The following was written in March 2003 by Kit Gorohoff, the oldest son of Michael Innokentevich Gorohoff

I was an indifferent student, relying on my easily acquired reading skills, rather than studying. For some unexplainable reason, I had quickly learned to read in the first grade, at Horace Mann, while still living on 26th. As a result, I skipped the first half of the second grade. I continued to skate along at F. A. McDonald.

Our 4th grade homeroom teacher, Miss Suffle, was a tiny, ferocious lade, at least to our eyes, who ran a very taut ship. We were required to do a set of arithmetic problems every day, and plot our scores in ink (from the inkwell on my desk) on a personal graph, which we turned in. She warned us to be neat with our graphs, and to not blot them. Naturally, early on in the semester, I laid a big blot on the graph. Rather than confess, I stopped doing my problems, so as not to turn in my blotted graph. This went on for a while until she noticed and called my mother to come to school to discuss my apparent learning disability. After they extracted a confession from me, I began to do the problems and turn in my graph as required. Miss Suffle also ran the schoolboy safety patrol like a Marine drill instructor, requiring that our belts be washed weekly and the handles of our flags be regularly sanded. She obviously made an impression on me.

My favorite class was Reading, naturally. We took periodic reading comprehension tests, with the two top scorers being appointed to the prestigious position of library book checkers, one checking books out, the other in. I competed for these positions with Clarence McAllister, who ended up as our (now retired) family doctor. One of us generally finished first or second. This was the limit of my academic glory, but I graduated on to Hamilton Jr. High School nevertheless.

My father Mike’s job at Todd Shipyard changed, as Soviet freighters were being refitted at the shipyard, in supporting the Russian war effort. In addition to his carpentry, he did a lot of translating for the yard. He befriended some of the Russian sailors, bringing them home for dinner. One of these, Alexander Zvanski, chief engineer of one of the ships in the shipyard, grew to trust my father, and asked for his help in defecting, as he was fed up with Communism. I was too young to notice any hesitation on my parents’ part in getting involved. In any event, they helped him, and he stayed with us until the INS ruled on his application to stay. My mother Galya went with him to the hearings and translated. The Soviet consulate accused him of defecting as a pretext to cover up embezzlement of ship’s funds, among other things, but in the end he was granted asylum. He was eternally grateful to my parents, staying with us for a while longer. Among other skills he was a journeyman level machinist, and immediately found work, at a pay that amazed him. He moved to California, where he owned a number of businesses, married, and is still alive as of this writing (March 2003). For years we got an annual Easter card from him, with a check to buy flowers for my mother’s grave.

My father’s shipyard career was interrupted in July of 1945. My mother and brother Ken (11 years old) and I (13) were in Berkeley, visiting some of my mother’s best friends from Harbin, the Borzoff family. The father, Victor Nickolaevich, had been head of the Kommercheskaya Utchilishcha, and a close friend of my grandfather’s. During the visit, my mother got a call from Seattle (long distance calls were a big, traumatic thing in those days), that my father had had an industrial accident, and was in the hospital. We raced home, by bus, since travel was limited by the war. I remember my mother racing through bus terminals, with my brother and I in tow, yelling in her Russian-accented English, “Emergency, emergency!” When we got home, we found that my father had been knocked off scaffolding by a crane, had fallen about 30 feet or so, and was in a body cast. He had hit the sloping roof of a shed and landed in a pile of scrap metal, both of which cushioned his fall somewhat, and probably saved his life. He was cut up, and had several cracked vertebrae. He was in the body cast for six months or so, but fully recovered. I assume he received workman’s compensation, while my mother went to work at Skyway Luggage, as a seamstress. Skyway employed large numbers of Russians, which I suppose was how my mother found the job.

Once my father had recovered, the State paid his way to Mohler Barber College. Why barbering, I never knew. He worked hard at it, and graduated in 1947. He worked in barbershops around town, then struck out on his own, and opened a shop in Ballard. Waiting for customers, and income, to come in drove him crazy, and his accented English, plus his taciturn nature did not make a good fit with the job.

Fortunately, at least for the family finances, about this time the Cold War began to heat up, and Boeing began to recover from its postwar slump. He abandoned his barbering career, and went back to work at Boeing. Somehow he got a job as a wiring planner, laying out the miles of wire bundles that ran through the airplane. It involved reading blueprints, trouble shooting the wiring, and dealing with engineers, all of which he was able to do successfully. He stayed at Boeing until he retired in 1967. As a measure of his skill at his job, he was asked to delay his retirement by a year or so, which he did.

The Boeing machinists went on strike in 1948, with the strike lasting four months. Mike was a solid union man, and naturally stayed home, and walked the picket lines. The Teamsters tried to organize the machinists out from under the IAM and sent recruiters around to the strikers. When one showed up at our house, my dad ran next door to borrow our neighbor’s shotgun. Fortunately, the recruiter left before my dad returned.

My dad had very strong feelings about many things. His hatred for Communism topped the list. He was always disappointed that the US did not use its nuclear supremacy at the end of WWII to attack the Soviet Union. He had corresponded with his sisters during and after WWII. One sister, Nadezhda, ended up in Hamburg and managed to survive the war. We sent CARE packages to her, and he regularly corresponded with her.

The other sister, Musa, had married a German Jew, Willi Nathanson. They were able to escape from Germany to Switzerland. They managed to contact my dad, who was able to get visas for the Nathanson family, and made it possible for them to move to Seattle in 1938. Uncle Willi, as we knew him, started a grocery store in the Mt. Baker neighborhood, so he was able to arrive here with some assets. He and my aunt were very good to my brother and me, and the families socialized, since they lived in an apartment on 23rd and Union, just a few blocks from our home on 26th. Somewhere along the way, Aunt Musa said something to my dad to the effect that “Stalin wasn’t such a bad man.” As best I can remember, he never spoke to her or her family again. Nor did we. To this day, I have no idea what became of them.

Years later, when my wife Melanie and I were going to Germany via Hamburg, I asked my dad if he had a message for his other sister Nadezhda, in the event we could locate her. He thought about it for a few seconds, then said, “Ask her if Communism is so good, why doesn’t she go back to Russia?”