In the last month I’ve written about Aina Haina, the shopping center and the Ranch House. This week I thought I’d write about what was, at one time, called the Village Green.

The strip of land between Kalanianaole Highway and the Aina Haina Shopping Center, when it first opened in 1951, was a grassy park area some called the "Village Green." The Aina Haina Carnival was held there for many years.

In the 1960s, former Mayor Frank Fasi, then a member of the City Council, led a fight to keep it green and vacant. He lost.

In 1960, Swim School Hawaii, owned by Rollie Higgins, was on West Hind Drive and Kalanianaole Highway, where the Aina Haina Professional Building is now.

Longtime resident Alice Tucker says several of its teams and students won state championships. Swimming was very big back then, and many communities organized teams.

"My dad had been a teacher and head swimming coach at Punahou School from 1947 to 1959, but his dream was to build a multipurpose Olympic-size pool (50 meters was the standard) that could accommodate swimming lessons, swim team training and recreational swimming," Rocky Higgins recalls.

"I believe it was 6 feet deep in the middle and 3 1/2 feet deep at each end, so that he and his instructors could stand in and move with their students in the pool.

"I believe the pool construction was started in 1959 and opened in 1960. He closed up shop due to financial reasons in either 1968 or 1969.

"In the late afternoons he trained his very strong Aina Haina Swim Club made up of powerhouse female swimmers: my sister, Cleo, a perennial state swimming champion and an alternate for the 1964 Olympic team; Mary Jane Wood; Blair Kennedy; Leslie Gratwich; Christine Wyatt; Betty Ann Barnett; Bonnie Brown; and Kathy Kamo, to name just a few. 

"My dad was ahead of his time," Rocky Higgins says, "but he served the community and the state very well by helping a lot of people … manuahi (for free)."

When the Village Green was developed in the 1960s, one of the first tenants was the Aina Haina library. It opened its doors to the public on Oct. 18, 1962, with 8,000 books.

Besides the Kaimuki and Waikiki libraries, which opened in the 1940s and 1950s, it was only the third library east of the main branch downtown. Currently it has over 70,000 books and periodicals.

Robert Hind donated land to Holy Nativity Church, which took that name because, like Jesus, they started off in a barn or manger. The church actually began in one of the old buildings of the Hind-Clarke Dairy on the site that is now Aina Haina Elementary School.  Some jokingly called it St. Mary of the Dairy.

Maurice Sullivan owned the Foodland at the shopping center and lived nearby, on the ocean side of the highway.

Sully also brought McDonald’s to Hawaii, and the first one was at the Aina Haina Shopping Center in 1968. The 2,000-square-foot restaurant cost $65,000 to build. The second McDonald’s opened a year later in Palolo.

McDonald’s was founded by Dick and Maurice "Mac" McDonald in 1940 in San Bernardino, Calif. Ray Kroc franchised their idea worldwide.

Jack Schneider, who was in the employee leasing business, remembers the McDonald’s could not have golden arches, like many on the mainland have, because of Hawaii sign regulations. Instead, he recalls, it had a bush or hedge cut like a big "M."

Next to McDonald’s is a First Hawaiian Bank branch. Inside, they have hung many old photos of the area. When the branch opened, First Hawaiian was called the Bishop National Bank of Hawaii.

The Aina Haina Shopping Center had another "first." My older readers may remember Cornet stores. We had several of these five-and-dime stores in Hawaii. The first was in the Aina Haina Shopping Center.

Cornet began in Covina, Calif., in 1923. It was founded by Belgian-born merchant Joseph Cornet, who at one time owned 138 stores in nine states.

Cornet moved to Hawaii in 1956 and opened his first Hawaii store in the Aina Haina Shopping Center in 1957, where Chuck. E. Cheese would later be. Another store opened in Kaneohe in 1958, then Wahiawa, Waianae and Kailua. Weak sales caused the entire chain to close in the 1990s.

Chuck E. Cheese’s was a family entertainment center at the shopping center for many years. It had pizza, arcade games and an animatronic show.

Chuck E. Cheese, by the way, was an anthropomorphic mouse.

Atari founder Nolan Bushnell launched Chuck E. Cheese’s Pizza Time Theatre in San Jose, Calif., in 1977 with help from the Walt Disney Co. It has nearly 600 franchisees today. Recently the Aina Haina restaurant moved to City Square in Kalihi.

Across the street, makai from the Aina Haina Shopping Center is Calvary by the Sea Church. I was friends for many years with the former pastor of Calvary by the Sea Church, the Rev. Doug Olsen, who presided over my wedding.

I was surprised to find out the church was funded by Lutheran churches in southern Minnesota in 1954.

Stan and Doris Gjervik arrived in Honolulu that year and held their first service in temporary quarters in the M’s Ranch House banquet room. Forty-two attended, but the numbers climbed past 100 in a few months.

The church purchased 63,000 square feet of land for $60,000 on the makai side of Kalanianaole Highway, and erected its church in September 1955.

Bob Sigall, author of the “Companies We Keep” books, looks through his collection of old photos to tell stories each Friday of Hawaii people, places and companies. Email him at Sigall@yahoo.com.