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BN: You mentioned that your grandfather had left also a son in Japan.

RM: Yeah.

BN: It would have been, I guess, her uncle.

RM: That's Mitsuyoshi. He was one years old when my grandfather left, and he was going to be adopted out to one of the families in the area. But he didn't want to be adopted, he wanted to be with his grandfather, I mean, his father. So I guess (...) he was already twenty or twenty-one years old. When he finally did come in Mountain View, and my mother was elated, because now she had an older brother, he was ten years older. Now he was the oldest, so she doesn't have to do all the hard work. But in Mountain View, there were five girls born, and my mother was the oldest, four other sisters were born in Mountain View.

BN: All girls?

RM: All girls. And then my grandfather would be, he would be the first one to buy a tractor. When the tractor became available, he would be the first one to buy a tractor so he could finish his land and then work on his neighbors' land and make extra money, and the same thing with the truck. When the trucks first came available, he would buy the truck and then haul his produce to market and haul his neighbor's produce to market. So he was always trying to be ahead, and he also knew that you can't grow the same vegetable that everybody else was growing because then the prices are very low, you can't make any money doing that, so he wanted to grow something different. So some friend gave him some seeds from straw flowers.

[Interruption]

RM: So some friend gave him the seeds for straw flowers, and he planted it. But because it's so hot in the San Jose area, the flowers would bloom out while they're still small, and he wanted it to get bigger. And so he moved to Pescadero where it's cool, it's on the coast, and so the flowers get much bigger. So he moved in 1925. In fact, he had a builder build his house. It took one year for this builder to build a house, because in the old days, we didn't have the Coast Road. You had to go through the mountains from San Mateo down to Half Moon Bay on the windy road though the mountains. In fact, the road was so narrow, sometimes you had to back up the truck to get around the curve. I used to always get seasick, carsick going down there. But that's how he built that house in Pescadero.

BN: Your mom, at that point, in '25 is...

RM: Yeah. My mother is high school, let's see, '12 to '25, but she went to high school in Pescadero. Two of her best friends were Italian Americans, Nisei Italian just like she was, Japanese American, and they were her best friends. She said they were known as the Three Musketeers.

<End Segment 4> - Copyright © 2022 Densho. All Rights Reserved.