COOPER SCHOOL ORAL HISTORY PROJECT

FINAL DRAFT

Nick Skalabrin

Audiotape

[This is an interview with Nick Skalabrin on November 14, 2006 with participation from Joan Skalabrin. The interviewer is Philippa Nye with participation from Peder Nelson. The transcriber is Philippa Nye.]

PN: So when did your family come to the neighborhood?

NS: My father immigrated from Croatia. It was part of the Austria-Hungary empire at that time. In 1907. And he came to Riverside. He came directly from New York to Riverside and stayed at the Budinich Boardinghouse, right on the main street of Riverside. And he went to look for work and basically worked as a laborer, and started out on lots of building sites and eventually became a laborer for Puget Sound Bridge and Dredge.

PN: Bridge and Dredge?

NS: Yes. So they built, they were in the process of building Harbor Island here (shows picture). That’s my dad here with the dredge in the background. They built Harbor Island and most of the piers along the waterfront of Seattle, Smith Cove, and of course the bridges that were involved at that time.

PN: Wow, that’s a great picture!

NS: And the streetcar line ran to Youngstown; basically Youngstown was the end of the streetcar line, and it ran across the flats on a trestle. As a very tiny child I remember riding that. It was like being on a roller coaster. You could feel the whole thing moving. And the end of the line was Youngstown. It ended right at my dad’s store. That’s the reason he built there. He built in 1916. And he and his …well this is a picture of him. He worked in Alaskan Railways, one of his jobs he did when he came here And this is a picture when he came back from Alaska full beard.

PN: Yeah, that looks like that would keep you warm!

NS: And his brother Anthony came, emigrated also, and he was a master cabinet maker, and the two of them went together to build the store, they actually built the store. And here’s a picture of him without the beard. The original name of the store was Skalabrin Brothers Incorporated. He incorporated it as a corporation and it was grocery and general merchandise, so it had more than

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just groceries. It had a section of bolt cloth, and hardware items, and everything kind of hung from the ceiling. The building itself was built at that time when they had real high ceilings, and not very much electricity, and no hot water. There was only one water system and it was cold, so if you wanted water you had to heat it. And the lighting for the store was one 300 watt bulb in the middle of the ceiling.

PN: That sounds kind of harsh.

NS: And the refrigeration was a huge ice box , which as a kid I used to have to empty the water from. It held about 200 pounds of ice so it was a huge commercial ice box. So that was the refrigeration for the store.

PN: Wow.

NS: Here’s a picture of the store about that era with some kids in front, and you can see that the kids are wearing knickers because in those days you weren’t allowed to wear long pants until you were a certain age, so mostly you wore knickers. And unfortunately my folks were from the old country. I say unfortunately because I lost a generation there when they came; they were a full generation behind folks here. So I was dressed as a girl until… I wore dresses, until I don’t know, I must have been nearly five. Curls and dresses, which was just the old custom. In fact I didn’t speak any English, I spoke Croatian. We were on the streetcar, I was telling you about that; we went to Seattle across the trestle, and the streetcar driver said…I was blonde, all us kids were blonde, I had blonde curls and a dress and ribbons, and the streetcar driver said, “What a beautiful little girl!” And in Croatian I called him a jackass.

PN: Even at five you knew what you were!

NS: The streetcar driver asked my mother, “What did she say?,” and she said “Well it’s a he and he called you a jackass.”

PN: So she wasn’t nice about it; she just translated!

NS: She translated.

PN: [Discussion about turning off heat] So were there other Croatian families? Was it generally a Croatian area over there?

NS: Riverside was. Very much so. And we had some Croatians in our area, in Youngstown. But Youngstown, as I mentioned to you before that when I started F.B. Cooper in kindergarten I couldn’t speak English, I spoke Croatian. But after the teacher sent home a note that I was speaking baby talk, and I wasn’t, I was speaking Croatian, my mother and dad only spoke English at home after that.

PN: Was their English good?

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NS: Actually it was. My mother was surprisingly fast. My father was born in 1884, so he didn’t get married until he was 50, so my mother was in her late 30s, 35 or so, and she’s a very smart lady, and she picked up English very fast. In fact back in the old village where she was from (we visited there, a beautiful old place) but anyway the boys were so dumb that the village priest tried to teach them to serve Latin Mass and they couldn’t learn it, so she became the Mass server, which in the Catholic Church was really quite unique for a girl to serve as an altar person.

PN: Oh, yeah…

NS: So when we came here, it was a little difficult for my brother and I because you know, when you have a strange accent, when you speak strange language, you’re strange, the kids kind of make fun of you so we had a tough time until we got our growth. Because my brother wound up six [foot] five and I’m not too short either…

PN: So you could intimidate…

NS: As we got bigger the harassment went away!

PN: So what do you remember about Riverside?

NS: Actually I know a lot of the people who lived there. At the time Riverside had two canneries. It was a low paying wage thing. So most of the women worked in the canneries. I had a picture that I lost and meant to bring to you [later sent] which is of my dad and my brother purse seining on Elliott Bay at that time that the salmon, you could practically walk across them. There were barges full of salmon they were catching off the Duwamish and I have a picture of them on their boat with this huge salmon.

PN: That would be great.

NS: So the men worked in the fisheries. Basically they fished locally and some of them went to Alaska and fished in the Bering Sea. So that was what I remember of Riverside, but I know a lot of the families there. And they were very much Croatian. Practically the whole Riverside was Croatian. In Youngstown there were three main ethnic groups, and my dad had to furnish food for all the groups because they all had different likes. There were the Italians, a group of Italians, there were Swedes, a lot of Swedes and Germans. So those were the three main groups and they all had certain things that they liked. And at the time I grew up and as soon as I could walk I was in there in the store. And at the time they didn’t package things, everything came in bulk. And one of my jobs as a kid was to package things up because everything came like in 100 lbs. of flour, 100 lbs of sugar. The beans came in a huge wooden crate and went in a hopper. So I would package 5 and 10 lb sacks of sugar and tie them with a string. That was one of my early jobs as a kid. And everything hung from the ceiling; there was, Italians like the salamis and the gourd cheeses, and then the dried cod. When you walked into the store there was a real smell about the place, but it was really a pleasant smell, because it was all these spices and things out in the open. The Swedish people liked pastries and a lot of sweet things, so we had a lot of baked goods.…

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PN: Somebody told me about lefse, that lefse was a big Swedish thing people would bring for lunch.

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NS: Yeah. And of course we always had a barrel of pickled herring because they went for that. And during Christmas we’d bring in lutefisk, which really wasn’t great smelling. For the Germans we had a barrel of sauerkraut. It came in a barrel, huge barrel. And I remember that my dad removed the first top hoop and dropped the lid down, then put a big piece of granite rock to keep the pressure on, but you could always sneak your hand down and put your finger around that lid and come up with a little sauerkraut. And we had one of the only telephones, original telephones in Youngstown, so it was a place where people came to use the telephone. And then a branch of the public library was there…

PN: Really!

NS: We had a branch of the public library. And it was the polling place for a huge part of West Seattle during the 30s and 40s. I can remember during one of the elections, of course Roosevelt’s fourth term, or third term, the people lining up to go to the store were about five blocks long. It was huge, all the way up Dakota Street to 30th Avenue and then across, and then up by the golf course. So it was a huge long line of people coming to vote.

PN: How did they vote?

NS: It was a machine. Seattle brought in a machine. It was a kind of a thing where you got inside and pulled a little curtain around you and it was a tabulating machine that you voted with.

PN: Did it have a party lever?

