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RP: I wanted to talk a little bit about the area that you grew up in, the Los Feliz area. Your, it's really amazing to me that your mom, shortly after her husband's death, decides to --

MN: Well, she, she was working on the flower farm, up there in what they call Sun Valley now, but there was like fifty acres and so they would plant flowers in one section and then the following year go to another section. And so then she decided that she wanted to open a retail flower shop. So then with the help of my uncle and everything, well, then she found this spot right up on Los Feliz here and she opened up a small flower shop.

RP: Did you also live at that...

MN: There was a house right on the property, and it used to be, like, all the property up there was like a big estate, estate of William Mead, and they didn't sell the place. You could rent it or lease it. And the, what they wanted was, they, we couldn't buy just part of the property. You had to buy either, they wanted everything. Well, they owned, they owned from, I'd say from Hillhurst, which comes into Los Feliz, all the way down to Western Avenue, all the north side of that.

RP: So did your mother actually purchase that, or just lease it?

MN: We leased it, and then she was able to buy one portion of the shop, but that was -- I mean of a lot -- but that wasn't enough to, that was a lot with a house on it and we lived there for a while, but then we lived in this other house right next to the shop.

RP: Tell us what the shop was like when you were growing up.

MN: It was open, and we had, like, flowers in buckets, real flowers, no artificial. And she stayed, she stayed open three hundred and sixty-five days. She would not close. She said, and New Year's Day -- New Year's Day is a big celebration for Japanese people, you know -- "No," she says, "If you close on New Year's Day," she says, "No," she says, "You'll go broke." She says, "You have to stay open to bring money in." So wherever, and then holidays, well, we used to go on picnics and things. My uncle would take us, but she would stay at that shop. And she'd open like eight in the morning sometimes, or earlier, 'til ten o'clock. But it was safe then. And we had, we didn't, we didn't really lock the place. We had these canvas awnings and we'd just roll 'em up, put 'em down. [Laughs] I mean, that's what, that's the way... and the shop was very nice. We had a lot of customers, a lot of customers. In this area, used to be a lot of Jewish people and English people and German people, but they were all hardworking, but a lot of 'em had, like one of the good customers we had was, he was president of Blue Diamond.

RP: Construction company?

MN: Yeah, the big, you know the rock consolidation? And his name was Van Rothenberg. Well, his wife used to come all the time, and then she also had lots of movie stars come in.

RP: Yeah, why don't you share a few names with us, people you remember seeing?

MN: Okay, we had, like, Mae West. I mean, she never got out of her car, but she would come, and always dressed up pretty and everything, and her chauffeur would, whatever she wanted, would take the flower and show her, and then she would purchase it or something. And then we had, like Olivia de Havilland. She lived right up here, just north of Los Feliz there near us. And then her sister, Joan Fontaine. And they never thought, we never had the, everybody chasing after them. [Laughs] No, it just, and they were very, very plain, honest people, and we had, like, people that were, that did cartoons for the newspaper. And we had, they came, and there was a Earl C. Anthony, he had the big radio station or something down here on Vermont or somewhere. He would come every day, I remember, and he would buy one mystery gardenia. And those gardenias were, apparently, at the time, a dollar, a dollar and a half each, and that's a lot of money. But that's what he would stop and buy every, yeah.

RP: Now, were most of the flowers that you sold from the flower farm that you were, that family...

MN: From the farm? Some were, and a lot of 'em were taken down to the flower market, and then whatever, to make up for or else, well, sometimes we grew flowers too up there in the back of the shop.

RP: In Los Feliz?

MN: In Los Feliz.

RP: What did you grow?

MN: We grew mostly sweet peas, we had carnations, and mums, those big fat mums. And my grandfather, he left the farm and then he came, stayed with my mom 'cause we had a second house in the back, and he was like the management and he took care of... and I think we had maybe one or two helpers that came in that I remember.

<End Segment 4> - Copyright &copy; 2011 Manzanar National Historic Site and Densho. All Rights Reserved.