Photo by Jill Freidberg
vivian phillips
My father arrived in Seattle as a Pullman Porter. His run was Minneapolis to Vancouver BC. And once they got settled here, he worked as a merchant seaman for a number of years and then went to work for the City of Seattle and was in the Department of Transportation, essentially. My mother was a seamstress, and she worked for a number of years in a really small little shop in Pioneer Square, which is the place that they made all of the leather jackets for motorcycle policeman. So she was a seamstress and a tailor. She made clothes, and then she got a real estate license. There are several houses in the neighborhood that my mom sold to families here. And my first job was at a dollar an hour, for a real estate company that my mom worked for called Space Realty. It was on the corner of 22nd and Jackson. I never felt like anyone was poor. We never felt like that.