Email Peter Sur at psur@hawaiitribune-herald.com.
By PETER SUR
Tribune-Herald staff writer
PAAUILO — When business partners Torao Saito and Pedro Eugenio took over a grocery store from the Theo. H. Davies sugar plantation in 1949, they might not have anticipated their Paauilo Store would still exist a dozen years into the 21st century.
Nor might they have guessed that, despite the end of the sugar industry, Saito’s son and grandchildren have taken over the business and expanded it, opening a Waimea location and operating a lunch wagon.
Yet, that’s what happened. And last Dec. 22, the family celebrated the opening of the new Paauilo Store, in a building adjacent to the place where they began.
The Paauilo Store — for a while known as Earl’s Snack Shop — has persisted beside Highway 19, near the 36-mile marker and in the same building as the post office. At one time the store had fresh meat. It had up to 22 employees and boasted of a steady clientele in this plantation town on the Hamakua coast. At another time, a quarter-century ago, the family had three lunch wagons.
Today the number of lunch wagons is down to one, and five employees. The regular customers still arrive in the morning, and Miriam Saito, the wife of Torao Saito’s son Earl, still works six days a week.
When Kamehameha Schools took over the lands of the bankrupt Hamakua Sugar Co., the trust became the owner of the Paauilo Store lease.
“They wanted to either renovate or tear down the building,” Miriam Saito said Wednesday. “They decided to tear it down,” and last Oct. 31 the original Paauilo Store closed its doors for the final time.
Kamehameha Schools tore down the building, which was deemed in poor shape, and offered the Saitos a five-year lease in the adjacent building, which once served as office space for Hamakua Sugar.
They accepted, the trust refurbished their new location, and by Nov. 25 the Paauilo Store was open. A grand opening celebration was held Dec. 22, on what would have been Earl Saito’s birthday.
Today it’s owned by brothers Mark Sr. and Miles Saito, the sons of Miriam and the late Earl Saito. Mark and Miles’ wives — Renee and Shawn — and their six children all have a hand in running the place.
Miriam Saito began helping out around 1959 and became a full-time worker a decade later.
Then the sugar industry declined, and with it fell the family stores and small towns that once hosted thousands of plantation workers. Most cars zip past the town, which appears as a small dot on the map between Honokaa and Laupahoehoe. Yet the Paauilo Store survives. A steady stream of customers comes in throughout the day.
“I tell you, we just held on,” Miriam Saito said. “The family just kept it together.”
And they’ve expanded.
The Waimea location is known as Earl’s Waimea.
“We run a lunch wagon, and we serve South Kohala,” for the construction workers and hotel employees, Mark Saito said. “Been doing that since 1987.”
“We serve the hotel workers, the golf course employees” and the tourists too.
As Miriam Saito said earlier: “Lots of changes.”
Email Peter Sur at psur@hawaiitribune-herald.com.