NS: It had a little thing you pulled down for each thing. And then the voting officials came, and Dad, because we had no heat there…. there is no heat in the store at all, the only heat came from our apartment in the back. So he would hook up one of those little electric heaters and set up a table for them, the election people, for the day. And originally, right at the beginning the postal people used it. He was also an American Express agent. And a lot of the people, the Italians and the Germans, a lot of them were immigrants and they would send money home. It was important that they would be able to fill out a money order and send money to their families back home. The Italians, of course they liked salamis and the Germans liked the sauerkraut and (what goes with sauerkraut?) the sausages. And the Italians smoked this black tobacco and I still remember it was Peerless, and it came in a package that had a factory with big smokestacks on it. I remember that, but it was the foulest smelling stuff, really strong. Of course they like strong coffee too, espresso kind of coffee. So we mostly had to furnish foods for these different ethnic people that lived there.

PN: But not for your own ethnic group, though, because the Croatians probably didn’t come over to this side….

NS: Well, the dried cod was… what was it called? Bakalar. They did use some dried cod in some dishes, I know that. Anyway, a lot of it was done on charge because their paydays were

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about two weeks apart. And basically what would happen is we would carry the families until payday and then they would come. So we had a charge book for everything. A lot of people would shop by phone. So as a kid I had a delivery wagon, it looked just like a buckboard, a great big wire, steel rim and wooden wheels, and I’d load groceries up and take it around the neighborhood and deliver it. But a lot of the people ordered their groceries by telephone, and I’d deliver it. One of the guys who lived here was a homebound fellow, he had a homestead here originally, and it was on the next street over from Dakota, I can’t remember what that street was [Yancey? Adams? Nevada?]. It was a log cabin, and it originally sat on a homestead, and his name was Barney Sloan and he was a Civil War veteran, who was still alive in the 30s. I had to deliver…he was homebound, so I would deliver to him and he had a parrot that knew every swear word that you could imagine… he was a really interesting guy to talk to, and a Civil War veteran. Barney Sloan.

PN: So what was the geographic area that people came to the store from?

NS: Basically just that area that worked in the steel mill. 28th to Delridge. On Delridge there was another store, it was Mr Werlic’s store. He was a butcher. And then across from Mr. Werlic was a drug store, Holman was the guy who ran the drug store. Actually, he wasn’t a druggist, he didn’t have a drug section but he sold over the counter stuff, but the most important thing he had was he had a fountain, an ice cream fountain…

PN: Is this place familiar? (showing a King County archive photo of the building on the northeast corner of Andover/Delridge)

NS: Yeah, Mike’s Meat. Mike Werlic.

PN: OK that’s good to know. Mike Werlic. How do you spell Werlic?

NS: W-E-R-L-I-C (spelling). In Croatian C is pronounced “CH.” So a lot of “Ich”s are not spelled “ICH”. The “H” is missing.

PN: Seems like every name I saw on these photos for Riverside ended in a “V.” It was Popov or…

NS: Yeah. Vukov, John Vukov was one of the original people in Riverside. His son became an MD and was a very well known MD in Renton and a good friend of the family. A lot of the Croatians who came here did really quite well. Marcus Nalley of Nalley’s Foods was Croatian. He visited my dad quite often and we would…I remember I loved to see him come because he would bring a huge box of potato chips, like this (showing size) for us to have. And we visited his farm; he had this ranch on Hood Canal. So a lot of them did pretty well here. The thing about the store is that during the Depression times were really tough, and my dad pretty much carried a lot of people. Like one time he showed me, this was during the 40s, he showed me a box that you

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usually pack toilet paper in, you know how big those are, just full of charge books that people couldn’t manage to pay off.

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PN: Wow. So how did you survive?

NS: It was just marginal, a marginal living. We managed. He never turned anybody down. We never got bothered; there was never any attempt to rob him at that time. That wasn’t true of some of the other places; they got pretty well knocked over.

PN: There was a place on the corner of Andover and Delridge – George’s? And I heard that the proprietor of that place actually shot and killed a burglar. And that was during that era.

NS: It could have been because things were so desperate. I remember at Mike’s Place, they blew the whole side and back out once and took the safe out. Blew the whole side of the building out.

PN: Wow.

NS: It was a desperate time. Can you imagine trying to support a family and your family’s unable to eat…

PN: You do what you have to do…

NS: Yeah. It was a really hard time, and I can still remember part of that although I was still pretty young. Of course when the war happened it turned things around. And one thing that happened was, of course the steel mill was still going full blast. The steel mill originally… the history of that was it was built by Pigott who had [Pacific] Car and Foundry in Renton, for him to have steel.

PN: It is now Paccar.

NS: Of course the car part of Pacific Car and Foundry is railroad cars; that’s what he built was railroad cars. So he built the steel mill, and he had Northern Pacific build a spur from Renton to here, so we had a railway here at one time. It was a spur that ran from here to Renton.

PN: Oh, so it didn’t go across the trestle; it went directly south?

NS: To Renton, yes. It was a spur of Northern Pacific that he had built to move the steel to the plant in Renton. And of course Bethlehem Steel eventually took it over. That’s what I remember, I remember the steel mill part because our place was really less than a city block away from the

steel mill and they had a rolling stamping mill there and they made tie plates for Union Pacific, which is the plate that goes underneath the rail to spread the force of the rail over the tie, and it would run 24 hours a day. And there would be a clank as they stamped out the piece and then it would go down a roller, brrrrr, and drop into a gondola car. And our bedroom was right there. You got used to it, so you didn’t notice it, but when we had visitors, let’s say from Pittsburg or somebody, they never stayed more than one night!

PN: They said, “how could you stand it!”

NS: They were out of there! They remembered they had to go visit somebody else. It was really tough.

PN: Was it just a regular rhythm of your life? So it just goes out of your consciousness?

NS: Yeah. It went on forever. Of course the shipyards, that’s where my uncle worked. This is a picture of Todd [Shipyard]. They are launching one of the destroyers they made during the war. Some of the people who lived here in Youngstown worked in the shipyards so my uncle was a foreman in the pattern shop. He was a cabinet maker so he made patterns for castings, pump castings of some of these ships that were built during the war. During the war they put up temporary housing, every lot that was in Youngstown that didn’t have a house on it, all of a sudden, had a two story apartment that was made of plasterboard, exterior and interior were plasterboard, they just put waterproof paint on the outside. So they were really slapped together in a hurry. I remember them building them and it seemed like overnight they went up. Any place that there was any ground at all they went up. Of course here they had a barrage balloon company, I remember as a kid. At school we could look across the street at the barrage balloons. And the troops would be practicing marching on Delridge. That’s a picture of it. I don’t remember what year that was, but I do remember being in school here when it happened.

PN: And you said that they actually had tents pitched on the north playground?

NS: Yes. Whoever took care of the barrage balloons. It wasn’t a very large cadre. I would imagine it was probably twenty or so. But I do remember them practicing marching. One of the big things…well, here are some of the pictures of (showing pictures)…you can see some of the dress of that era. There’s my dad in front of the building.

PN: So people would just come up to the counter and give you their shopping list, and you would go fetch stuff?

NS: Yes. There was a green grocery area too where they could go get vegetables and stuff.

PN: Did you do prepared food? Like did you have a soda fountain or anything?

NS: No we did not. You know, later on in my dad’s life…because this was a pretty marginal thing, it would be really tough to make a living, especially when Safeway came in. One of the very first Safeways that happened in Seattle happened on Delridge and Spokane. And that was the original Safeway in Seattle. So that was devastating for my dad.

PN: Do you know what year that was?

NS: It had to be…

PN: The fifties, right?

NS: I think it was the late 40s.

PN: I haven’t been able to find a picture of it. It existed in the window between the King County photos, and nobody I found…

NS: It was the original Safeway in Seattle. Of course it was quite small by today’s standard, but for then it was huge. And it was a new concept. You went in with a cart and…

PN: It was self serve.

