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TI: So I'm curious, when you go downtown Seattle as a kid, you said you were a downtown person, what did you do downtown?

MA: Well, I worked at my dad's from the time I was really young, and I knew all the stores, of course, and the people that owned, there's a small market down on Fourth between Pike and Pine is where he eventually had his final business, and it was a flower shop, fresh flower shop, and it was called the Queen City Market -- and the people that owned the fruit and produce were Japanese. I don't remember their names, though. And they, of course, left when the internments time.

TI: And so when you say the Japanese owned the produce, so back then, it's so different than the supermarkets today, but, so you would have the Queen City Market, was the produce inside the store or was it next door?

MA: It was right in front, the front part of the market, and there were two butchers, one here and then Manning's was here, and then my dad's flower shop, and then another butcher, a deli, a fish market, and in back it was Piggly Wiggly, was a kind of a supermarket kind of place. But that was a small market, and it was a great market, really great market. And Manning's was just so popular. That was kind of my hangout for goods to eat. And so I worked for Dad, and I was there throughout, golly, until I was a big girl, and I used to love to send customers to Sullivan's and Rosea Brothers, who were the big shops, and ours was a market shop. And whenever they knew that their person, customer couldn't afford, they'd send 'em down to Papa. And Papa was really cute. He'd sit out in front of the store, in front of the market, on the street, under the lamppost, on an orange box, and have his gardenias with a sign and him calling, "Ten cents, gardenias," and so on, so forth. He was... I guess I'm going back to him more than me, but I used to go with him to the wholesale all the time, and there was another Japanese wholesaler and two, three Caucasian ones. And he had a style, considering he didn't know the language, nor how to read or write, but he'd go, the big guys would go to the wholesales in the morning and they would buy accordingly. six in the morning, four in the morning, whatever. He'd go at eight or nine in the morning, and by this time they had all their flowers back in a big icebox, great big one, and so they would greet him. He was a, he was a jokester, had a great personality, and, "Hi, Frenchie. How's Shorty?" I mean, when all that was over, now we get down to business. He would go down, go back to the, he had two salespeople that he liked to deal with at each of the places. He'd go back to the big box and he'd say, okay, and he wouldn't handpick. "Five hundred dollars, the whole box. Okay, send it down." And that's how he shopped. And so he was one of their favorites because they weren't left with a lot of stuff, too.

TI: But he was pretty savvy because they had already made their big sales, and these were kind of the leftovers and they wanted to just --

MA: Not, well, leftovers in the sense, yes, what was not taken, but it was all still quality, totally quality. And he would be able to sell accordingly because he got such a buy on everything that he would send the stuff, I mean, sell the stuff at great prices but total quality, and he gained a very good reputation on Fourth Avenue. Everybody knew Frenchie Shorty. And he was also funny, and he'd flirt with the ladies with two words that he knew in Swedish, fin flika, and stuff like that. He was real great. Now, my mother, she didn't go down, she went downtown a lot, but she went more or less not to work or anything. She just liked getting on the streetcars and getting downtown.

TI: Okay.

<End Segment 4> - Copyright © 2011 Densho. All Rights Reserved.