The next time you drive by Ching's Store in Punalu'u, here's a story you can spin to the other people in the car. The story is about the man who founded the store, one of the most colorful, rugged individualists of Hawai'i. His name was Yan Quong Ching, but everybody called him Kung Kung.

The really amazing thing about Kung Kung was his versatility. He could cook both American and Chinese dishes and make home-brewed beer. Kung Kung repaired his own cars, overhauled the engines and put them back together again. As a carpenter, he built the family's first modern home, doing the masonry work using sand from the beach across the highway.

Listen to this. In the 1920s, he built the first radio in Punalu'u and picked up station KGU in Honolulu. People came from miles around to listen to the news. He kept two cows so the family would have milk and butter. The only enterprise in which he goofed was his great pigeon scheme. At its peak, Kung Kung kept 250 pigeons that he planned to sell. Then disaster. A bunch of mongoose got into his flock and the venture failed.

As a plumber, Kung Kung was very imaginative. For years, the family carried water from a mountain stream. One day, he watched county workers making test bores for a bridge. He decided to bore his own well. Kung Kung went to a blacksmith and had a drill built. With a lot of help from neighbors and sons, he drilled his well.

The son of a pioneer rice planter in Punalu'u, in 1898 Kung Kung began working in the ricefields at age 6, chasing ricebirds out of the paddies. He attended Hau'ula School until the fifth grade and eventually went to work at the Hawaiian Dredging Store at Pearl Harbor while the Dillinghams were building the first Pearl Harbor dry dock.

It collapsed and Kung Kung was out of a job. So in 1915, he bought a second-hand truck to haul rice and vegetables from the Windward side to Honolulu over the Pali, a three-hour trip to either City Mill (rice market) or Chun Hoon's (vegetable market).

No bridges in those days. The road was on the beach at He'eia. If the tide was in, you waited three hours. Fill up with water at Castle Junction on the Windward side and Morgan's Corner on the Honolulu side before crossing the Pali.

By 1918, Kung Kung had expanded into hauling the pineapples that Japanese truck farmers grew in Punalu'u Valley. He and his brother hauled the pineapples to a cannery at Kahalu'u in 3/4-ton Packard trucks. Farmers couldn't pay their trucking bills, so Kung Kung went into the taxi business with a six-passenger Packard, $1 one-way to Honolulu.

Next, in 1935, he opened a general store that everybody called Quong Store — now it's called Ching's at Punalu'u. In those days, it was the social and trading center of Punalu'u, open 16 hours a day, seven days a week. When the 1946 tsunami wrecked his store, he rebuilt it himself.

Reach Bob Krauss at 525-8073.