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This article was from a Hawthorne High School message board.

It’s about my Uncle Ben Nishinaka (Gwen & Jeri’s Dad!)

Name: Mike Backus () on Monday, March 5, 2001 at 14:49:42
E-Mail: michael@backusstudio.com
Class: '74
City and State: Eugene, OR
Message: On Sunday afternoon I was walking through our local mammoth warehouse market. It's one of those creepy coast to coast chains, the kind that sells everything from take and bake pizzas to snow tires. Since my wife only took me along as 'mule' to push the heaping cart of goods, my brain was dangerously unoccupied. I started thinking about how all of this discount commerce was affecting other businesses. I was just starting to visualize their new "Discount Computer Graphics Department" (MY business) when I remembered the little corner market in my old neighborhood in Hawthorne; "Ben's Market". Ben's Market was run by Ben Nishinaka (father of he Class of '74s own Gwen Nishinaka), and was always referred to simply as "Ben's". It was on the corner of 118th Street and Freeman . Ben's Market was a classic neighborhood corner market. Of course you could find a half gallon of milk, or a loaf of bread, or a dozen eggs or most of the essential "Darn, we're out of..." items. But the thing that made Ben's so special was Ben himself. Ben loved kids, and it showed. His store was stocked with kid treasures like balsa wood gliders, plastic model kits, paper kite kits, comic books, ice cream bars, sodas, Hostess pastries and candy of every description. He had the wax fake fingernails and big red lips (these could actually be chewed and tasted kinda like, well, wax with sugar in them), he had red and black vine licorice, the straws filled with flavored sugar powder, Bazooka bubble gum and an endless array of other candies for a penny. You NEVER saw pennies laying around on the sidewalk in the '60s! That was a decent piece of candy! If you wanted to splurge you could spend a nickel and get a 'log' of chewing gum or giant Tootsie Roll. My personal weaknesses were the comic books and models. Ben had some arrangement with the comic distributors which allowed him to get comics that had not sold during their actual newsstand time slot and so had gone back. Ben got these unsold 15c comics and sold them for a nickel. Superman, Batman, Spiderman, X Men, Fantastic Four, Wonder Woman, The Incredible Hulk, Captain America. My teachers at York Elementary School and at Hawthorne Intermediate always wondered where my brain was. I was watching the Hulk and the Thing battling it out on their desktop. What little attention span I had was preoccupied in fanciful carnage. I financed my acquisition of comics and models by skipping lunch and saving my lunch money. 35c a day was a lot of comics at a nickel per! Where things would get rough for me was when Ben would get in some elaborate plastic model kit that I had to have. One time he put up this huge WW2 battle kit that had soldiers and jeeps and tanks and other cool stuff. I nearly starved! I think I had to skip lunch for two weeks to save up for that model. Most of the models are gone now, too bulky and fragile to move. I do still have my comics, archived in plastic bags and carefully stored. Last time I checked most of my nickel investments were worth ten to twenty dollars each, with some valued as high as $200. Not a bad investment! I never heard where the Nishinakas moved to after Ben sold his little market. I like to think of him happily retired somewhere and surrounded by his grandchildren.