As a young boy in the late 1960s and early 1970s, Kenneth “Kokomo” Ho remembers his dad hanging out with friends at their Waipahu home. Ice-cold Primo beer was always their beverage of choice.

“Dad said he drank Primo because at the time it was made here,” said Ho, now 54 and a senior scheduler for TheHandi-Van. “He wanted to support a local product. He never actually told me this, but I think that’s how he got interested in collecting Primo stuff.”

That “stuff” included everything from decals and wooden nickels to key chains and what Ho considers the best finds of all: two unused tickets for a tour of the 8-acre brewery that Milwaukee-based Joseph Schlitz Brewing Co. built in Aiea to produce Primo.

Ho would eventually inherit his father’s collection and merge it with his own collection of Primo items, savoring the trip down memory lane that they provided. But Ho has decided it’s time to pass much of it to new caretakers. He’s keeping a few items that are especially dear to him, but the rest will be available for sale today at the Hawaii All-Collectors Show (ukulele.com/collect.html) at the Blaisdell Exhibition Hall.

Primo’s Aiea brewery, which is now partly occupied by Best Buy, was home to a beer garden called Primo Village. The brewery tour always ended at the village. Although there are no dates on the brewery tour tickets in Ho’s collection, they must have been printed between 1966, when Schlitz’s Hawaii Brewing Co. facility opened, and 1979, when Schlitz closed it and moved production of Primo to its Los Angeles brewery.

“Several tours of Hawaii Brewing Co. were offered on weekdays,” Ho said. “The tour ended at Primo Village, where visitors could enjoy Primo on tap and a great view of Pearl Harbor. There was no charge for the tour or the tastings, but you had to have a ticket to do it.”

Schlitz was a master of marketing, emblazoning Primo’s distinctive warrior logo on everything imaginable — lamps, clocks, mugs, ashtrays, flashlights, golf balls, beach balls, watches, slippers, towels, umbrellas, bottle openers, even baby bibs. One of its most clever promotional items was a transistor radio in the shape of a Primo can.

Like his dad, Ho got hooked on the tchotchkes. A few years before his dad died in 2009, he gave him his Primo collection. By then Ho had amassed a noteworthy Primo collection of his own primarily through eBay, Craigslist and Surf ’N Hula Hawaii, a Kaimuki shop that specializes in vintage Hawaiiana. He also received numerous things as gifts from friends.

Ho figures he owns about 400 Primo items; some rare and unique ones came from the collection of Richard Saito, who was nicknamed Primo because he was an avid collector of its souvenirs. Saito kept his Primo knickknacks and thousands of other collectibles in a cottage behind his Wahiawa home that he affectionately dubbed “the museum.”

When the 93-year-old Saito entered a care home two years ago, none of his four children had room to store his massive collection, so they gave other collectors first crack at buying items from it. One of the treasures Ho obtained was Saito’s Primo suit, complete with a coat, vest, shirt, slacks, tie, tie clip and cuff links.

“Richard’s late wife, June, was an excellent seamstress,” Ho said. “She made vests, hats, rugs, cushions, clothespin bags, blankets and potholders from original Primo fabric and sold them. I have one of the last Primo blankets that she made.”

Beer drinkers can still find Primo on store shelves. They have to look elsewhere for the memories.

“Primo is still being made, but its glory days were from the mid-1960s to the mid-1970s, when Schlitz made dozens of different things to promote it,” Ho said. “You don’t have to drink Primo to appreciate those things. They’re a fun, interesting part of Hawaii’s history.”

A PRIMO TIMELINE

>> 1901: Honolulu Brewing and Malting Co. releases Primo. Its red-brick building still stands on Queen Street between Punchbowl and South streets.

>> 1920: Prohibition begins.

>> 1933: Prohibition ends. Hawaii Brewing Corp. is formed and takes over production of Primo.

>> 1962: Hawaii Brewing Corp. is renamed Hawaii Brewing Co.

>> 1964: Joseph Schlitz Brewing Co. buys Hawaii Brewing Co.

>> 1966: Schlitz begins brewing Primo under the subsidiary Hawaii Brewing Co. at a new $5 million facility in Aiea.

>> 1969: Primo hits its peak, claiming 70 percent of Hawaii’s beer-drinking market.

>> 1971-1974: Primo’s popularity begins to drop, largely due to competition from Olympia and Budweiser.

>> 1974: Schlitz invests $2 million in its Aiea brewery to turn around the downward trend.

>> 1979: Schlitz closes the Aiea brewery and moves production of Primo to Los Angeles. You can see the former brewery’s Primo Village and packing and distribution building by turning left on Hekaha Street, taking the first left past the guard shack and driving to the end of the parking lot. They’re on privately owned land, but if you walk a short distance toward Pearl Harbor, you can get a close look at them beyond a barbed-wire and chain-link fence.

>> 1982: Stroh Brewery Co. buys Schlitz and resumes production of Primo. Despite using a new recipe and expanding distribution, demand continues to decline.

>> 1998: Stroh stops brewing Primo.

>> 1999: Pabst Brewing Co. buys Stroh, including the Primo brand.

>> 2007: Pabst revives Primo, which is currently being distributed in Hawaii, California and Nevada. Check out primobeer.com for specific locations and store.primobeer.com/collections/all to see current Primo merchandise.

Sources: “The Hawaii Beer Book,” by Cheryl Chee Tsutsumi (Watermark Publishing, 2007); Pabst Brewing Co.; San Jose (California) Mercury News