Paia General Store
and Drive-In closes

PAIA, Maui » A landmark store featuring a variety of goods from produce to fishing poles and chicken feed on the way to rural Hana in East Maui has closed its doors.

Ray and Bobbi Nakagawa shut down the Paia General Store and Paia Drive-In restaurant yesterday, ending 22 years of operating retail and food enterprises in the seaside town.

The family plans to keep a two-story structure toward the rear of the property built in 1990, but the one-story barn-red wooden building will be demolished because of its age, and eventually replaced with a commercial structure they plan to lease to other businesses.

The general store once included an automobile repair shop.

Its hamburger steak, dry mein and banana bread were among the big sellers each day and sold out quickly earlier this week, when residents found out about the closure.

"Everybody was trying to get their last fix," said Bobbi Nakagawa.

Nakagawa said she'll miss certain patrons who came by almost daily -- some to buy cigarettes or just a pack of gum and a soda, along with a little conversation.

"They like family, good fun to joke around," said customer Joe Kaniaupio.

Nakagawa said she's had a relationship with the store about as long as her marriage.

Her husband, Ray, began the business in 1982, six months before they were married.

The investment was small back then, and they grew with the community, expanding the building twice and learning the intricacies of running a store, she said.

But the nature of business has changed in Paia. The town's sugar mill closed in 2000, and there have been fewer blue-collar workers and residents, and more visitors and foreign windsurfers frequenting the town.

Island plate lunches have given way to restaurants and cafes serving cappuccino, salads and nouveau Mexican cuisine.

Paia, the hub of the alternative youth culture on Maui, has attracted some interesting groups of people as well, including what the town folks call "Jerry's kids," people who once traveled with the Grateful Dead and the late Jerry Garcia to various concert locations on the mainland and made a living selling folk art.

"They come and go in groups, and new groups come," Nakagawa said.

The Nakagawas will continue to work at their other businesses at the Haiku Grocery Store and the adjacent Kimura Saimin in rural Haiku.

She said the general store and restaurant in Paia was their first store and gave her flexible working hours to raise their daughter Billie, now 17.

"As a whole, in the last 22 years we've been fortunate," she said.