By Bob Krauss
Advertiser Columnist

This amazing story of how Ala Moana Center sprouted from wasteland might remain unrecorded if it wasn't for Junior Achievement, a laudable organization that encourages enterprise in young people.

On Tuesday, Junior Achievement will honor examples of American business ingenuity, and one of them is Donald Graham, who turned the back yard of Our Honolulu into the world's biggest shopping center at the time. Here is his unusual story:

You have to understand that the site of Ala Moana Center was not desirable real estate. People dumped their rubbish on the beach. It's near where Thalia Massie was allegedly raped, causing headlines and big headaches for Hawai'i.

Walter Dillingham picked up the whole kit and kaboodle about that time for $25,000, an area bounded by Ward Avenue on the 'ewa side, King Street on the mauka side, Kalakaua Avenue on the diamondhead side and the ocean on the makai side.

He sold some land and filled in the rest with coral from dredging the Ala Wai Canal and the Ala Wai Boat Harbor.

After World War II, his son, Lowell, got this shopping center idea after seeing one in Detroit. He hired Graham to make it work. People said he was crazy. Why drive a mile and a half from downtown Honolulu to shop? Dillingham said it was a central location that Honolulu would grow around.

Graham said he first had to find stores to lease the space. His surveys showed that a hole-in-the-wall clothier on King Street downtown was doing business as good as the big boys. His name was Bob Sato. He had a three-year lease. Offered 15 years, he signed up.

Shoe repairman Joe Pacific was next. Pacific said he'd love to move but his credit was lousy. "I owe the telephone company so much money they'll never put in a phone," he said. "I owe Hawaiian Electric. How can I ask them to install power?"

Graham promised him a turn-key store, telephone, electricity, everything installed but his cobbler's tools. Pacific accepted the deal. Three years later, he took a trip back to Italy and stopped in Germany to buy a Mercedes.

Longs Drug Store wanted in but couldn't wait for construction to be completed. That's why they have a store downtown. Sears, then at Beretania and Kalakaua, became the anchor store after Graham promised to build the new store to their specifications. When Sears moved, all the little stores around it also moved.

Graham went to Honolulu Rapid Transit and asked to have some buses routed into the new shopping center. HRT said, "No way, our buses run right by. That's good enough." Graham asked how much it cost to lease a bus. Answer: $25 an hour.

So Ala Moana Center started bus lines from Waikiki, downtown and Makiki into the center. By the third year, they were making money. HRT admitted that the bus line from Waikiki to Ala Moana Center was the most profitable in the system.