Vladimir Selivanoff Oral History

The following is an excerpt from an Oral History of Vladimir Selivanoff, conducted by interviewer Gene Pugh on January 17, 1999. We thank Mr. Selivanoff for sharing his family memories with us.

My mom was Polish. My folks came over here, emigrated from Shanghai. Mother was sent to Vladivostok from Warsaw during the first War – to get here out of town basically. They sent her with some people on the Trans-Siberian Railroad. My dad was a Georgian with title, related to the czar. He had gone through college and was a civil engineer – he actually had three degrees. He was practicing as a civil engineer, surveying along the Trans-Siberian Railroad. The Bolsheviks were looking for anyone with title, anyone related in any way to the Czar or Russian dignitaries. A young boy came out and tipped off my dad, saying, “They’re looking for people with your background – the Bolsheviks.” So Pop jumped on a train and he ended up in Vladivostok also. Things weren’t going well. Mother was staying at the English embassy, and he met her there. So they were married and they went to China because he was working for a British company dredging on the Yangtze River. They had their first son there, and lost him a few years later in a fire, a Christmas tree fire – it just exploded. So they ran outside and Dad’s in shock and all that stuff. The child got pneumonia and died.

They were very wealthy in China, had a river boat and all that good stuff. They were very well-to-do. So they decided to get the Sam-Hill out of there and start a new life. So they came to Seattle. Seattle and San Francisco were the two points of entry and there was a large Russian community in San Francisco, and also Seattle. That’s how they came here. He knew no one here before they came. He had learned to speak English by studying the English-Russian dictionary. And his diction was perfect, absolutely perfect. You could not tell that he had an accent. But my mother did not do well with English and I think she got worse as she got older. She never did let go of the past. He accent was very definitely Slavic.

Pop got a job washing dishes, but he got fired because he was too slow. He took up with an old Scotsman named Stevenson, doing some drafting for him. Finally Stevenson said, “I’m sorry, I can’t pay you what you’re worth, but you can go to work for the Austin Company.”