I was sitting in my car recently, waiting for a green light at Punahou and King streets. There’s a Subway sandwich shop on one corner, and I was trying to remember the name of the drive-in that was there before. Then I realized the area had several noteworthy stories my readers might like to hear about.
It was called Pee Wee Drive Inn, and I found it interesting because the second and third owners thought it was named for the original owner’s dog.
“No, that’s not correct,” founder Nobuo Watanabe told me. “I named it that because it was a small place.”
The second owner, George Dore Jr., remembers the founder having a dog named Chico. Some of my readers will remember Chico’s Pizza off Waialae and St. Louis Drive where City Mill is today.
Pee Wee Drive Inn opened around 1975 at 1602 S. King St. Today, like I said, it’s a Subway. Originally Subway was called Pete’s Super Submarines, and was founded by 17-year-old Fred DeLuca and a family friend, Dr. Peter Buck, in Bridgeport, Conn. When it opened in 1965, the average cost of a sub was between 49 and 69 cents. Today there are more than 37,000 locations around the world.
Across the street from Subway is Washington Middle School. My readers may be surprised to learn that it was the first junior high school on Oahu when it began in 1926. (I’ll leave it to my readers to look into the differences between junior high schools, middle schools and intermediate schools, if they so desire.)
Its original name was John A. Cummins Junior High School. John Adams Kuakini Cummins (1835-1913) had been the foreign affairs minister under King Kalakaua 50 years earlier. Cummins was half-Hawaiian and a great-grandfather to Mayor Neal Blaisdell.
Cummins had a 10-bedroom home on that corner. It had a large veranda and gazebo where musicians performed at lavish parties. Unfortunately, termites caused the home to be torn down, and new school construction began in 1926. It quickly found itself with more than a thousand boys and girls and was renamed Washington Junior High School.
The granddaughter of J.A. Cummins, Helene Cummins, was a teacher at the school in 1930. She said she was paid $120 a month (about $1,700 today), and that grew to $525 a month ($4,200 today) when she retired in 1960.
Helene Cummins says that bomb fragments fell on Washington Intermediate when Pearl Harbor was attacked, but no one was injured.
“We took care of service wives and children who were bombed out of their Pearl Harbor homes,” she said. “We helped set up cots, provided blankets and prepared meals for these frightened people. The families stayed three or four days until it was safe for them to return to their homes.”
On the makai-Ewa corner of Punahou and King streets is a Tesoro gas station. Tesoro means “treasure” in Spanish and Italian. It was founded in 1968.
On the mauka-Ewa corner is Punahou Auto Service, owned by Malcolm Ho. He told me his father, Koon Hoy Ho, bought it in 1947 from another who had owned it since the 1920s. Ho used to have three gas pumps on the property. “It was a Shell gas station, and we had a NAPA parts store.
“I remember when King Street was much smaller, maybe four lanes, and it was a two-way street,” Ho recalls. “A streetcar ran down it. Across the street where Tesoro is was once a photo shop, a soda fountain and the Japanese Methodist Church. Children of gypsies who used to live around here accidentally set it on fire around 1972.”
Ho went to the Pawaa Theatre, next door, when he was younger. “If you were a member of the Mickey Mouse Club and it was your birthday, they gave you a cake,” he recalls.
“In the old days a Christmas parade would go down King Street each year. The people in the parade would throw candy to us.”
O’Reilly Auto Parts store is next to Punahou Auto Service. Charles O’Reilly and his family began it in Springfield, Mo., in 1957.
Before multiplexes changed the theater landscape, O’Reilly’s was the Cinerama Theatre.
The theater opened in 1928 as the Pawaa Theatre and had a Spanish-inspired interior. The Royal Hawaiian hotel and Honolulu Hale, which opened at about the same time, also had Spanish architecture. It was inspired, I believe, by Rudolph Valentino, the heartthrob actor who died in 1926. More on that another time.
The Pawaa Theatre was renovated in 1962 and renamed the Cinerama Theatre. Cinerama was a special, wide-screen format.
Pawaa is the old Hawaiian name for that area of town and means “canoe enclosure.” A hundred years ago the area was filled with taro, rice fields and banana patches.
Washington Middle School, Punahou Auto Service and the Cinerama Theatre all go back to the late 1920s. To put that in perspective, that’s when Aloha Tower was completed, Honolulu Stadium and the Natatorium opened, and the Ala Wai Canal was finished. KC Drive Inn, Hawaii’s first, opened in Waikiki in that era.
Outside Hawaii, in the late 1920s Charles Lindbergh flew solo across the Atlantic, penicillin was discovered and Mighty Mouse made his debut.
So next time you pass Punahou and King streets, try to look past the current face of Honolulu and see how it was 50 to 100 years ago.
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.
