Rearview Mirror: Popular Buck’s Bake Shop left lasting taste in customers’ mouths

Jo Anne Yamamoto said she was enjoying a hearty bowl of Portuguese bean soup with some delicious Portuguese sweet bread rolls from King’s Bakery for dinner recently.

“This led me to wonder about some of the sweet breads I’ve had in the past. Remember Buck’s sweet bread? It used to be a great fundraiser back in the 1950s. What ever happened to Buck’s Bakery?”

I’m sure many in the islands remember Frederick Buck Woo Lam (1911-1990), known as Freddy Buck. Besides being a sweet-bread king, he was also a champion boxer.

Lam was involved in baking for more than a half-century as proprietor of Buck’s Bake Shop of Moiliili where he baked hundreds of thousands of loaves of Buck’s sweet bread.

His shop occupied the building now run as Chiang Mai Thai Cuisine at 2239 S. King St., next to Stadium Park, which in his time was the heavily visited Honolulu Stadium.

Buck was the territory’s first flyweight amateur boxing champion in the early 1930s, and he fought in many matches on the mainland.

His father had a bakery in Kakaako, a thriving residential community 100 years ago. The family had 12 children and lived in a house behind the bakery. Buck’s baking career began as a 7-year-old helper in his father’s bakery in 1918.

His father taught him how to make sweet bread, an art he learned from early Portuguese settlers.

“The Portuguese women used to bless the dough and mark it with a cross,” Buck said. “We continued to do that right up to the time I closed my shop.”

Fifteen years later, at 22, he rented his father’s basement for $14 a month and set up his own baking operation. Eventually, he opened a restaurant in Kalihi before opening a bakery of his own — then next door to the old Honolulu Stadium.

In 1959 Buck pioneered Portuguese sweet bread benefit sales for schools, clubs and athletic teams to raise funds for projects, sports uniforms and travel.

“If it hadn’t been for Buck’s sweet bread, a lot of kids on this island wouldn’t have athletic equipment and uniforms,” one resident said in 1972, when Buck sold his bakery and retired after 55 years in the business.

During its heyday Buck’s Bake Shop churned out more than 800 loaves of sweet bread every two hours, and up to 25,000 loaves weekly for benefit sweet bread sales.

Lam said his signature sweet bread contained pure butter, eggs and milk. Most bakeries mass- produce their products quickly. Buck’s, in contrast, let his dough rise for 18 to 20 hours; then it was machine-kneaded for 2-1/2 hours.

The result was a sought-after tasty, rich, firm loaf that he guaranteed would stay fresh for a month.

“Baking is an art,” Buck used to say. You have to treat the bread “like a baby.” He was an “early bird,” starting his day at 3 a.m.

Another island tradition took Buck’s place when he closed. In 1976, Axel and Ilse (Micki) Mor­tensen opened their first Heidi’s Bread Basket, named after a daughter, in the same building. Within a few years they expanded to the Ala Moana Building, International Marketplace and Pacific Trade Center.

Later they had a bistro in the Grosvenor Center, and there’s still a Heidi’s Deli, with new owners, in Cunha’s Alley in the Pioneer Plaza Building.

A generous man

Nelson Yuen told me: “Buck was my grandmother’s brother-in-law. As a child, he would bring loaves of sweet breads to my grandmother’s house and give it to all the families.

“My grandmother had nine kids. He would drop off 20-30 loaves of sweet bread. On special occasions like Thanksgiving, he would bake pumpkin pies and other specialty pies and give them away.

“When he dropped off the bread to my grandmother’s house, he would give us kids $2 each. He was such a generous man.

“After he retired, I would go to his house to learn how to make his sweet bread. It was a difficult task because his recipe had to be broken down to a small batch. While we waited for the bread to rise, we would sit at the table and have cookies and milk and talk story.

“People would come to his house, and he would sometimes give them a massage, since he had been a boxer and had strong hands. Uncle Buck, as we would call him, was a kind and friendly guy.

“To this day, I bake his bread occasionally to bring back the old days and to those who remember what it was like.”

Too much Buck’s sweet bread

“Buck Lam was an ophthalmology patient of my husband’s (Jerry),” Alice Tucker told me.

“One day he mentioned that his beloved little miniature fox terrier was going blind from cataracts and that the veterinarian, Dr. Al Takayama of the Aina Haina Pet Hospital, mentioned that the dog needed surgery to correct the problem.

“As longtime Aina Haina residents, we’d been taking our pets to Al Takayama for years. I don’t remember if it was ‘Mr. Buck,’ as we called him, who asked Jerry if he’d consider operating on the dog or if it was Dr. Takayama, but Jerry said he’d read up on canine cataracts and try.

“Well, he did the cataract surgery with Al assisting, and the dog had great eyesight from then until he died many years later.

“And then the floodgates opened!” Tucker said. “At least once a week, Mr. Buck would come by our house and drop off about 20 leaves of fabulous Buck’s sweet bread.

“We adored his sweet bread, but too much of a good thing is, well, too much. We filled our freezer with sweet bread, and then as soon as Mr. Buck drove away, I’d have our kids go up and down the street giving loaves to our neighbors. This went on for months and months.

“At Thanksgiving we would get fabulous pumpkin pies (dozens of them at a time!) instead of sweet bread. The neighbors would say they still had loaves (or pies) in the freezer, but so did we! This went on and on.

“Then Mr. Buck called up and invited all of the Takayama family and all of the Tucker family to a nine-course Chinese dinner. We assumed this was an indication that the carloads of sweet bread and pumpkin pies would be ending, and the entire operation would end in a glorious crescendo of a Chinese dinner.

“The dinner was, of course, splendid and delicious, but the sweet bread loaves continued to arrive — for years. I don’t remember how long after the dinner, but sometime later we realized we weren’t getting the sweet bread anymore.

“It was great while it lasted, and we certainly couldn’t ask Mr. Buck why we weren’t getting any more. What smiling memories our whole family has when we think of that delicious bonanza of — can you believe it — too much Buck’s sweet bread!”

Have a question or suggestion? Contact Bob Sigall, author of the five “The Companies We Keep” books, at Sigall@Yahoo.com.