Produce with Appeal: The Story of Top Banana
Chapter Six: Eminent Domain and the Heart Attack
Story by Nicholas Reiner
Photo: Otto and Kathy's Retirement Home in Oregon
In 1988, the City of Buena Park claimed eminent domain and asked Top Banana to move from the Lincoln/Valley View location. Greta and Otto went to an attorney who specialized in eminent domain. The lawyer said the laws were intentionally blurry. Buena Park wanted to put a big Lucky store in that shopping center and, “You guys sell produce.” You can either sue them and win but you’ll have to close down until the lawsuit comes or you could move overnight and the city would give you “tit for tat.” If you had two phone lines, they’d give you two phone lines at the new location. If you had six tables, they’d pay for six tables. Greta and Otto didn’t want to lose the customers so they looked for a place in the surrounding area. The only space available within a five-mile radius was on Knott and Lincoln, but not precisely at the location I later worked at. It was in the corner of the same shopping center, behind a 24-Hour Fitness. It wasn’t the greatest spot, kind of hidden. After the move, the store lost a lot of customers. It was tough to find from the road and there were more than a few robberies.
The most memorable armed robbery happened the first year at the Knott/Lincoln corner location, in 1988. It was 3:00 p.m. on a weekday and the robber knew there’d be shift changes around that time. It was just Greta and another employee, a girl working the registers at the front of the store. The robber paid a kid to knock on the back door to ask a stupid question. Greta went to the back room to answer the door and realized right away something was wrong. She slammed the door and ran towards the front. Greta saw the face of the checker, scared stiff with a gun pointed at her, while she threw the money from the registers into the guy’s bag. Customers all around stared, or backed away, speechless. Greta ran to the back desk to call the police and the guy took the money and ran out. Greta had cleared bills and coins out of the drawers earlier in the day so the guy only took about $600. The employee was shaken enough to leave Top Banana altogether shortly after the incident. Break-ins at night were usually unsuccessful, because the safes were in the cement floor and the registers were open. Greta just hoped they wouldn’t break the windows.
Around the time of the eminent domain crisis and after the armed robbery, Otto had a heart attack—in the store. He said he was fine, that he was just going to see the doctor. The doctor said, “You’re having a heart attack—you have to go to the ER.” But he came back to Top Banana and told Greta and the others that the doctor had given him a clean bill of health. He told the crew, “Let’s go have pizza for lunch.” They went down to get pizza and shared a carafe of wine. He went home early and didn’t tell his wife, Kathy, about the heart attack symptoms. They had dinner. Later that night, Greta called Otto to give him the nightly order; every night at around one or two in the morning he went down to LA to get the next day’s orders. Kathy answered and said the hospital had just called. “He’s had a heart attack,” she told Greta. “I need to take him in right now. He didn’t tell us.”
Greta knows Otto didn’t tell anyone because he knew he’d be stuck in the hospital and he just wanted to have lunch with Top Banana and dinner with his wife. He didn’t know if he’d ever come back.
Everybody banded together at Anaheim Memorial Hospital. It was like a family, even the customers. Eric, who had left Top Banana to pursue architecture, came back to help with the orders and deliveries until Otto came back. It wasn’t looking good for Otto. The doctor in the ICU said, “Quite frankly, we were only trying to make him comfortable until he died, but the guy's not dying. We can't fix him and he doesn't die, so we're sending him to UC Irvine to see if they can do something there.” The people at UCI told the family, “We don’t know why he's still alive. He shouldn't be alive. We’re going to keep him comfortable and he’s gonna go. He’s not going to make it.” He kept on living, though, and they finally let him out, after three weeks at UCI. They said, “You can’t work, though. You can’t lift.” And so he rested for about a week, then came in to Top Banana one day and said, “Give me a case of lettuce, I’m gonna trim. I’m not dead yet! I can work if I’m not dead!” When his wife found out, that was it. She said, “we’ve got to get out of here. If you’re here, you’re gonna work.” They had always talked about retiring. So she and Otto packed up, sold the house, and moved to Oregon.
Otto was still everything to Top Banana, though. Greta and Eric and the other employees talked to him every day. He called in the morning and whoever closed called him at night. ‘We're closing now, Otto.’ ‘OK, remember to turn off the lights.’ They did that until the last day Top Banana was open. Even the workers who never knew him still called him and said ‘we're closing now.’ The tradition kept going because he Otto was all about Top Banana.
While in Oregon, Otto changed the ownership status of Top Banana from sole proprietor to corporation, allocating 60% ownership to Greta, 10% each to her sisters Nira and Kristin, 10% to Eric, and 10% to himself.
