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VY: Well, let's talk about life after the war and what it was like for your nursery business and your family. What was it like for you growing up in the nursery, and did you work in the nursery as you were growing up?

FN: Yeah, we all worked in the nursery, even if it was just very, very kind of menial work. Like in order to sell flowers, we would have to open up newspaper to wrap the flowers in, so that was a job that you do as a child, so everybody was participating. And I would say that there were three in our family that stayed in the business, and we were partners, my brother, and my sister Martha and myself. And I did go to school, and I did go on to take, study horticulture. I went to Berkeley for two years, and I transferred to UCLA where the horticulture department was, so I took all the basic courses like entomology and soils and plant nutrition. I was usually the only girl in the class, but the professors we had were, they really wanted me to stay in the business, so they encouraged me. Like our agricultural economics professor, he was really curious whether I would stay in the business or not.

VY: Why do you think that was?

FN: Because I was the only girl in the class, only woman in the class. And so they really encouraged us. And then my two horticulture professors were from Cornell, and they had both just gotten out of the armed services and gotten their PhDs, and they made it a point to connect with my father so that they would know what kind of person he was. And they were both encouraging, and so we would go on field trips with the class, and I'd be the only woman in the car, but we had a lot of fun. And I still see a few of my friends that I went to college with, we do see each other once in a while. My brother went to Ohio State, which was one of the leading horticulture universities. And in those days, there weren't too many people that went from California all the way to Ohio State. And at that time, things were still really hard for my father because he was just still building up the nursery. And so my brother used to go to school on the Greyhound bus. And you could take a whole half a trunk for free on the Greyhound bus, so he filled up his trunk and he would send it off, and then he would stay there, and then all during the time that he was at Ohio State, he worked in the greenhouses as a student to make income so that he could support himself partly. And then in the summertime, he would pack up his trunk and come all the way back again, so he did that.

VY: What about your sister? Did she also study horticulture?

FN: No, my sister was a nurse, so she went to UCSF and she studied nursing. But when we started our nursery, my mother had died when we were just forming our partnership, so she came home. And my sister Martha ran the packing shed, and she also took care of the books. So she took my mother's job.

VY: This was the same sister that went to school to become a nurse?

FN: Yes. Martha became a nurse but she... so we were the only nursery that had a regular licensed nurse. And she never went back into nursing, she stayed on the nursery until we closed the nursery.

<End Segment 14> - Copyright © 2019 Densho. All Rights Reserved.