By Bob Krauss
Advertiser Columnist

You get more for your money than two scoops rice from the Tsukenjo Lunch Wagon, at Queen Street and Ward Avenue, if Doris is at the counter. She's a walking encyclopedia of Kaka'ako. What she doesn't know, her mother does.

But what you'll hear doesn't get into the history books.

Doris' mother was Mitsuko Nakadomari, born March 13, 1921, on O'ahu. About the time she was ready to start school, her father fell in love with another woman and sent his family back to Japan so he could marry her, an acceptable solution in those days.

This added two children to the family while Mitsuko lived on a rice farm. She returned to Honolulu at age 17 in 1938 and went to work at Tuna Packers. Soon, however, she worked her way up to be a live-in maid for a haole woman. That's how she learned to cook haole food.

Like her mother, Mitsuko fell in love with a fisherman. Tatsu Tsukenjo was born in Okinawa and raised in Hilo. He was captain of a boat berthed at Kewalo Basin. She was 19, he was 20. They got married and settled in Kaka'ako, a regular United Nations. There was a Portuguese camp on Queen Street. Japanese lived more on Ko'ula Street.

But fishing wasn't very good and World War II came along. Neither of them spoke English. A neighbor told Mitsuko to burn all her pictures of Okinawa before the military police came around.

Tatsu went to the city maintenance yard looking for a job. Nobody could understand him and vice versa. Some men jumped into the back of a truck so he jumped in, too. They stopped at a road construction project. He pitched right in and worked so hard that the boss gave him a job.

He made enough money to build a Hawaiian sampan fishing boat with his brother-in-law. Tatsu named the boat after a new daughter but his daughters weren't allowed on board. He took his sons fishing but they got seasick.

Tatsu worked hard and drank hard. During bad times, Mitsuko worked at the Young laundry. Then she opened a saimin stand at 705 Cooke St. in the Lopez Building built in 1897. She rented from Mrs. Lopez, who had her office in the next room.

It wasn't long before she began serving plate lunches and added two lunchwagons to her empire. Now it takes a son and two daughters to run it. They've seen some hard times. When the city widened Cooke Street, the sale of plate lunches dropped from 250 to 100. Lillian Hong's knickknack shop next door went broke.

"It's hard to get people to come back," said Doris. She said they had to retire an original lunchwagon because they couldn't get parts for it. The one she drives is a 1979 model that belongs in a museum.

Reach Bob Krauss at 525-0873.