, August 13th, very fateful day. It's a good day for me. So anyway, that's the family.