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HH: When you finished high school, what did you do?

TM: Went to Berkeley. Graduated in '41.

HH: '41. And what did you study at Berkeley?

TM: Commerce.

HH: Commerce, but not agriculture.

TM: No. We knew how to grow the stuff. We always got screwed when we tried to sell the stuff. [Laughs]

HH: And so after you finished Berkeley, you went back and worked on the farm?

TM: Yes. I was farming when the evacuation happened.

HH: Okay. There were some, I think, circumstances that should be covered regarding evacuation and complications of closing the farm or moving on?

TM: Certainly it's not easy to shut down a farm. And we were told that unless we kept farming, we were committing sabotage. So we put our own money in, and were in the process of raising the crops. I evacuated June 13th. And cantaloupes, for instance, you start picking them July 4th, so we were pretty close to harvest. Not close to harvest, but at least we were getting towards that point when we evacuated. We also bought... do I want to talk a little bit about...

HH: Sure.

TM: We also bought all the eggplant plants from all of our neighboring Japanese farmers and planted 'em even to the day before I went to camp. And we had a Mexican that did the work of irrigating, cultivating and picking, packing. And my high school coach and Scoutmaster watched the Mexican. The eggplants were shipped to San Francisco, to LJ Hopkins company, with whom Father had had a long relationship. And then half the money Hopkins kept for us and half of it went to the Mexican family that was operating the farm. So we probably were the only, our eggplants probably were the only eggplants winding up in San Francisco market. So he got a good price for them. I actually have reports of what the eggplants sold for, I have it here in Medford Lees.

HH: It sounds like, the way you describe it, that arrangement worked out very well.

TM: Yeah. That particular arrangement worked out very well for us. In fact, it lifted the mortgage on the farm. Except that the rest of the farm, which was... see, we had some rented ground, too, so probably another fifty acres, which was in cantaloupes, and I think we had some garlic that year. But my coach, he said he didn't make any money. The year before, we sold cantaloupes for forty cents a crate and we'd pick 'em. I know that he got over four dollars for the cantaloupes, and he still told me he didn't make any money. Anyhow, that part of it, gone. But the one part that worked was the eggplants.

HH: Did you have a reasonable amount of time close up the farm? Even though you had to plant eggplants with a day left, but did they give you a good chunk of time to close up?

TM: No, you had one week.

HH: One week.

TM: Yeah. But before that, why, we were making plans. In fact, I helped Livingston, the grapes and the people that belonged to the Livingston Co-op, Kumiai, I helped them set up their setup so that a California land bank person was hired to run all the Livingston farms.

<End Segment 2> - Copyright © 1994 JACL Philadelphia. All Rights Reserved.