<Begin Segment 26>

TI: Okay, so Ramsay, we're gonna start up again and, and I had talked about after your father's death you were the administrator for the estate, and one of the things that you had to do, your father had accumulated different properties that were probably, like the house was built for a large family of eight and now it was just your mother, and so it probably didn't make sense for her to be there by herself, plus it was filled, as you said earlier, with papers and artifacts and objects. So talk about what, what happened in terms of what you had to do.

RM: I met a cop not too long ago -- married another flight attendant friend of mine, beautiful lady -- big Hawaiian man and he was, of course, grew up as a juvenile delinquent as well, in the same neighborhood, and he remembers, "Oh, I used to burgle that house," he told me.

TI: Your house he used to burgle?

RM: Yep. He says, "You know, I'd go in there, I'd see money lyin' around all the time, all over the place." Told him, "Yeah, that's the way my father was. He left money lyin' around all over the place." In fact, after he died my mother picked out his favorite suit and we sent it off to Hosoi Mortuary, was doing the, doing the fixing up, and Mrs. Hosoi came over at the funeral and said, "Oh, Mrs. Mori, I need to see you. I need to see you." And my father had secreted -- because they both knew that was his favorite suit -- he had secreted like eight hundred dollars in cash in the suit. [Laughs] And Mrs. Hosoi brought it out to us. But of course, that's the kind of community we lived in.

TI: So your dad had lots of cash and it sounds like he had just lots of things all over, around the house.

RM: Oh, yeah. My brother Arthur and I were looking through one of the drawers, dresser drawers, and there were, like, twenty-five dollar gold pieces U.S., beautiful things. And he'd tell me in a typical lawyerly way, he'd say, "Why, Ramsay, I have been collecting coins since I was a child." He'd pick up the coin put it in his pocket. So family, when it comes to family, I mean, you see a gold piece like that, which is probably, well nowadays it's worth about a thousand four hundred dollars each, one gold piece, so I guess he was doin' the right thing for Arthur.

TI: Well, how about like things left over from his medical practice? What kind of things were left?

RM: My grandfather was one that left a lot of stuff and, of course, my father hadn't done anything with it, and so these, like I said, he's a navy, navy doctor, navy surgeon, in fact, so everything that he cut out of somebody as a surgeon he'd preserve it in a bottle, so when you went into his office he had these jars all lined up around the office, pickled organs and things. Even a baby, in stages, I think nine months' stages of babies that he had removed for one reason or another. And it must've been absolutely fearful going in that office. But all of that they put into mono'oki in the back, little shed in the back, and I got in there and I was cleaning that up and all of a sudden there'd be somebody's stomach or something like that, pickled. Sometimes the containers were broken, so it had that formalin smell. And the girls that worked at the office, the secretary and a nurse, a practical nurse, actually, actually buried quite a bit of it because it was difficult cleaning it up and, of course, with broken glass and, and they said they dug holes on the property and buried quite a bit of it, but there was still some left. So when I got in there, I was sittin' there all by myself, lookin' through the papers in there, like the magazine Lancet, which is a British magazine, a very well-known British magazine for medical, medical stuff, and of course they were very old ones, from way before the war, in the eighteen, I mean, the late 1800s, and there were piles of the Lancet stacked up in the corner. And then in a little cabinet, I opened it up and I found bottles of USP, heroin, hundred percent.

TI: So pharmaceutical grade...

RM: Ninety-nine point, yeah.

TI: Wow.

RM: And what he used to use that for, I find out later, is that he used to make cough syrup and he'd put a little bit of that in the cough syrup and of course it did wonders for a cough, and I imagine people from all over the countryside lined up to get that cough medicine. [Laughs] You could understand how, how good your cough medicine is if people are lining up to get it. And they had, it was on the inventory, it was current inventory, but they never collected it, so when I went out, down to the narcotics bureau and I actually gave it to the agent along with ampoules that indicated they had cocaine in it or whatever. The ampoules, of course, didn't amount to much, but bottles of heroin really woke him up. And he looked at me and he looked, looked at the heroin and he, he says, "Well, you're right. It's on the inventory." Nobody'd come back to collect it. So I'm tellin' him well, "Why is it such a surprise? It's out in the open." It was in the back storage room. I didn't tell him that, but, but he would say, "If you emptied these out in a container and you put milk sugar in 'em, maybe ten times the quantity of milk sugar, and you put it in a capsule, each capsule you could sell for about twenty dollars." And it began to occur to my how much worth I had of heroin in the back of my car for about six months before I finally turned it in. I could've got, had my throat for havin' that much in there, if anybody knew about it, and I realized, I finally realized what I'd been through. That kind of experience, yeah... I think I touched upon all of it.

<End Segment 26> - Copyright © 2011 Densho. All Rights Reserved.