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Kids miss box car
racing track
A new track planned for Kunia
will not be ready until next year
as officials raise funds
Krystal Hovious, a budding box car enthusiast, says she misses the hills.
"There's one," said the 14-year-old recently, "where you sit down, brake and then when you're ready you let go of the brake. I was a little scared at first, but after the first try you kind of get the feel of it."
Hovious was one of dozens of kids disappointed this past summer when a nonprofit box car track in Pearl City was forced to shut down to make way for a Wal-Mart.
Work on a new track is set to start this month in Kunia, but a first phase won't be completed until early next year.
And officials say they still need more than $200,000 in donations to cover the new facility's construction and some of its maintenance.
"I've gotten a couple thousand calls in the five months that we've been closed ... from families that want to come out," said BC Cowling, the track's executive director. "Basically, we missed the 2004 racing season."
Cowling founded the American Box Car Racing International Race Track -- the only one of its kind in the United States -- in 1995 as a way to teach kids about physics, mechanics and safe driving. Track officials stressed driver etiquette lessons and let young volunteers build their own box cars.
It started in the parking lot of Tripler Army Medical Center and grew into its own site with a full-time breadth of programs that attracted kids, families and schools.
In June the track's organizers were told that the land they had leased in Pearl City had been sold to Wal-Mart, and were given six weeks to move out. They had to tear down their track, store their box cars and lay off their employees.
The year before, the track had been awarded a special lease from the city in which they would pay $1 a month for a 2-acre parcel next to the Kunia Park-and-Ride in return for providing the community with a unique educational program. But track officials were planning to relocate to the site once they had gotten enough money to build a new track, not before.
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The track's abrupt closure disappointed dozens of kids and their parents, who had planned to center their summer around the track. Pauline Worsham, the track's community resource specialist, said 40,000 children and their parents visited the track in 2003. Many participated in free after-school programs.
Hovious said she had to go to summer school because the track shut down. Before the course closed, her father had promised to enroll her and her 11-year-old sister in the group's driver education classes.
"I was really looking forward to it," she said. "I think it would have taught me about driver safety."
Cowling said parents and educators are attracted to the nonprofit because its main focus is driver safety for youths age 6 to 16. There are also science-oriented programs and volunteer opportunities for kids interested in building box cars, he said.
"Driving is a skill, like a lot of things," Cowling said. "We're teaching safety principles, safety rules of the world."
Kids like the track, he says, because it's fun.
Box cars only go about 10 mph on the track, Cowling said, but they feel faster because drivers are in small vehicles and low to the ground.
"We feel that we certainly are addressing a need in the community," Worsham said.
"There are not enough of these kinds of family-oriented programs."
Teacher's aide Colleen Carrington said she got hooked on box cars -- and eventually started working at the track -- after her daughter volunteered with the nonprofit.
"It's a really good program," she said. "It doesn't cost anything. The kids come in. They learn how to use tools. ... They learn how to obey rules."
Carrington added that her daughter can "fix anything in the house now" and was persuaded to go into engineering as a career after the University of Hawaii student volunteered at the track and learned to build box cars.
