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HH: One of the things that I think needs to be talked about would be the way in which you developed your farm into what it is today. The phenomenal growth over a short period of time, can you describe how that went?

TM: Well, I tried vegetable farming and I worked so doggone hard that I lost my health. And I thought, you know, you can't run a small vegetable farm here like you did in California, because you can't keep people year-round. So from the statistics, I knew that the apple tree population was going down, of course, human population was going up. And if economics means anything, why, those two lines ought to cross. So I bought a apple farm in Cherry Hill, and I was able to buy it from Charlie Collins, another Quaker, because Mrs. Collins wanted Charlie to slow down a little bit. And here I was, I was wanting to do more. So we were able to purchase that farm, hundred and forty-four acres, I think I paid twenty-seven thousand something for it. And we argued about the last four hundred bucks, and actually when we went to sign the papers, Jonathan Powell of the Burlington County Trust said, I guess I had negotiated four percent interest. And he said, "No, no, no, that's not gonna happen." We're gonna charge whatever it was that he thought I ought to pay, and he probably was right. But I said, "I got a deal. If you're not going to do it, I'm not going to do it," and I started to walk out. We got the deal. [Laughs]

HH: So this was a farm that really had an orchard...

TM: Yeah, it had seventy acres of orchards on it.

HH: Apples?

TM: Yeah.

HH: And then so you didn't keep that?

TM: Well, I had that from 1946... let's see, '44, '45, '46, '47, '48. I bought it in '48, and I kept that thing until about '66, something like that. Portions of it. So from... I had the base to work from, and then I rented lots of ground. And I think have to add that I have to thank Yuri for her willingness to continue to live on a rambleshack house where the wind even blew through the house. Cooking on a kerosene stove, heating with potbelly stoves, while Hiroshi and people like him, they were buying new homes, and here I was buying tractors. And I'd buy a tractor and then I'd get extra cultivating capacity, so I'd go rent a piece of ground. Then I wouldn't have enough, so I'd buy another tractor, this went on for a while. Anyhow, that's part of the story.

HH: But then during that time, although you may have lived in a house, your farm kept growing.

TM: Oh, yeah, yeah. We built cold storages on the farm.

HH: Which is a story of its own. That's the major cold storage area facility in this area, isn't it?

TM: No, no. At that time, there was a large cold storage in Moorestown, but Charlie Collins owned half of it. There's a lot more story than that. But I had to build a small storage shed on the farm, otherwise you can't haul the stuff from there into town and back and forth. So we built one cold storage, eventually built another cold storage, and built the third cold storage. I got the steel out of a shoe store that was being torn down on Route 70, where 70 and 38 come together, well, I bought a shoe store and used the steel to build that cold storage. Then when we moved to Moorestown, I tore that building down and moved that steel again to build cold storage in Moorestown.

HH: So you own now three cold storage units?

TM: Well, now, the cold storages there in Cherry Hill, they're gone, because that's an industrial park now. But yeah, we have three cold storages over in Moorestown, they're really modern cold storages.

HH: The food that's in the cold storage isn't just your food, you bring in food for the whole area.

TM: No, no. Well, things have changed since I was farming full tilt. The time we were farming full tilt, we, I guess we used to store fifty, sixty thousand boxes of apples besides all we sold before storage season. And we used to grow about that many boxes of peaches. So we were a major fruit grower when I finally quit. But the reason why we quit, one of the reasons why we quit is because the tax laws changed in '48. That was the last year that you could change, you could collapse a small corporation and pay one capital gains tax, so we decided to do that. That's '48, huh? No, it can't be. '68. '68? Well, anyhow, I'm getting my dates correct here. But we had to, we decided to collapse the corporation and actually deed all the lands to our kids. So we had a thousand acres at our maximum, but we collapsed the corporation. I owed two million bucks, and in the collapsing process, I was gonna have to pay a million and three quarters in income tax, so I needed four million. So we sold two hundred acres. [Laughs]

HH: It takes a certain amount of vision to do the things that you've done. Is there any way of describing how or what process you used to develop the kind of vision that you had to do the things that you've accomplished in business and farming?

TM: Well, in the beginning, when we didn't have the orchards, or rather small orchards, we were still farming all kinds of vegetables. And we'd start the reasons with rhubarb and wind up with fall apples. And I was selling the stuff to the chain stores as much as I could. And in the middle of the season, I'd have three different groups harvesting three different crops and selling three different crops to the chain stores, and that gets to be a real hassle, and I realized that my health was starting to fail. So I conferred with Yuri and said, "I think we better settle on certain crops." We settled on apples and peaches because people can't get into that business readily, because it takes ten years for the apples and five, six years for peaches to mature.

HH: The trees.

TM: Yeah. So that's one of the reasons why we got into those principal crops. And the returns on those crops, when they hit, they really hit. I guess when we first bought the farm in Cherry Hill, we grew a lot of strawberries, I think we ought to back up to there. I was probably the largest strawberry grower in the state of New Jersey, and I supplied American stores consistently, A&P and Penn Fruit occasionally. And I got a reputation on the Philadelphia market as the best strawberry grower around. They still talk about it, even now. Because you run into some of these guys on the market and they'll say, "Yeah, Andy Lombardo used to talk about you." And Andy's kid, son is on the market now, I guess Andy's told him, Andy's still alive, I think.

<End Segment 7> - Copyright © 1994 JACL Philadelphia. All Rights Reserved.