MOSES LAKE — Miyo Koba’s yard and garden were her pride and joy. 

“I believe those geraniums that she had on the patio are approximately 30-plus years old,” said Miyo’s son, Rick Koba. “She would plant them, and then when the time came, she used to put them under the house (and later an enclosed patio). She would put them in there and nurture them all through the winter until it was time to dig the holes and put the geraniums back out front. And when she was able, she had the roses. She was very proud of her roses and her geraniums.” 

Moses Lake icon Miyo Koba passed away at the beginning of the year at the age of 101. She was still living independently in her own home, where she’d lived for more than 70 years, Rick said. At the age of 89, she had chased off an armed robber with a golf club, and at 98, she became the first person in Moses Lake honored with the key to the city. 

Miyo Konishi was born in Toppenish to a farm family; she told the Columbia Basin Herald just before her 100th birthday. The family spoke Japanese at home, she said, and the children learned English at school and came home and taught their parents. 

When she was in high school, the U.S. entered World War II, and Miyo and her family were carted off with thousands of other U.S. citizens of Japanese ancestry to an internment camp. 

“My folks had to give up the farm and move,” she said. “We moved into a church, a Buddhist church in Toppenish, and waited there till we were told to leave.” 

Miyo and her family spent the remainder of the war in a camp in Wyoming, where she worked at growing sugar beets and in a cannery, taught kindergarten and worked as a nurse’s aide. 

When the camp was closed, her sister and brother-in-law settled in Moses Lake. While she was visiting, she met Frank Koba, who had spent the war in a different internment camp. The two were married in Seattle the next year. They stayed a little while in Seattle, but that didn’t work out, she said, so they came back to make a go of things in Moses Lake. They bought a little store, renamed it Frank’s Market, and became a part of Moses Lake’s history. Frank ran the store, and Miyo raised three children. 

And a garden. 

“She enjoyed people,” he said. “She’d go shopping and when she’d been gone for three hours, I’d wonder, ‘Where the heck did she go?’ Well, she was down there chatting with everybody because everybody knew her. Dad was more visible, but Mom knew lots of people.” 

Frank passed away in 2008 and Rick took over the store with some help from Miyo. Her daughter, Marsha, passed away in 2014, and her son Doug lives in Arizona. 

“My mother didn’t particularly like to be in the store,” Rick said. “I don’t mean she hated the store, she just didn’t like being inside the building. She wanted to be outside digging holes.” 

She kept on working in her garden until she was 98, and then she reluctantly let go of it. Very reluctantly. 

“I don’t know how many lawn services we went through to make sure her yard was perfect,” he said. “… If she needed a special fertilizer for her yard, you couldn’t buy anything that was close, or that the chemists or whoever said was the same thing. It’s not the same thing. She needed that particular fertilizer and a couple of times I had to chase all over town.” 

Generations of children had bought their after-school candy at Frank’s Market, and some of those children, now grown with children and grandchildren of their own, would come by and help with taking Miyo to doctor’s appointments or with chores she had trouble doing. She was well-known and well-liked all her life, Rick said, and loved to talk about her favorite subject. 

“If anybody talked to her about her flowers, it just lit her up,” Rick said. “She just loved talking about that sort of stuff.”