NS: And the prices were… dad couldn’t match the prices because they could buy in volume. So it was really…it came down to people being faithful to him that he had carried them in the bad times so they would still come to him. And we’re basically talking about after the war. But he tried getting a market in the north end. And that was pretty much a disaster too. He wound up working as a janitor at night to make ends meet. But they eventually found a delicatessen in downtown Seattle, kitty corner to the Bon Marche, it was on Fourth and Virginia I think was the street, and my mom could cook there, she was a wonderful cook. And she cooked, she used garlic and a lot

of things that were a little out of the ordinary as far as flavors were concerned, and chicken, and they had a huge fan that was over the door and these odors would be coming out of this place…

PN: That’s good advertising

NS: It was an absolute mob of people in there all the time because the food was wonderful. And they would just come in there. And of course they had a lot of people living in those apartment hotels down there in downtown Seattle. So it got to be a wonderful place for them, and they made that money from there and retired up across from Lincoln Park. My dad, we used to go to Lincoln Park every Sunday. Here’s the Valentinetti’s (showing picture).

PN: Oh, yeah, we interviewed Aurora.

NS: There’s Aurora here, and here’s me in the background. My brother Val. That’s Aurora.

PN: Oh, that’s great.

NS: One of the things that happened on Saturday nights was…

PN: So Aurora is the one that the other girl’s arm is in front of?

NS: Yes, that’s Aurora. So one of the things we did on Saturday night, the families did here was, because of money and everything else, was we went to dinner at each other’s homes. And the Valentinetti’s were very close to us, and we would go to their home and they would come to our house for Saturday night. And the food! Italian cooking is so good. My dad and Mr. Valentinetti, his name was John, too. And they would make wine. Fall was our wine making time every year. We would go down to Georgetown. The grapes would come in from California on boxcars. The old guys would get up and taste the lugs, and you’d buy so many lugs. And then they’d make the wine. And there’d always be an argument on Saturday night about the right way to make wine. They all had their way. And every fall we’d make the wine. We always had wine at meals as kids, in moderation. I never saw my parents drink anything except at meals.

PN: Did they water it for you?

NS: Actually there is a way…when you cut wine in half with water in Croatia it is called Bavanda. It is a summer drink. So you drink it with water. You can’t do that with the wines you

get commercially, but you could with the homemade wines…It was very good. But we had it full strength at dinnertime.

PN: So let me get the chronology. So what year did your parents…your parents came before you were born, so did you know approximately what year that was?

NS: 1907, my dad came here. My mother, let me guess. I was born in 1934 so she had to be here about 1932.

PN: So did he bring her over?

NS: Yes, actually…

PN: So they had met in the old country?

NS: No.

PN: OK. Was she a mail order bride?

NS: Exactly!

PN: Really!

NS: So actually she had a friend in Split My mother lived near Dubrovnik, a beautiful place called Peljesac, a peninsula that runs out into the Adriatic, and she lived in a place called Trstenik, which had another peninsula next to it. It is a wine growing area, and olives and oranges trees. She had a friend in Split which is a Roman city built in the first century, and it is still exactly like it was then. So she was visiting the friend, and they took her picture on the veranda with the friend. The friend happened to be the niece of a friend of my dad’s, who was a publisher there in Split and he was trying to interest my dad in his niece. So he sent a picture of the two of them on the veranda, and my dad wrote back and said, “The niece is very nice, but who is the friend?” So he began writing to her, and my dad was a wonderful writer. I’ve read some of it, he had beautiful writing. And they corresponded for five years, and he proposed to her by mail, and she agreed to come. And the immigration system at that time was very unfair; it was heavily loaded to northern Europeans, they had a huge number of…

PN: a quota…

NS: A quota, yes. A very small quota for Southern Europeans. So it was closed. The only way she was going to be able to come was if she married my dad, who was a naturalized citizen. So when she got here by boat in New York, the immigration people took her from the boat to the church. And the first time they met was on the altar at the church getting married.

PN: So they were going to make sure they got married!

NS: That’s exactly what they were doing. They wanted to make sure it was going to be a real thing, that she was marrying a naturalized citizen.

PN: So did he travel by train?

NS: Yes he traveled by train across the country to New York. So the first time they met face to face was at the wedding. Can you imagine how much courage it took for her to come all the way across here! I said, “My dad really wrote some good love letters!” A pretty amazing guy. And he only went to the fourth grade on this island called Pric Luka. It is just a rock in the Adriatic; there is a Franciscan monastery there, and he went to the fourth grade in the monastery, then he had to go to work.

PN: So it sounds like he was totally self taught.

NS: Absolutely.

PN: Did he read a lot?

NS: Oh, he read everything. He went to lectures, just audited lectures at the University of Washington. He became friends with Henry Suzzallo. Suzzallo was Croatian. So anyway…in fact I have letters, Suzzallo’s letters. I think, whether it is a truth or not, but as you get more educated, your handwriting gets worse and worse. So, you are the president of the University of Washington, very educated person, but you could barely read his handwriting.

PN: Well, because you don’t write, you have secretaries do it for you!

NS: So they were friends. And so anyway, he read, and he took these courses, university courses by correspondence, you could write away for a volume of books like an encyclopedia, that would take you through it. So he was very well versed person all through his life. He lived to be almost 104…

PN: Oh my goodness…

NS: And he lived with us the last four years of his life. And he didn’t have any eyesight left. And he still wanted to be in touch with everything. So the Library of Congress will send you a record player and you could order whatever he wanted. He ordered things that had to do with news and political things.

PN: So he just did books on tape.

NS: Yeah. So he was very well versed.

PN: It sounds like he still had a good mind right to the end…

NS: He never was sick, it was amazing. When he died, we were canoeing down in Oregon, it was three rivers we were running by canoe. I had a practical nurse come to stay with him while we were gone, so I called him each time we made a river run and we were on the last river which was the Willamette, and about half way down it a ranger came on a jet boat to tell me my father had died, and we got our friends to take our canoe down, and we rented a car and got home. And the nurse said he got up that morning and was really, really excited and said he was going to see Anka. Anka was his wife. And he said, “I’m going to see Anka today.” Really excited about seeing her.

PN: So he knew…

NS: Yeah. He was really excited, but his breathing got funny, so she put him in the car, and by the time he got to the hospital he had died. But all the time there he was talking about seeing her.

PN: How long before had she died?

NS: Quite a while. She had cancer. She was about 66.

PN: Oh, so…

NS: It was a long time. But he never got over that.

PN: Yeah.

NS: But one of the things…of course, Boy Scouting was a big thing for me because my folks, we didn’t have a car, so basically Youngstown was my life, I never got out of Youngstown. But the Boy Scouts kind of opened the world for me because Lionel Skinner had started a troop that was sponsored by the Salvation Army…

PN: Yes, Fred told me about that….

NS: And we had a hiking trip every certain weekend of each month; we went 12 months of the year. It didn’t matter, it was that weekend. Didn’t care if it was snowing, raining, whatever, we went. Basically to the Olympics most of the time.

PN: Are there names here? No.

NS: This is Fred here. This is Fred (pointing to picture).

PN: Where are you?

NS: I’m the guy with the sleeves rolled up. The tall one.

PN: So you’re in the second row, and you’re the fourth from the left, and he’s in the bottom, and he’s the third from the left.

NS: Uh huh. All these guys of course all lived in Youngstown. These are the Bennetts, and of course this is Liney. This is Phil McKinley. The Wicks family. Tommy Skinner. These are the Wicks here.

PN: And Skinner was the leader?

NS: Yes, Lionel Skinner. He was the leader. Wonderful guy. He taught us…

PN: And was this taken at the Salvation Army?

NS: Yeah, there is a Salvation Army lady there (points at picture). That’s in the hall. But we would go, there was a certain weekend that we’d leave 12 months a year. Didn’t matter if it was snow or rain, we knew we were going to go.

PN: So where did you go in the winter?

NS: We went to the Olympics.

PN: So you snow camped.

NS: Yes.

PN: You did snow caves?

NS: Yes, we did that too. But we went. And basically this was not a troop that sat around, we took trips every month, we had a trip planned.

PN: So how did you get out there if most people didn’t have cars?

NS: He worked for Taylor Edwards Company, a trucking company, so they’d lend him a truck. It was a closed body truck. We’d put all our gear in there and we’d get in the back.

PN: A flatbed.

