<Begin Segment 13>

RP: And is the... what happened later to your father's nursery? You said he kind of retired from the business and your older brother ran it for a while. Is there still...

MN: No, it, from Sierra Madre again, a development forced us to move.

RP: Eminent domain?

MN: No, not imminent domain, but just residential development. And so we found some property out in Ontario, and we moved out there. And so then again the, the type of plants we're growing changed completely 'cause it was all, we didn't have any lath houses or anything in Ontario. So we just grew one, one juniper.

RP: That's all? One juniper?

MN: Yeah. Later on we added, we built a small, not a greenhouse, but a, you know, covered house. And we had some Rhapis Palms.

RP: Which type of palms?

MN: Rhapis Palms.

RP: Rhapis?

MN: I think they call 'em Rafus or Lady Palms. And it's an indoor plant. Yeah. And then eventually that business, you know, was getting so competitive and difficult, and not financially desirable. In fact, it was terrible. So, we finally folded up in the end of '88. Geez, twenty years already. Yeah. So we found, we found buyers for whatever stock we had and then we, for a while, we rented the land out. Fortunately we had bought the land so we owned it outright. But we rented it out and then later we were able to sell it. And... but one thing about my father, he came here with nothing. He owned all this stuff. Oh, he actually once owned 140 acres in Redondo Beach. Which is now, I don't know if it became the school or civic center or something. But that, because of the downturn in the nursery during the war years and right after the war years, piece by piece that got sold off to raise money. He, he had dreams of building a big cherry park there. He had planted a lot of cherry trees there.

RP: Redondo Beach?

MN: Right, right. It was a little bit inland, off of the, off of the main highway. But it was a hilly area and he had, he had planted a whole bunch of cherry trees there. I think I still have an old picture of that.

RP: Huh. That would have been before the war?

MN: Right. He had, he had bought it before the war. Yeah. I think the picture I have is from 1940 probably. But, it all got sold off piece by piece. So, like I say, he came here with nothing, he had all this money, he made all these trips to Japan. But then, you know, then he had his home in Altadena and then as they got older and we were in Ontario, we built, they built a small home on the nursery so that they could be, you know, where we could keep an eye on 'em. And eventually they died while living there, both of 'em in nursing homes at the end. And they had already passed on the property rights to the children. And he died the way he came, with no money. And, but, they say that's a good thing. They say it's not good to die with money. I've, I've heard some rich people say that, recently.

<End Segment 13> - Copyright © 2008 Manzanar National Historic Site and Densho. All Rights Reserved.