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MN: But you still continued on.

BK: Hmm?

MN: You still continued on with trying to build this museum.

BK: Yeah.

MN: And were you ever worried that you weren't gonna be able to get community support and, and this might be a competition for funds? And how did you resolve that issue?

BK: We were so busy trying to build Merit up. We were, started branching, and so the only way you could grow is by locating branches, and so the first branch we got I think was in maybe Torrance. That became a very successful branch, then we went to Monterey Park, Monterey Park, then we went to, what was it, went to Orange County. Anyway, we had about four branches, and that brought in more savings. It also gave us more overhead, but, but what we thought was important was to get a good base of savers and start promoting so we could maybe either merge with someone and come out with a big organization. Being a small ethnic savings and loan is just, you have the odds against you, but eventually we sold out with a firm out of Orange County because we found out we can't grow anymore, and they took it over. They started to develop properties and he ran into problems, but anyway, we sold the property at First and Alameda to Al Taira and he kept it as a parking lot for a long time. We took Merit Savings and sold it to this outfit in Orange County and then dissolved the corporation and passed the proceeds out to the stockholders. That ended Merit Savings. Nobody made any big profit.

MN: But going back to the museum concept, while you're dealing with the Merit Savings you had a fundraiser in 1984 in your building, the 941 Third Street building. Do you remember that? It was called a "One Night Nightclub."

BK: Yeah.

MN: And can you share who came to that, who of weight came to that -- oh, let me see, was that the fundraiser or is that the one...

BK: Well, that was a...

MN: That was just a fundraiser.

BK: That was, yeah, we were trying to get people who had money to come to it, and so we sent out invitations to any, everyone that we could think of. Nancy headed it up and she prepared the visual presentation, and we got the Boy Scouts of the Nishi Hongwanji and the, the veterans' group, and we got some, I guess we got people to donate paint and brushes and painted up the old warehouse. We got Jun Okimoto to bring in his Astroturf and fake palm trees and created a nightclub scene, and Nancy made a film and hopefully we could entice some people with money to come to the dinner. And we had a steak dinner and Irv, was it Irv? Who was it? Can't think of his name (Chester Yamauchi). He was the person that put the dinner together.

MN: Chet?

BK: Huh?

MN: Chet?

BK: Oh, Chet. Chester. Yeah, Chester did, and we had first class steak, and he says to get the best steak possible and when it turned out that not many people showed up, all the volunteers filled the tables and ate the steak. [Laughs] And the only one who came in was a senator and his wife, Yolanda.

MN: And when you say the senator, you're talking about California State Senator Art Torres?

BK: Yeah, he was the only one that showed up.

MN: Of, of any weight, you're...

BK: Yeah, other than his wife, and then nobody else showed up. No council people, no supervisors, none of the people we invited. He was the only one. And Nancy, during the intermission, then showed the film that she had put together and Art Torres had never seen anything like that. He got all excited. He got up and went to the front, took over the mike and he says, "I never heard of anything like this." He says, "This is impossible. This is terrible." He says, "I'm going to go up to Sacramento and introduce the bill for one million dollars for this project. This is a very worthwhile project." And that's when we got all excited. We'd never been to Sacramento, but as soon as he left and we're talking about how we're gonna do it, we all decided that we're going to go up there and visit every office that we can. So we set up a date and we did go up there and talked to as many state representatives as we could, and as it turned out they were very cooperative. And Art Torres says that towards the end of the term the funds available are diminishing because the other regulators had requested funds, so he says, "Now it's down there, I can get you seven hundred and fifty thousand, not the one million, but if you want to wait 'til next year I think I can get the one million." And all of us says no, get the seven hundred fifty thousand now, and so he did and with the seven hundred and fifty thousand, the cooks, he was with the, the city redevelopment and he was in the Merit Savings building now, and he says the CRA will match the one million dollars if you will take over the, the Japanese American National Museum. Location would be the church. And we says okay, that would be great. We didn't know, we didn't realize what commitment we made because we had that side of, the north side of First Street was declared a, what do you call it, an area that, it's a renewal area.

MN: A historic district? Is it a historic district, became a historic district?

BK: Yeah, historic district. Tosh Terasawa contacted the Historic Society and they came and looked at all of the old buildings and says, "Yes, we declare this a historic district." And being a historic district, that also brought a lot of new requirements that you couldn't destroy anything. You had to preserve everything, so when we went ahead to do the building we had to remove everything, bring it down, redo it and then put it back up. We couldn't destroy anything, so even the light fixtures had to be preserved. Everything had to be preserved, and so it was a job that we had to hire a historic architect to do the job and he was very helpful, but it was very expensive for us to do that. The most expensive part of it was the building was not seismically approved. It was not secure, so what we had to do was to drill holes in the wall to put iron down the wall across the, the ceiling, the roof to tighten up the building both ways. That was a very expensive process, but we had to do that and we had to preserve all the things that were in the building. We couldn't get rid of anything. It's still a preservation district for us, but it seemed to work out.

<End Segment 13> - Copyright © 2010 Densho. All Rights Reserved.