NS: A flatbed, but it had a box around the back. So we’d get in the back, and at that time the ferry system was run by the Black Ball Ferry line, Captain Peabody. He again was acquainted with my dad because one of the guys who worked for him was Fred Jansa; he was my adopted grandfather. My folks got married so late that my grandparents had passed away so we kind of adopted people who looked like grandparents who were friends of my dad. So anyway if you were a Boy Scout it cost 15 cents to travel on the ferry if you were in uniform, so we could catch the ferry at Fauntleroy, and at the time it went into Harper. And we’d drive along…. there wasn’t a bridge then so you had to got through Belfair and go all the way around the canal in order to get to the Olympics.

PN: When you say Harper, that was a town named Harper?

NS: Yes.

PN: Is that south of where it comes in now?

NS: It is north of where it comes in now. There is a fishing dock there now. If you get off at Southworth and drive along the water, you’ll find a fishing dock there and that was the ferry dock originally. And we went through Port Orchard. Port Orchard at that time in the early forties was built out over piers. Now it’s all filled in. But that’s how I came to Port Orchard. I had fond memories of it. We lived in San Francisco when I was in the Navy, and I came up here on a Navy plane to take a look at it, at an office that I could go in with, and when I got back I told Joan, “It’s kind of like Sausalito.” She never let me forget this. It was a hill, and I think there was an artist there, Ogla Baker, who did water colors.

PN: Right, right. (laughs) One artist. Not exactly a colony, but close!

NS: Yes, but close. So she never let me forget that. Told her it was like Sausalito. So then we went around the canal, and usually up the rivers to get up to the mountains themselves. But we had wonderful memories. Of course that was my out-of -Youngstown experience. My parents never learned to drive. We never had a car. Eventually I started as a teenager to get cars and stuff.

PN: Did Skinner just take you by himself, or did other parents come along?

NS: Well, we had a few guys to help. Basically he pretty much did everything on his own, which was amazing. He was an amazing guy.

PN: Yeah, controlling that many kids!

NS: Yeah, it was a good bunch. And of course we had our own secret organizations and stuff within the troop. It was called the Pflugers. I don’t know if you know fishing gear, but Pfluger is a manufacturer of fishing gear (43.06) and they make sinkers, and three lead sinkers in a row, that was our insignia. We had a secret ceremony and everything, in the middle of the lake somewhere, at midnight.

PN: A hazing sort of thing!

NS: Then we had Indian outfits, we’d wear loincloths. Oh, we made it up along the way. I remember one time… the end of each trip was called “Mulligan Stew Day,” and whatever was left in your pack went into this thing. So you never knew how it was going to turn out. I remember one time we went to this one lake, and we were there for three or four days, I think, so there was still quite a bit of stuff left, but we couldn’t reach the bottom of this big pot so someone used an entrenching shovel to mix the stuff up with. So it really had a lot of flavor!

PN: Wow.

NS: I remember… and Fred when I was there he was the tenderfoot. He was the youngest kid in the troop, but he liked to hang around with all the big guys and he was a neat guy. I remember one time… the tenderfeet are always good for a laugh because of course they don’t know a thing about camping. It wasn’t Fred but it was with someone else, and we were camping, and he brought a frying pan, big cast iron frying pan which was hard to carry, and potatoes, whole potatoes and he was going to cook the potatoes. And he had a whole potato, unpeeled, sitting in the frying pan waiting to cook.

PN: And you said, “You are going to be waiting a long time…”

NS: And he was talking to us, and as he was talking he turned his head, and a caterpillar dropped into the pan. We never mentioned it to him; we never knew if the caterpillar ended up part of the meal.

PN: So you didn’t go to Camp Long much, you went a couple of times?

NS: We would go up there mainly to use the rock for rappelling. We got into mountain climbing as we got older. As we got further along in Scouting. In fact Fred went on… when we climbed Mt Baker he was on that climb. I have a picture of him on the summit.

PN: Who taught you? Was it your scout leader or where there people…?

NS: We kind of were self taught. In those days, this was really early, and the place that you went to rent gear was REI. And REI was a little upstairs place on Fourth Avenue, above the Green Apple Pie Restaurant, and you could go to rent gear there. So we would rent ice axes and climbing ropes, whatever we needed. And in those days it was manila climbing ropes. So we kind of learned as we went. And the boots were called Triconies made by an outfit off Elliott Avenue

called Rainier Shoe Co. and they were a major investment for Scouts; you had to save up a long time to buy them but they had spikes in them, kind of like a saw tooth edge. That’s what you used for…

PN: Like crampons.

NS: We didn’t use crampons. They were a combination crampon and boot. In those days, you started in the Olympics on small peaks, and you worked your way up. The ranger required at that time that you prove, before they would let you climb, that you had the experience to do it. So you had to lay all your equipment out in a row and you had to have the proper slings, for the peaks you’d climb and what experience you had. And somebody somewhere along the line sued them, and now anybody can climb, and they are having to rescue people with no skills at all.

PN: Under the “Freedom to Be Foolish” law!

NS: Yeah, I think that’s what they named it, the Freedom to Be Foolish Act. One of the things that would happen in Youngstown each year was that the guy with the pony would come around. And you could get your picture on the pony. And he’d have a Western outfit for you to put on.

PN: Was this a certain holiday?

NS: No, no, it was a guy making bucks during the Depression. He’d come around and he’d have ponies and western outfits that you could wear. And the other guy I remember coming around Youngstown was the junk guy. And he’d sing this little song “Any Junk Today?”

PN: Oh, yeah, somebody else told me about that.

NS: Any junk today, and he’d collect whatever scrap you had. That was before the war, and during the war we had our own scrap drives. And of course my dad was really involved; he really wanted to do what he could, even though he was quite old at that time, so he was the Civil Defense person for Youngstown. So he would go out and make sure each curtain was closed and there was no light showing at night. And he had a helmet and a fire extinguisher thing, and a gas mask he would wear (showing picture).

PN: What is behind him? Do you know where that was?

NS: Yeah this is Dakota Street. This is on our vacant lot. That’s another thing, we just had the lot the building was built on and there was a vacant lot next door, a really small one, maybe about 50 foot frontage, but he bought that lot, and my brother and I thought it was like open range. We built campfires back there as little kids, and pretended we were rounding up cattle and the whole thing.

PN: So there really wasn’t… What else was around you? It looks like across the street there wasn’t much.

NS: There was a house here at one time, and of course there was all that wartime housing.

PN: Oh, where the park is now [meaning the Dragonfly park].

NS: No there was regular housing there. This was across Dakota Street. On that hillside. It looks like this [picture] was before that time. Because there was all wartime housing here.

PN: So that’s looking across Dakota Street, that’s looking south.

NS: That’s looking north.

PN: Oh, that’s right, you are on the south corner.

NS: Yeah, so he would have the scrap drives, the rubber drives and the metal drives would go into that big lot. So we had huge piles of stuff. I remember he put my kiddy car on the pile.

PN: Oh, no!

NS: Because it was old.

PN: That was a sacrifice!

NS: But it got stolen off the pile. Another kid got it!

PN: (groaning) Ooooh!

NS: But he was very patriotic, he really tried to do everything he could. When the war was coming down, the big thing was the people in Europe who were destitute. So my mother and him worked on clothing drives. They would organize huge clothing drives, bales and bales.

END OF AUDIOTAPE 1, SIDE A

And they would ship the clothing overseas. So they were much involved in that. And this (showing picture) is my brother and I in front of the store.

PN: It didn’t seem like you had a very big sign. Was it in the window?

NS: No, we really didn’t have a sign.

[pause to fuss with analog tape]

The house itself is really interesting. [showing picture] This is my mom in the kitchen in the apartment behind the store. This is the modern one, but we used to have the old wooden stove, the old wood stove. This is the second stove we had.

PN: Did the modern one run on coal?

