I asked John Cross, an executive of C. Brewer & Co., the sugar cane folks we bought our land from: “How old is that green shack on our property, the one located next to the old airstrip?”

He told me that the shack predated airplanes. In fact, the building was used to support mules that cultivated sugar cane in the old days. So this building is at least 55 years old. And best guess is that it’s been there for longer than 65 years. It was called Duggan’s Shack in the old days. But that’s another story.

A few months ago, we started thinking about what we could do with this old building. Trees and grass were threatening to cover the building completely and the roof had holes.

We didn’t know exactly what we would do with it, but we knew we had do something or we would lose a part of this land’s history.

First we thought about putting up a farm stand. Kimo decided to repair the most obvious problems, like holes in the roof, etc. We really liked the idea of doing a farm stand, since it was located right on the farm, but we worried there might not be enough customers to support the business. While we were thinking about it, Kimo made the necessary repairs and cleared the brush around the building.

About that time, my grandson Kapono and I started to participate in the Kino‘ole Street Farmers Market. We’ve been there for maybe six weeks now, and from that experience we both realized we didn’t think we could get enough customers to come to Duggan’s Shack. It’s off the highway and the area’s population is not large enough. Lose money.

But then the Alan Wong cookout came up and we offered to dig an imu and make kalua pig. Kimo decided to take that the opportunity to kalua enough so each of our employees could take home a container.

And right then we figured out what we can do with Duggan’s Shack in this new age. We will use it for company parties—where we will do an annual kalua, have fun and send everybody home with food. Perfect!