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BN: How did you meet your wife?

RM: Okay, so it was '58. My friend in San Francisco, Steve Ihara in San Francisco, he met -- my wife's name is Akiko, I just call her Aki -- her sister, Kimi, in San Francisco. She was working in San Francisco, so they met over there. And so when Steve knew that I was moving here, he told Kimi to have a party for, New Year party for us boys, because we were batching, our New Year's on that year when she comes home for the New Year's. And so when was that? '58, I guess it was. Anyway, so Kimi invited us for a New Year's Eve party at her sister's place, and so us boys, us single guys, we all went there, and we would dance and so forth. And so that's how I met her, because of my friend Steve up in San Francisco. He passed away already, too.

BN: And then when did you get married?

RM: '59.

BN: You're my parents' age.

RM: Oh, yeah? Oh.

BN: This would have been...

RM: Yeah, we got married in the Buddhist church in West L.A.

BN: Oh, okay. I live a block away from there.

RM: Is that right? [Laughs]

BN: I walk my dog past it every day.

RM: Oh, yeah.

BN: So sixty-three years then.

RM: Yeah. So when's your anniversary of your parents?

BN: I can't remember, September, I think. I can barely remember my own. [Laughs] And then regarding pharmacy, I mean, you stayed, you remained a pharmacist for decades, subsequently, right?

RM: Yeah.

BN: Something your father, you didn't even know what it was when your father recommended you pursue that. Did you come to enjoy it at a certain point?

RM: Oh, yeah.

BN: What did you like about it?

RM: Nice clean job, nice clean job, nice clean job, yeah. I was good in math and I was good in science, so I didn't have any trouble getting into even accounting, I could have done that. I would have been happy there, too, I think. In fact, that's what my cousin Eddie Moriguchi, when we were going to Cal, he was ahead of me in school. But he went three years into chemical engineering at Cal and he changed his major and he became a CPA eventually, but he changed his major. So I'm the first one in my family to graduate with a BS. But I got sidetracked again. So I was working in Van Nuys in a medical building, and I met a lot of movie stars there, even Esther Williams. And Bob Hope came through there, the Rifleman, Chuck Connors, Buddy Hackett, all kinds of people. Anyway, and then we, when we first got married, we stayed in an apartment in Van Nuys, but when the first born, first child was going to be born, we decided we'd better buy a house. So we bought a house a couple miles from here, still in Granada Hills, just below the dam there. In fact, we had to evacuate when we had that earthquake, first earthquake. But we moved there, bought the house there, and we stayed there until 1974. So we've been here since 1974.

<End Segment 21> - Copyright © 2022 Densho. All Rights Reserved.