NS: I think the modern one did have electric burners, but it also had a burning thing – you can see the chimney there. But it also had some electric ones. But the old one I remember as a kid was just a wood stove and you could… one of the things you had to do was clean the ashes out. But that’s where we heated water. All we had was cold water faucet, there weren’t two faucets, there was only one faucet. And no washing machine, you would just use a scrub board in the tub. And Saturday night was bath night because Sunday was church. And you got issued your clothes for the week on Monday. And that was it for the week. What I have is the greatest admiration for the teachers here at F. B. Cooper School. By Friday, all those kids in there with those clothes…(wrinkles nose)

PN: Right, right!

NS: The smell in there must have been just eye watering.

PN: Because they only wore one set…

NS: One set of clothes for a week. And you had your bath… you had to heat your water on the stove. And it was the same water that my brother and I had our bath in. But it had high ceilings and the old sliding big doors, and the tables with the big cloths. It was a lot of…my dad had an old roll top desk. I remember the roll top desk during the war; that was where my brother and I had to be during an air raid, was under the desk.

PN: You had it planned out. So you said you left in fourth grade. So was that when your family opened the store in North Seattle?

NS: No, they still lived here. I went here until the fourth grade, and then in the fourth grade I had an injury. Some…. I don’t know, it was really more of a collision than a fight but I had a concussion and was out for a number of days and then they decided that they would move me up to Holy Rosary. We’re Catholics. I would walk up hill or you could have a bus token during the war that would allow you to ride, a school bus token. So we would go up… So from fourth grade on I went to Holy Rosary, and from Holy Rosary I went to O’Dea. But I kept in touch with the guys here because I still belonged to the troop. Even in high school I was still with the troop because we had kind of an Explorer Scout group.

PN: Did you get to Eagle?

NS: No I didn’t. I didn’t. Phil did and several others.

PN: Phil McKinley

NS: Yes. Several people did but I didn’t. I don’t know why I didn’t now. I enjoyed the camping and the outdoor stuff, but I wasn’t much for the book stuff. I think I got to be Star. I had enough stuff, I suppose I could have been…that’s as far as I went.

PN: So did your family think that Cooper wasn’t that safe; is that why you went to Holy Rosary?

NS: I’m not sure exactly the reasons. But there was still some hazing that went on because we hadn’t gotten our full height yet. So there were some tough kids in that Gulch Gang.

PN: Talk about the Gulch Gang a little bit.

NS: Us little kids referred to the Gulch Gang as “big kids.” And the big kids were always stopping us and pushing us around, and wanted to establish the fact that they were the big kids. And I remember getting beat up several times. Just because we didn’t speak good English and for some we were different. It happens. But my brother was real feisty even though he was younger. I remember coming home all black and blue from a fight, and he was just livid. We were going to get the big kids, just the two of us!

But I do remember the first television in Youngstown. And this was, I don’t know, had to be the very early fifties. One of those that the tube was about this big around. A round one.

PN: Oh, yeah, with the really tiny picture.

NS: And it was a lawyer. He lived in Youngstown, right across the Gulch, right at the edge of the Gulch across from the store.

PN: Close to Genesee?

NS: Right across the Gulch (the Creek). There was a bridge across the Gulch, a wooden bridge. And so he invited the kids in Youngstown, a whole group of us, to come watch television one night. So we all came, and of course they didn’t have a very long time that they were broadcasting, it was very short, only two hours a day or something like that. So they started out with the Star Spangled Banner. So he had us all stand at attention during the Star Spangled Banner. And then we sat down and got to watch television, and I forget, it was probably “Howdy Doody” or something. But that was the first television set in Youngstown. It was a big deal. Then one thing that they did was they had women’s groups. Most women were housewives. Some of them worked, but before that, most of them didn’t; they were housewives. So this is my mom’s women’s group. (Showing picture) This is my mom here. They were a sewing group. Supposedly. But I remember as a kid they were talking, all the time. And how they could ever understand what was going on because they were all talking.

PN: So she was the one in the front here in the front row…

NS: That’s my mom right here (pointing to a different woman).

PN: Oh, that’s her, third one along in the back row, from the left.

NS: So it was a sewing group, but it was kind of like a hen group, I thought. So you are welcome to take copies of any of these pictures.

[discussion of photos]

NS: (Showing photos) This is something that my brother saved up for several years. This is a Schwinn Knee Action bike. This was the cat’s meow.

PN: Was the knee action the brake?

NS: No, the knee action was the spring right here, so when you went over a bump it was like a bump absorber. It was the cat’s meow for then. And we’d ride double. What we’d do is we’d get on the top of Avalon Way, you know where the top of the hill is, and we could coast all the way down Harbor Avenue to where we could fish for cod. And we’d bring home cod. We’d go there early enough that the tide would be down and we could get pile worms, and we’d use that for bait. So we’d catch cod, usually rock cod, and we’d bring it home and have it for dinner.

PN: And was this on the river or on the bay?

NS: On Elliott Bay. Actually I wish I could have brought that other picture because you could have seen the size of those salmon. There were a lot of salmon.

PN: That would have been great. Well if you find it…Do you remember teachers at school, any teachers that were significant to you?

NS: No, honestly it was so long ago I don’t remember. They were very nice. It was hard to tell age then but I thought they were very old but I’m sure they were quite young. One thing I’m doing… of course, we have eleven grandchildren and six children, three boys and three girls. Well, Joan had the children. I don’t know what credit I have in it but anyway… So, one thing is, I have some nice memories of my youth, so I’m building a train set of Youngstown.

PN: Are you really?

NS: It’s not… because I don’t have the room to really do it authentically, but it has the places that are involved. And of course this is a German train so it is huge. And one thing about kids and

trains is when you use the HO gauge they come off the tracks, but these big LGB trains are huge and kids can load stuff in them and do everything. So this is Youngstown (showing photo), my dad’s store is here. This is a typical house of the time; I’ve constructed it that way. The mill that was out here on the flats was Nettleton’s cedar mill. So I’ve built the mill and the head saw and welded the carriages so it actually cuts wood; it works like a saw mill. And the mill originally, the steel mill was an open hearth mill. And it used coke; coke was one of the things they used in the blast furnace when they were making the pig iron before they made the steel. So that came from the coal mines which were in the Kent-Langley area, and they were mined by Croatians, by Slovaks a lot of them. So in the summer we would go, and one of the mines was Morris Brothers Mining Company. And I built the mine, and it actually has a shaft and bucket lift. Here’s a head saw, and a carriage, it carries the log across the saw mill. Here’s Nettleton’s mill. As kids we used to, we weren’t supposed to but we went out on the log boom. Because they brought all the logs in by water. They were all right here off of Youngstown. In those times the logs were huge, so it was a pretty good jump from one to another. Then the watchman would come out and chase us. It was a big deal. Barney Sloan’s cabin. This is Barney Sloan, Civil War veteran. He’s got a Sharp’s rifle, here’s his pipe of tobacco, Polly in her cage. You can see a little detail. In those days, he had a pump. I used to bring him kerosene because he cooked on a kerosene pump, kerosene stove, but he also had a heating stove. And in those days they didn’t have formica so the countertops were galvanized sheet metal.

PN: And he built this all himself, right?

NS: Originally, he did. There is the log cabin. And Smith Brothers dairy was the one that delivered the milk, so I made a little farm for them. Here’s the pig sty. And I have vehicles of that era that I’ve built authentically with the right names on them. Smith Brothers Dairy.

PN: Wasn’t there a flour mill here?

NS: Stone Burr Flour Mill. And actually there was a chemical plant, which I helped build. It was Colonial Chemical Company, just up from the steel mill; it was a really short walk, maybe 250 feet. A bunch of guys after the war, GIs, decided to build it. One of the fathers was a chemist. So they decided to build a chemical plant. And they didn’t know a thing about building. And they were unloading equipment and lumber. And as a kid, I hung around everything. So I was hanging around down there and they were putting together the table saw. Well, they couldn’t figure out how to make it run, but I could see how it was supposed to go together so I went and put it together. So they hired me as the go-fer kid. So I hung around there, and I eventually got to

hammer some nails. And the son went back into the Army and became a colonel and when I got to go into the Army he was my commanding officer. So it was kind of connected.

