<Begin Segment 8>

HH: Some of the things that we didn't cover so far is the number of children you have. How many children do you have?

TM: Four.

HH: Four. And they, with respect to gender, are they all males, females?

TM: No. We had a boy and then we had a girl. I said, "Yuri, this is working pretty good." Said, "We need another boy," and so we had a girl, then we said, well, we can't have three girls in a row, and we did. Now that last one, she says, "I'm sure glad you didn't quit." [Laughs]

HH: Of your four children then, some of them were directly involved...

TM: Fred, we gave the business to Fred. And we gave him the major part of the real estate, and we gave one of the farms to the three girls. And our middle daughter, Kiyo, went to the University of California at Berkeley -- no, Davis, and got a master's in integrated pest management. So she's helping Fred to some extent. But, see, Fred also has an MBA. Kiyo has a master's, and Chiyo has an MBA from Columbia. That was a funny one, you know. She got a full scholarship to Columbia, and I've never been able to figure out why the heck she got a full scholarship to Columbia.

HH: Tak, you've lived a full life. Were there other things that you would want to have included in your life besides the things that you did include?

TM: Oh, yeah. I've had an interesting life. One of the changes we made in our harvesting process of apples, we shifted from field crates. At one time I had seventy thousand of those doggone, seventy thousand of those boxes. We bought 'em anywhere from seventy-five cents to a dollar and a half apiece, I guess. But we changed, the industry changed from field crate type harvesting and basket type harvesting to bulk bins. And when you got bulk bins, you can't pick those doggone things up, you got a thousand pounds of fruit in 'em. So then I went to the Ford dealership in Mount Holly. I knew they had a forklift there, so I went there to buy the thing, and the distributor was closing that place down. And he says, "How are you going to pay for this?" I said, "You deliver it, I'll give you a check." And then I said, "You're closing them down, how do I get parts now?" Said, "Well, tractor dealership's open." Eventually I owned a Ford tractor dealership.

HH: That's a way of solving the problem.

TM: Hmm?

HH: That's a way of...

TM: No. You know, that ran as a separate business altogether. And none of the kids seemed to be interested in it, so eventually I guess I was involved in that fifteen or twenty years, and I sold it. It's still operating down here on Route 70 at 73.

<End Segment 8> - Copyright © 1994 JACL Philadelphia. All Rights Reserved.