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TI: And was your brother still in Alaska with the FAA?

HM: No, no. He was back in Seattle. After I got thrown in the army, he didn't have enough money to pay, make the monthly payments. So he was forced to sell the property.

TI: Let's, let's talk about that just a little bit. So the 17 acres that you bought, that was going to be nearby the Anchorage Airport.

HM: Yeah.

TI: And, so both you and your brother were going to make the payments on the loan to keep it going, but then you went into the army, so your brother couldn't make the payments.

HM: No. He was, he was cut off with half the monthly increment that he needed. So he decided to sell it. And he sold it very quickly. I mean, I don't think he placed the right price on the market. But anyway, he sold it very quickly. And then at that time Boeing was starting to hire people, and --

TI: But to finish up the story, so he got a low price. But then the owner who bought it, what eventually happened to this property?

HM: Oh. Well, anyway he kept it for about three years. And he got twenty times the price he paid for the property.

TI: Because you and your brother were right. The airport...

HM: We were right.

TI: It was placed there.

HM: It was a strategic corner. It was the main intersection for the traffic flow through to the airport, as well as the town area for the Spenard city. And all our calculations were correct. It was just that it was an untimely period for me to have joined the U.S. Army.

TI: Well, the thing that, an observation is your brother was very, very bright and smart, but it seems when it comes to business situations he wasn't very good at that?

HM: No, no. He was good at business.

TI: Was he?

HM: But he, I think he got into a kind of a panic over it because for one thing, he felt maybe he might be recalled too because he was in, still in the Reserves because they have you in there for six years after your active duty is finished. So he felt maybe if they did call him up they would give him the short notice like I had, and then it would be complete chaos because he would be late on his payments, and he would have to give up the property, and they would really give him a slaughtering. So he decided that while things are still in a fairly passivated mood that he was going to sell the property, and that's what he did. And he sold the vehicles that we had up there. And then he went back to Seattle. And that solved one of the problems because I had one of my cars, the one I drove from Detroit to Seattle, in Seattle, and he just took over the car. And that's what made me free to buy the car in Baltimore. So everything turned out fairly well. It's just that we didn't take, take advantage of the opportunity we had. Had we been able to sell half the property and pay off a portion of the piece that we had, had he waited 'til summertime, I think he could have done that, and at least have half the property left.

TI: It's kind of interesting because you know really, thinking back to when you were in Seattle before the war and had to evacuate, and the quickness that you had to sell everything, with the store and the cars and everything, it's kind --

HM: It was panic sale.

TI: Right. It was panic sale. So having gone through that...

HM: And that might have been in my brother's mind at the time he sold the property because he sold it in about, let's see, about, let's see, I left in end of January, so he sold it in March, I believe. And the snow was still on the ground, and you can't see the property. It's hard to sell property when you can't see it right.

TI: Right. Yeah, it just reminded me of that, when you told me the story earlier about, during the evacuation, and the sort of, that panic sale. And when you said "panic sale," it reminded me of that.

HM: Well, at least he broke even with the thing. Well, we both had monies into the property. Well, that freed up a lot of capital for us, too. So it did help. I spent a lot of money when I was in the army. I was spending probably three times my salary on a regular basis because I, I had, I cashed in my civil service retirement money, which was a dumb thing to do. But they gave me option when I was in Fort Holabird. They sent me a letter, either maintain it and you have to sign this agreement for, I forgot what, there was some obligations attached to it because I was no longer working for civil service directly. And they didn't know when I was going to be back. So they gave me that option versus taking all the money out. So I took all the money out. And I was spending it very freely. [Laughs] I was having a good time.

<End Segment 4> - Copyright © 1999 Densho. All Rights Reserved.