And the Stone Burr Mill was next door, and it was originally a warehouse. And they converted it into the mill. That happened later, after the chemical plant. It was a ratty old warehouse, I remember the guy who owned it. But they converted to the Stone Burr Flour Mill that you see in the supermarkets. It is a specialty flour.

PN: Yeah, right, they still sell it.

NS: So that’s where they were.

PN: There was a cooling pond there, on the other side of Dakota

NS: Yeah exactly; it got its water from Longfellow Creek. And it was fenced, but you could climb over the fence.

PN: Was it warm water? Was it scary?

NS: It was warm and dark. Black.

PN: Probably all kinds of stuff grew in there.

NS: But for kids, water is water. Longfellow Creek was of course our play area, and we had a swing across the Gulch, over the Creek. And unless you were a newcomer kid, you could not get enough of a run on it, and you could wind up not making it to the other side, so then you wouldn’t make it to the other side and you knew you were going to have to drop into the creek. So it was always a big deal when a greenhorn was going to do it because you knew he was going to have to drop into the creek. So you could hike up that to the golf course, and finding golf balls was a big deal. One of the kids in our group, he had a white dog, a terrier of some kind, and he would pick up the balls while they were still rolling. ‘Cause you know, on one side of the Gulch was the tee, and they’d have to go down in the Gulch to get up to the green so while they were in the Gulch, anything could happen.

PN: A lot of people didn’t score too well in those games…

NS: No, they wondered where their ball went.

PN: Were you working a lot in the store? NS: Oh yeah. It was a really great place for a kid to grow up because there was something going on all the time. It was the meeting place for everybody. You got to learn to talk to adults. And I got to work with adults very early, especially at the chemical plant. But I went to work in warehouses really early when I was just out of grade school. I was big so they never asked you how old you were. My first job, I went to a warehouse and it was a produce warehouse and this guy said, “Unload that freight car,” and it was full of 100 pound sacks of potatoes. And I unloaded the whole car and he said, “Come back tomorrow.” And that was my whole hiring process.

PN: That was your test.

NS: But I made good money. So anyway, this is one of the places here which is the tavern, Geno Burritti’s Delridge Tavern (showing a model house on the train set).

PN: Oh, yeah, Geno Luchessini.

NS: No, Geno Burritti.

PN: Oh, so this is a different one.

NS: This is the original guy who owned it. I remember his name well.

PN: The guy we interviewed who eventually got the tavern was Geno Luchessini.

NS: The original one who had it was Geno Burritti. He came from Italy and his mother did also. But I remember she was really taken with my mom. And there was quite an age difference between my mom and my dad. I remember hearing in the store, I overheard this, she talked to my mother and she said, “You know if Senor Skalabrin should die, God forbid, then you marry my Geno.” She wanted her to marry her son. Anyway this will be the tavern on the corner, and this will be the general store. The freight area is in the back then the actual waiting room for the train is here. And then….

PN: How did you get your ice for the huge freezer?

NS: I have an ice truck [on the train set]. It came from Rainier Ice plant, which was right on Alaskan Way. It made ice for all the freighters and also the fishing boats that went to Alaska. And it delivered ice. So the ice man would come and it was a big deal for the kids because when he chipped blocks. They were 100 pound blocks and most people took 25 pound blocks, so he have to break then and chip them, and when he chipped them there were all these extra chips, so to suck on a chip was a big deal. So there was always a crowd of kids hanging around the back of the ice truck to get some chips of ice. The other thing we did was chew tar, too. Because they tarred the roads. You could chew it like gum.

PN: Eeew. I’m sure that was really healthy.

NS: Hey, we did stuff you wouldn’t believe.

PN: You wouldn’t think that would taste good.

NS: We didn’t wear shoes during the summer. Shoes were expensive so we went barefoot all summer. We got pretty tough feet at the end of it all. [Showing train set photos] This is the switch tower. And here is the coal mine. The shaft underneath it puts coal in the cars.

PN: Amazing.

NS: And this was the mail truck, a Model A mail truck. That was what we had that delivered mail.

PN: So how many people did you collect mail for? Was it that whole area from Avalon to Delridge?

NS: The post office part was really quite early before I was born. The library was there. And that was just for a short while; then we had a mobile library for a while, a truck or something. The polling place I remember very clearly.

PN: And there was just one machine, right? No wonder there was a line out the door!

NS: I think we did eventually get two machines. But it covered such a huge area. There was so much war time housing, a lot of people lived in the area that weren’t there before. Anyway it was a very interesting place to grow up in. A lot of things going on all the time.

Peder: I had a question about church. Where did the Italian and Croatian families go?

NS: They all went to Holy Rosary Church which was up on California.

Peder: So everyone did go up to the top of the hill.

NS: They went to Catholic church there. Of course the Salvation Army had a Sunday service. They had a Sunday service. So that was a church there. There was also an Evangelical church – Hadley was his name – across the street, across Dakota. He had a church in his home. And it was an evangelical church, Southern Baptist I think. I remember he was always passing out tracts to us kids, sayings out of the Bible that we should memorize.

PN: Tell me about this picture.

NS: That’s my dad when he was working as a laborer. And that’s down on the Sound, Elliott Bay. You see how little is there.

PN: Yeah, it looks like a wilderness behind him.

NS: Yes, that’s how it was. They had the Mosquito Fleet because people….to get around here originally they didn’t have roads, so basically people would take these small ferries. There were tons of companies, probably a hundred of them. They’d have a boat, and they’d act as a people carrier, and take people around the Sound to the different towns. And each town, the way that the real estate people worked it was if they wanted to develop an area into a town, they first had to build a pier for the Mosquito Fleet to land. So that’s the job my dad had, to go around with his dredger and his pile driver and build piers. In fact I looked up the census, 1909 census, and he is listed as being a resident of Irondale because at that time he was building the piers for Irondale. Irondale was a community up beyond Port Townsend that they had iron ore in the area, so they decided they were going to be a maker of pig iron and ship it down to San Francisco. But they had to have piers. So he was up there for more than a year, so he was marked in the census as being a resident of Irondale although his home was here in Youngstown.

PN: So when he had kids, did he stay here from then on?

NS: Oh, when he built the store, which was 1917, from then on he stayed here. Then of course we were born in Seattle. But like I say, it was a very close neighborhood, we knew everybody. A Seattle policeman lived across the street, Mackey, Vernon Mackey. A lot of times the kids would do what their parents did. So it was very often that they’d follow the father. So Vernon was my age and a friend of mine; he became a Seattle police officer. He’s retired now, but he would occasionally keep in touch. I know he came to my dad’s funeral, which was very nice.

PN: Oh, wow.

NS: My dad would hire kids, early on, before I was there to do the work. Monahan was one of the kids he hired. When he was working on war projects, he hired him to clerk in the store, so he had more time to spend on war projects. Clothing drives and stuff. It was just a really close neighborhood.

PN: Do you remember the other stores? The Boysen’s?

NS: There was one at the top of the hill, right on Avalon Way. It was not a very big store, but it was there. I can’t remember where the gas station was. I think it was on Delridge Way.

PN: Yeah, I think I have a picture of it in the pile here. A Richfield Station?

NS: Yeah. Fifteen cents a gallon, I remember that!

Peder: Is that the one that was in the same block as the Tavern?

PN: Yeah, that would have been it. It was a triangular lot.

NS: Yeah. This was here before West Seattle was West Seattle, before they had the Junction. This was the end of the street car line. So Youngstown predates the Junction. And a lot of the businesses that are now up there started in Youngstown. One of them was O’Neill the Plumber, the one that advertises on television? He started in Youngstown. There was an electrician too, I can’t remember his name.

PN: This one says plumbing supplies (looking at a King County photo on Youngstown Place)

NS: Sweeney, that’s it. Sweeney the Plumber.

PN: And that became O’Neill’s?

