By Victor Greto
Ken Rogers is the kind of guy who won’t be offended if you joke about his name and ask him to sing Ruby.
Or, if after you see his distinct Korean features and note his shirt and tie, you assume he’s a doctor.
Rogers, 47, won’t even get mad if you call him a banana: yellow on the outside, white on the inside.
The comments, he says, are both harmless and rare.
“I never observe it because I don’t look for it,” he says. “I don’t think I was treated badly in my life. I get comments: called a banana, that I act white.” He shrugs. “But that’s how I grew up: white.”
Rogers was born in Seoul, South Korea in 1953, the last year of the war, lived with his grandparents there for six years, but was adopted by American educators in Michigan. After his adoption, he says, he quickly forgot Korean and learned English in three months, just before he started the first grade.
“I had a middle class American life,” Rogers says. “I thought I was white. I wasn’t raised around other Asians or minorities. Only every once in a while someone would point that out.”
At more than six feet tall, he became a basketball player in high school, and an excellent swimmer. So much so that he earned a scholarship in swimming to Arizona State.
That’s where he met his future wife, Mindy Jaffe.
Mindy, born in Scotch Plains, N.J., to a Jewish father and an Irish-Scottish-French-Dutch Catholic mother, had an “idyllic childhood,” but “my mom’s family resented her relationship with my dad. I grew up with this open-minded tolerance, both religious and racial.”
Which explains why, she says, when she fell in love with Ken Rogers, “his race never crossed my mind.”
It was an attitude that had developed within her throughout her teen years.
“Sometimes I felt when I was a kid dating Jewish kids, I wasn’t Jewish enough, or if I dated Christian kids, I wasn’t Catholic enough.”
It may also be because, “Everyone always thought I was a Native American or had some Asian in me.”
“We hit it off so well,” Rogers says. “We both had strong families, educated roots, upper middle class backgrounds.”
They’ve been married 24 years and have three children, Margaret, 19, Kimberly, 13, and Katie, 6.
Rogers, a commercial real estate investor, and Mindy, an interior designer, recently moved to Boca Raton from New Jersey with their two youngest children; their oldest is attending school in New Jersey.
“I understand people who feel they need to do it, but I have no desire to know my roots,” he says. “I easily assimilate. It’s how I adjust.”
He adjusted so well he converted to Judaism, which went a long way toward Mindy’s father accepting him.
“He can’t speak Korean but he can recite Jewish prayers,” Mindy says.
Their biracial children always mark “white” on forms that ask about their race.
“All of their grandparents are white,” Ken says.
“Here’s how far removed the kids are from their Asian roots,” Mindy says. “Kate had a Chinese friend at school; she came home one day and said she wondered how her friend could see through her eyes.”
It was an easy question to answer. “We told her to look in the mirror.”
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When Adele Lee looks in the mirror, she sees more than her Chinese ancestry.
Born in Honolulu 75 years ago, she sees the eyes that saw the bombing of Pearl Harbor, the child who worked relentlessly throughout the war helping her mother at the lunchroom she owned, feeding the stevedores and soldiers stew and adobe chicken.
And she sees the jazz singer who worked up to four clubs a night for nearly three decades; the person who converted to Judaism a decade after marrying her husband, Ed Kaplan, in 1952. She’ll have been Ed’s wife for 50 years come St. Valentine’s Day.
She’s not a war bride, though that’s what people often assume, she says. Nor is she Ed’s maid, another assumption when she’s answered their door.
In 1949, Ed used to eat at a coffee shop on Geary Street in San Francisco while attending the Hastings Law School. That’s where and when he saw Adele for the first time. She had left Hawaii to go to school, but also to continue a career as a violinist and a vocalist.
Ed had left his “dysfunctional” Brooklyn home to go to school, after serving a couple of years in the Army as the war ended.
“She was there, and I flirted with her,” Ed says. “I had no money to tip her.”
But like many a college-poor successful suitor before him, he pursued her, watching her perform at a nightclub in Chinatown called Charlie Lo’s Forbidden City.
“I caught the act all the time,” Ed says. “I used to pick her up. We were together nearly two years in San Francisco.”
America was different then, Ed says. He and Adele were going out together when the Korean War started in June 1950.
“People went into Chinatown to eat but that was all,” Ed says. “This was a new experience for me. During our first date, I was aware that people were looking. But by the end of the night, I was too involved to care.”
But Ed ran out of money in San Francisco, and had to return to New York. He found work as an assistant headwaiter in Lakewood, N.J.
Adele happened to be traveling with a show troupe at the time. Now, with a job, Ed asked her to marry him.
“We were the forerunners of the interracial marriages,” Ed says proudly.
Their families’ reactions were muted, they say.
Adele says Hawaii was full of mixed marriages, so their union was nothing out of the ordinary. As for Ed’s family, “Dad was a liberal, so he didn’t want to say anything. Mom didn’t say anything because she never said anything.”
After they married, Adele continued the act, but now, “I had to learn Jewish numbers,” as she sang at local hotels. “I did it so well some thought I was Jewish in Oriental makeup.”
The had four children between 1952-1960.
“We never had a problem,” Ed says. “She was up to the task. She wasn’t reclusive. People might come to the door asking for Mrs. Kaplan, thinking she was the maid, but other than that …..”
“One of children came home one day,” Adele recalls, and asked her: “What am I? Jewish? Chinese? You’re half and half, I told him.”
After the last child graduated high school in 1978, they moved to Florida to retire.
“We’ve had a very full life,” Adele says happily.
Ed says the fact that his wife is Chinese “never hit me. It’s never been my problem. There are always good reasons to break up. But it’s all about dedication to each other.”