The front of Kaya Fishing Supply is packed with weights, lures, nets, everything a fisherman might need. But it was a back room that intrigued me, shelves piled high and deep with a dust-coated stack of tattered boxes decades old.

Standing about three yards away, afraid to get close lest I end up buried in the heap, I asked Maurice "Pops" Kaya, third-generation owner of the downtown fishing supply store, "What’s in there? Do you need that stuff? Do you ever throw anything away?"

"No," said the good-natured and active 70-year-old.

At first I chalked up the cache to his having been raised with his parents’ Depression-era conservationist mentality. But there’s a good reason for hanging onto every box. In them are bits and pieces of split bamboo and other components that go into repairing and restoring fishing rods dating to the turn of the 20th century.

"I figure somebody can use it," Kaya said. "Sometimes guys are cleaning up their parents’ house and they find something and they bring it in and want us to refinish it. It’s not something they’re gonna use, but they want to hang ’em up, like when they find a Calcutta fishing rod. Those were from the 1920s or ’30s, made from dark bamboo, not the white (blond) kind like today."

As we talk, a customer strolls into the store, asking, "You get the rubbah thing?"

"Yeah, over here," says Pops, no translation or further explanation needed for the rubber sling used in spearfishing. He knows his stuff by heart.

This year, Kaya Fishing Supply is quietly marking its 100th anniversary. There will be no party or celebration. For the no-nonsense Kaya, every day is simply business as usual, just as it’s been since he took over the reins from his father, Jack, 39 years ago, in 1972. Retirement is out of the question because, he said, "What I going do?"

Fishing has been a part of his life since he was a child. He remembers his first catch was a squid, and though to his eyes it must have looked like a giant slippery monster, he says now, "That thing must have been real small because my father made me throw it back."

He said he was sad about it, but there was no arguing with his dad.

"My father was real strict about being legal. That was the old days, when everybody was strict."

He had better luck with his first fish, an aholehole "that tasted real good cuz that was the one I caught."

MAURICE KAYA’S grandfather, Kaichi, opened his general store in 1911, the same year his son Jack was born. At the time, he sold canned goods, clothing and fishing supplies, serving downtown clientele that included longshoremen due to the proximity of Honolulu Harbor. The original store was a mere 100 feet from where the shop stands today just off Nimitz Highway. They had to move due to remodeling on the part of their landlord, C.Q. Yee Hop & Co.

By the 1920s the shop had become a dedicated fishing supply store run by Kaichi and his picture-bride wife, Koharu, who had a taste for fugu, which Jack learned to clean from a Hawaiian fisherman.

Fugu can be deadly due to tetrodotoxin contained in its organs and skin, and Kaya said he always knew that death was a possibility in eating the soup made from the puffer fish, but he trusted his dad.

"You could always feel that numbness going down, but we all ate it, except for my mom. She wouldn’t touch that stuff."

It was a practice that lapsed after his grandmother’s death, so Kaya said he never learned to clean fugu.

He raised his three sons in the fishing and diving tradition. Oldest son John, a veterinarian with VCA University Animal Hospital in Manoa, said learning to gut and clean fish probably helped him through veterinary school.

"A lot of things in school would shock people, looking at cadavers, examining cows that drop dead in a field after three days. A lot of my classmates would leave the room, get sick, put Vicks under their nose or use respirators because of the smell, but it never bothered me."

Middle son David, now an account executive at business services corporation Ceridian, said he always took pride in the shop.

"Everybody knew it. Whenever we mentioned our name, people would ask, ‘Are you the Gem’s or Kaya Fishing Supply Kayas?’ You could see their eyes light up because they remembered our store from when they were small and talked about how they went fishing with their dad and that now they bring their kids over. There were fond memories from everyone, never a negative feeling."

David’s memories of the water include diving and fishing at Haleiwa and running across Nimitz Highway from the store to throw their crab nets into the water. "Traffic wasn’t bad in those days," he said.

Even so, Maurice Kaya wanted his kids to have a life apart from the store, which involved long, laborious hours. The work included melting lead for weights and cutting and finishing the individual weights.

"The lifestyle involved my father waking up at 4:30 a.m., and after working till 4:30 or 5 p.m. seven days a week, he would come home and still work, making fishnets, crab nets and lay nets at the house," David Kaya said.

The family would also pitch in and sew newspapers together with thread to make bags for the weights.

"It was all grass roots. We never bought bags. We were green before there was a green movement," he said.

THE ELDER Kaya said working on the weekends was necessary to accommodate fishermen from the neighbor islands who flew in to pick up supplies. For a time he offered mail-order service, but "too many things got lost in the mail." These days the store is open Mondays to Saturdays, and although Kaya said he felt bad for a while, the fishermen adapted to the new schedule.

Since its founding, the store had a tradition of sponsoring fishing tournaments and offering fishing outings to children. Among the kids participating in the store events was Raine Nitta, who Maurice Kaya considers his hanai son. Nitta never stopped hanging out at the store, so Kaya put him to work, where he’s been ever since. Kaya said he plans to pass the business on to Nitta, who acknowledges the responsibility of keeping the Kaya legacy intact.

"Gotta live up to that cuz this shop has been known generation after generation," he said.

The youth fishing tournaments ended about 10 years ago because, Kaya laments, the kids changed.

"They don’t want to go outside anymore. They don’t want to get their hands dirty. They rather stay inside and play computer games."

He believes this is a shame because of the life lessons gained from the fishing lifestyle, including environmental consciousness. He applauds the number of recreational fishermen who participate in the state’s catch-and-release tagging programs and return trophy-size fish to the ocean so that they can reproduce and replenish near-shore stock.

"Some of ’em release 20-pound ulua so later guys get when us guys gone."

He believes most fishermen are honest in returning tagged fish to the sea. "Usually they would feel bad to take something someone else released, unless there’s a family starving. Then I don’t think they would let it go."

But concern over fish stocks is changing attitudes, he said. "Before, people didn’t care. If they catch 10 fish, they take 10. They don’t care if they can’t eat it all."

Other aspects of a fishing education including learning patience, teamwork and how to cook.

Kaya said, "My youngest, who’s 30, I taught how to make hibachi, so when his friends found out, they’d call him up to make hibachi because he’s the only one knows how."

Youngest son Marcus, a chemistry teacher, explained that his friends didn’t know how to start a proper hibachi fire.

"Their idea was to put as much lighter fluid on charcoal and hope for the best. They didn’t know about adding wood and rolls of newspaper and setting it up like that. My family never used lighter fluid, but to this day you go to certain friends’ barbecue and the hamburgers taste a little like lighter fluid."

Kaya Fishing Supply Inc. is at 901 Kekaulike St.; call 538-1578.