NS: Yeah. That’s the plumbing shop on Delridge

PN: There’s Martin’s Fuel.

NS: Yeah that was down on Spokane Street. They delivered oil. And of course coal and fuel. Coal was the thing. My dad had apartments, up above my store; these are apartments that he rented out. And they had a garage in the back, and the side of the garage had coal bins. Each apartment had a coal bin. And they would deliver coal. My uncle had a Model A. Really I dreamt about that car. That would be my hot rod. And he sold it for $50. I wasn’t old enough to drive yet, but I had plans for it.

PN: This is a little further down, this is probably beyond your turf, but this is at the corner of Hudson St. [showing photo of store] on Delridge.

NS: I don’t remember that one.

PN: It probably seemed like miles away at the time.

NS: Holman’s was the place we hung out. It had the ice cream counter in it. We had cherry cokes and Green Rivers there.

PN: Everybody remembers the Green River soda. I wanted to ask you about this one. You were probably too young but…this is called the Riverside Comrades Club. And I wondered if you had any clue what that place was.

NS: Some friends that we have that live close to us now, her mother was a friend of my mother, and she gave me a history of Riverside. I just got it a couple of weeks ago.

PN: Oh, wow, if you can give me a copy.

NS: Want me to send that over?

PN: Yeah.

NS: It was really funny. When I got done with the coal mine, I needed some coal. They don’t sell it anywhere. I finally looked in a book and sure enough, Morris Mining Company is still in existence. So I called them up and said, “I’m building a model of your original mine.” And it was in Durham, which doesn’t exist any more; it was off the Kent Langley Road, I did find it. He said “Fine, how many tons to you want?”

PN: And you said “Can I have a grocery bagful?”

NS: Then I found out, we had an old feed store, and sure enough they had some old sacks of coal. But the guy who used to be the fuel person for Port Orchard, Sacco, he used to deliver with horse and wagon, that’s how long ago he got started, Joe Sacco. He was in the Marine Corps at the time when the Marines were in Nicaragua, before the first World War. He was the one who had supplied Port Orchard with coal, so there were some sacks of his coal in the feed store.

PN: [Looking at photo] It looks like she’s got a fox fur stole on. It’s got the tails.

NS: Yes, that’s from when it was all right to wear furs. Now you have people hit you.

PN: Now they’ll throw ink on you. Do you remember strikes after the war? At the steel plant?

NS: Yeah.

PN: Do you remember people picketing?

NS: Yes, I remember that. It was open hearth in the 40s; then in the 50s it converted to the Basic Oxygen Process mill, which is an oxygen blasting mill. The pig iron and the scrap is put in, and the pig iron goes in hot and they don’t add any other heat; they just blow oxygen in. And that turns it into a really hot mess and it becomes steel. And that was the process they turned to in the 50s. And when they did that, they let a lot of people go; some of the people…originally it had a huge gallery. I remember going in. If you had somebody that was a neighbor who worked there they could take you in and show you during a shift. They had a huge gallery that ran along the top of the open hearth, and that’s where they shoveled in the calcium and magnesium and aluminum that they used as fluxes. So there were a long line of guys with flat bladed shovels along this open furnace. It was a really…it paid real well, but it was a real hard…

PN: A back-breaking job.

NS: But when they switched from the open hearth to this, I’m trying to remember the name, this retort of some kind that they made the steel in, it took less people to run the mill. So the union was upset about that. So there were some strikes at that time.

PN: And now it is one guy, with about eight computer screens in front of him, watching the rebar go down on all these automated conveyor belts.

NS: That all had to be done by hand. It was really quite a spectacular thing to see. The rod would come down the full length of these rollers, the guy at the end would catch it, and swing it around in a hot arc onto the rollers to go back in the other direction. And the thing did not collapse on him if he made that arc right. He’s standing in this hot arc. And the arc would go around him.

PN: Boy, you wouldn’t want to drop anything.

NS: No, it was amazing the things they did. Of course my dad was really a hard worker. The things that they had to do then. It was tough.

PN: [discussion of questions] A lot of my typical questions are around the school, but it seems like you don’t have a lot of memories of the school because you were so young.

NS: I think I fell in love with one of the teachers, I remember that.

PN: Do you remember what her name was?

NS: No. Very pretty. I thought I’d marry her when I got older.

PN: So your family, when did they move to doing the North Seattle store?

NS: High School. I was out of high school. 1952. Around that era.

Peder: When did the original store close?

NS: Pretty much then. I think when he sold the store they converted it to apartments.

PN: So it was never commercial after that.

NS: I don’t think it was a store after that.

PN: So when you were there it was just your apartment on the second floor.

NS: No actually we lived behind the store. Our apartment was here (pointing to south end of first floor) the two sets of windows. The upstairs was rental apartments.

PN: Who did you rent to? Single people?

NS: Workers, in the shipyard, mostly families. They didn’t like to rent to single people because most of them were alcoholics and had problems. They would trash the place. A lot of people during the… I think he charged $20 a month for rent. And that was still a godsend for people to have it that cheap. So we lived directly behind the store.

PN: So how did the neighborhood change during the time you were here?

NS: Well, because of the war. It brought in just tons of people. And it brought in, a lot of people from the South, Arkansas, that area. So there were a lot of people that were not of the three ethnic groups that were there originally. There were some problems. There was crime where there wasn’t before. I don’t remember any crime early on. During the war it did become a problem. White Center was even worse, I think they had a lot of crime in that area. But that was a change.

PN: Although you said that during the Depression there had been some desperation.

NS: There had been. But there wasn’t…there was violent crime during the war. During the Depression it was people stealing things to eat, basically. During the war it was violent things that went on. I think there were people-to-people things that went on, that hadn’t been before because it was a really tight neighborhood before, and it was a factory town because everybody worked at the mill mostly.

PN: Although you said the shipyard was another…

NS: Yes at the beginning of the war, the shipyard became a place to work also. And of course Boeing when it got going. But I don’t remember any Boeing workers, I really don’t. I think

basically the steel mill and the shipyards were it for our area. As kids, of course, we made our own fun. I know we made derby racers, what we used to call soapbox derby racers. We raced them…We didn’t do anything official, but anytime we found some wheels we were making something that could roll around. And we had hills to do it on. (1:28:20)

PN: Right, right.

NS: There were great hills to run down on. I remember when my mother first came here, the night she arrived they did a shivaree. And that’s not a custom in the old country, so she was scared to death. All the neighbors came out with pots and pans and they banged the pans together in the middle of the night.

PN: What is it called?

NS: It’s called a shivaree. It was on the wedding night. And they’d come and make this noise, make all kinds of racket to keep people up. But anyway she was scared to death; she thought she’d come to the Wild West and these were the wild Indians. It was a custom that she had never even heard about in the old country. And of course it was a custom here to do this shivaree thing on the wedding night.

PN: But they had their wedding in New York, didn’t they?

NS: When they came, the night that she came to Youngstown was the night they put this on.

PN: They considered that the wedding night.

NS: Well, we used to have big bonfires in the neighborhood. We had a big bonfire on Halloween night. And Halloween they did trick. It wasn’t just trick or treat. Everyone would trick. They would wax the windows and soap the windows, and there was all kinds of stuff that went on. There were some outhouses still; Barney Sloan had an outhouse, and they got tipped over. And generally just some things. And there was one house down the end of the street next to Dakota. The next one down?

Peder: Yancey?

NS: No, Adam St. There was an old house there. You know, all those old houses where the park is now? They were quite old houses. None of them were painted because no one could afford any paint. There was an old house there and there was an old widow who lived in it. Probably a really nice lady. But we thought as kids that she was a witch. And the thing was to run up to her porch and knock on the door and run away. The bad things kids do when they’re little--because they don’t have any sense at all. The stuff that we did.

PN: I don’t know if people would give you any treats if they knew what you were doing.

NS: Well they all came to the store for treats because they knew Dad had treats. Of course penny candy was a big deal. You could get some pretty good candy for a penny.

