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MN: I'm gonna go back a little bit, before Irene and, and before Nancy was hired, and I want to ask you again about Minoru Yamasaki. You actually flew out to meet him, and this is even before there was a building. And what did you discuss?

BK: That's, that's when we bought the property from California Hardware. We had the property, so Joseph Ito was a board member. I didn't know that his nephew was Minoru Yamasaki. He's just, he says yeah, says, "Well, why don't you go talk to my nephew?" I said, "Who is he?" He says, "Minoru Yamasaki." I said yeah, I heard... so we made a date and I flew over to Detroit. He met me and picked me up at the airport. He's a very slight fellow. He's not even five foot one, short fellow, but what a brain. I mean, he's very creative. He picked me up at the airport and said, we're looking for my luggage, I couldn't find it, he said, "Well, I'll call back and we'll pick it up later." He says, "I'm gonna take you over to the house and, and you're gonna stay with me for two days and then I'll put you on the plane, go home. In the meantime, we'll go to the office." So he drove me to his home. He drove me into his garage and the doors open like this and he has cubicles up there, just like a store. He has whatever is up there one by one. It's like a store with a, it's like an exhibit. It's not messy. It's just perfect. It's sitting there, the whole garage is filled with the things up there, but I don't think it's a practical thing, but being an architect it's graphic and it's beautiful. Then he says, "Well, you're gonna stay with me for the two days and we'll go upstairs and meet my wife." So his house is two levels, upstairs is his living quarters and down below the garage and then two apartment like rooms and a swimming pool underground. And so I met his wife and we had coffee, and then he says, "Let's go to the office and meet part of the staff," so he drove me to his office and he had everybody come in and introduced me, and he says, "Now, would you tell 'em what, what you have in mind?" And so I explained the map I had of the property and what we thought we wanted to do for Merit Savings, and he said, "Okay, we'll leave this with the staff and tonight," he says "you're going with me to the golf course country club to eat dinner, and after that we'll come back and you're staying at my apartment below. And tomorrow we'll go to the office and we'll talk." And so we went back to his house and I says, "I still don't have my luggage." We called the airport and they can't locate my luggage, so we check in and I says, "Well, I don't have anything to change to." I says, "I just have what I have." He says, "There's a toothbrush and all that and you have a separate bathroom." He says, "I swim in the mornings," he says. There's a pool downstairs. He says, "Do you swim?" I say, "Yeah, I swim." But so he says, "Okay, I'll knock on your door in the morning." And so we went to the country club and I didn't have a jacket. My clothes didn't come in. He says, "But you have to wear a jacket to go to the country club." He says, "You can borrow one of mine," so I borrowed one of his. Like this. [Laughs] He's only five foot one and he's much smaller than I am, and so I go walking into the country club like this, and there's a lot of people there, but he, he just waves to them and we find a place to sit down and we're eating dinner and I'm goin'... [Laughs] Finally we finish and go back and it's kinda funny, but nobody bothered, nobody looks at you or anything. Everybody's busy. We go back, I gave him his jacket back. I says, oh, I don't, I just my have my sports shirt. He says, "I'll wake you up in the morning."

So went to sleep and I hear a knock in the morning and Minoru's there. He's got his bathrobe on; he's gonna go swimming. I says, "By the way," I says, "I don't have anything. Do you have extra swimming trunks?" He says, "No, don't worry." He starts walking towards the pool, takes off his bathrobe, he's naked. Doesn't have a stitch on. He's just, "I swim like this." I said, he says, "You could join me." So I says, "Well, I guess I will." So he jumps in and he goes swimming all across the pool. It's a big pool, indoor pool. So I jump in and I'm over here on this corner without a stitch on. [Laughs] So anyway, after the swimming lesson we went to his office. I'm still wearing my same clothes, and calling into the airport, they still haven't located my luggage. And we talked to the staff and after the staff meeting we're talking about the, what ideas might come about, and I don't think I spent more than all that day, I had an evening flight coming back, and so he was still checking with the airport and they finally located the, my luggage had gone to Hawaii and back, and so when we went to the airport, when we were checkin' out, I picked up my luggage and checked it back in. So I'm wearing the same stuff I came with. But I got to know Minoru Yamasaki pretty well and we were just laughing about it. He's, well, I said, "Minoru," I says, "I got to tell you, this has been very revealing experience. Not only have I come to your house to see what it looked like and met your wife, but swimming in the same pool with you has been a very unusual experience." He laughed. But I met him once. We had a, after that he developed the plan and Nancy has a copy of what he prepared. It was a simple plan with buildings on the fringe and a possible museum in the middle of the courtyard. That was his off the hand, off, more or less first crack at what he thought we could do. And then we had the feasibility study, which came up with a negative, that it couldn't happen in this environment. Money was not available. Banks weren't loaning money. It would be impossible to pull a deal together, so we just dropped it. So that was the end of the idea for Merit.

<End Segment 12> - Copyright © 2010 Densho. All Rights Reserved.