PN: Did they get really lean in terms of what you could sell because of the war?

NS: Yes, there wasn’t any chewing gum, and the toilet paper got to be so you wouldn’t believe, it was …I mean wrapping paper was soft compared to that, it was really bad. I remember there was no double bubble gum. That was a big deal. What else, during the war…everything was rationed. And one thing I had to do as a kid was do the ration stamps because everything was rationed.

PN: You had to mark what they bought.

NS: They brought in stamps, and for us to redeem the stamps, we had to turn them in. Because they had to be separated into little compartments, each kind of stamp. One was for meat, one was for this or that, you could only have so much, for each family. We had to keep records of that, and my job was to sort all these stamps that they brought into the right compartments and turn them in.

PN: And what happened when you turned them in? Somebody was doing what with them?

NS: I’m not sure exactly how the system worked. But I do still have so samples of them.

PN: That would be interesting to see.

NS: I don’t know how the system worked, but I know they did have to have a stamp, and you had to turn them in. As a little kid, when I was really little, I had an unfortunate incident with a candy case. Because it had a little sliding door that you could slide open. And I wasn’t more than

crawling or toddling. And Dad kept the over-the-counter drugs in there too, like aspirin. Mostly what he kept in there was Ex-Lax, which was a chocolate bar….

PN: Oh, no!

NS: I ate a whole bar of Ex Lax. I was one sick kid.

PN: That would be really serious.

NS: Yeah, I don’t think I could look at a chocolate bar for a long time. That was bad. Anyway, in those days the doctor came to the house. I remember that… what was his name, Dr. Young, I think.

Peder: Where was he situated?

NS: His office was off Delridge somewhere, it wasn’t too far away. He was upstairs. He came to the house. Of course that was after your mother had tried all the other remedies…

PN: I’m sure, because your mother had to pay out of pocket for it. Nobody’s going to do it unless it was really serious.

NS: If you had a chest cold, you got the most awful thing for a kid to go through; it was called a mustard plaster. It was yellow mustard, and they put it between two pieces of gauze and slapped it on your chest. And you were on fire! It was the most hideous thing.

PN: It was supposed to make you sweat?

NS: It was kind of a poultice thing to draw out supposedly the germs (1:34.02). And the other thing was garlic. Garlic cured everything. I had pneumonia once, and they tried the garlic cure for I don’t know how long before they called the doctor, and the doctor came to the house and that was before penicillin, so what they had was sulfa. It was something that came up during the early part of the war, actually the early to late 30s. So they treated it with sulfa. And if you had measles, the house got quarantined. They would quarantine the houses, put a sign up on the outside of the house that this house is quarantined.

PN: Was it the doctor that did that or the school nurse? Because I heard that she quarantined people.

NS: Well it could have been but I remember the doctor coming to the house.

PN: Do you know about the lawyer – did he serve the neighborhood or was he somebody that worked downtown and just happened to live here?

NS: I can picture him in my mind but I don’t know where he worked. I just know that he was a lawyer. He was the only one with a television set. It was a big deal and we all made friends with him quick. And he’d invite us kids in fairly often for the kids programs.

PN: Did you go to the community center very much for entertainment?

NS: No we did not. My folks…of course ethnic groups all had their own clubs. That pretty much could be what that was (referring to the Riverside Comrades’ Club).

PN: The sewing group you mean? Oh, you mean the Comrades Club.

NS: Ethnic groups. Italians had an Italian club, Croatians had a club that was called the Croatian Fraternal Union. My dad was the founder of it. He and another fellow founded it in 1909. So they had a clubhouse, it was up on Beacon Hill. And they had dances. And kids….I never saw a babysitter. We went every place they did. So if they were going to go to a dance, we went to the dance. And I remember as a little kid the fun we had was running between the legs and sliding. But they took the kids with them wherever they went. No babysitters.

PN: Were there a lot of Croatians on Beacon Hill, is that why the club house was there?

NS: They were up there. There was one of my really close ones, the Donavic’s, were up there; they were really close friends, we went there real often. I would say the biggest majority of them were in Riverside because they were fisherman, basically. And then out of Ballard, out of the fishing fleet in Ballard. And they brought purse seining to Puget Sound. Purse seining was not known here until the Croatians brought it. And that was their contribution to the fishing here was the purse seining.

PN: Which was basically net fishing, right?

NS: Right, you take a skiff and make a big circle, and then the net purses at the bottom, and then, now it’s a power block but then it was all done by hand, a huge block that sits on a heavy arm on the boat and they cinch that up until they get close enough to get the fish out. And that method is used around the world. But my cousins have a tuna boat, it is huge. It has a helicopter on it, and they fish tuna all around the world. They fish in Africa for a year, in the Tasman Sea off of Japan. We met them once…actually we missed them there. They were fishing in the Tasman Sea and we were in New Zealand, in a little town called Rowen that they were fishing out of. And some Croatians in that town were our hosts when we were there.

PN: So they are still doing it.

NS: Croatians are heavily into fishing around the world. They came to my dad’s 100th birthday when we had it here at the West Seattle Golf Course, at the hall there.

PN: Oh, did you do it there? Wow.

NS: Right. And the music was wonderful. They came from California, the tuna fishers. And so we had a lot of house guests. It was really a fun time.

PN: So he lived by Lincoln Park up until the time he moved in with you?

NS: Right. One day I just went over…because he was doing his gardening by Braille. He was a wonderful gardener. We would give him poinsettias every Christmas and they all stayed alive. He had a breakfast nook area completely surrounded by poinsettias. And he made his own compost and his tomatoes were…

END OF SIDE B

we used to take bushels of tomatoes home and our neighbors in Port Orchard would go nuts over them because they had such a wonderful taste. Fig trees, he had fig trees. He could grow anything.

JS: This is a nice picture of the store, maybe we could get a copy of that. I think it would be interesting to get a copy of this part too (a later photo from the 50s).

NS: OK

JS: See it shows here that somebody must have bought it in 1951.

NS: That’s about the right time.

JS: And then it sold again in 1955, then again in 1956.

NS: Yes, he used the money that came from that sale, because it was a time thing, to pay for the delicatessen.

JS: It must have been 1951 when they moved to Bothell.

PN: Oh, Bothell was where the north end store was?

NS: Bothell Way was where the market was. It wasn’t really in Bothell; it was on Bothell Way in Seattle.

PN: And that didn’t last very long?

NS: No, that was a bad situation. In fact he had to take a job as a janitor in the courthouse to make things come out. And we lived in …it must have been a half mile walk every night. He worked the night shift and he’d walk up the bus line home every night. He worked hard. Anyway he went to get the money for the delicatessen and he had to borrow money. And he was in his 60’s. Who was going to let a man in his 60’s borrow money with no collateral? And finally he went to, he knew Joshua Green, you know, Peoples National Bank, and he was in his 90’s. And even though my dad was in his 60’s he was a kid!

PN: A relative young ‘un!

NS: So he lent him the money to buy the delicatessen.

PN: Then they did a screaming business.

NS: They did a screaming business.

PN: Was it just your mom who cooked?

NS: Yup.

PN: Boy she must have been busy!

NS: She was a fantastic cook and she taught our girls to cook. But there were no recipes. It was always, “You mix the dough until it feels like this.”

PN: Right. A little bit of this, a little bit of that.

NS: And I was at wits end to figure out how we were going to duplicate these things because they were wonderful things. But her friend that I was telling you about, her friend was a girlfriend of my mother. She wrote a cookbook that had recipes that were very similar to my mom’s. We found it in Gig Harbor, so now at Christmas I make the strudel, the strudel, and we have this huge table and we stretch that dough so thin that you can read a newspaper through it.

PN: Wow.

NS: Yeah it’s a lot of fun.

PN: Are a lot of your family still around?

NS: My kids are all over the country, but they come for holidays. They’re in Salt Lake City, Boston, Texas, Spokane.

[Discussion of getting copies of photos]

END OF INTERVIEW