Talking Hawai`i's Story: Oral Histories of an Island People

TOGETHERNESS WAS THERE ALL THE TIME

STANLEY C. MENDES TOGETHERNESS WAS THERE ALL THE TIME Even from the young time, when we were still going school, we wanted to go work with the mules. I’m thinking one of the best jobs they had in the plantation was mule gang. ’Cause you go to work in the morning, you harness those mules up, ready, they gotta eat, ready for go. Put two, three burlap bags and tied it together. Was your saddle, that. Play cowboy, racehorse , take longer to get to the field. Stanley Clifford Mendes was born in 1931 in Ähualoa on Hawai‘i Island. He was the only child of John Mendes, Jr. and Josephine Souza Mendes. The family moved from Ähualoa to Kapulena, then to Pa‘auilo into a housing area called New Camp. Stanley Mendes attended Pa‘auilo School until the eighth grade. In 1944 he began his forty-year career in the sugar industry, first with Hämäkua Mill Company and later, through company mergers, with Laupähoehoe Sugar Company and Davies Hämäkua Sugar Company. He retired in 1984. In 1952 he married Kathleen Doris DeRego of Haina. They raised five children. The closing of the three remaining sugar plantations on the island— Hämäkua Sugar Company in 1993, Hilo Coast Processing Company in 1994, and Ka‘ü Agribusiness Company in 1996—dried up the area’s major source of employment. Two of Stanley Mendes’s sons lost their plantation jobs due to the slowdown and eventual closure of the sugar companies. Stanley Mendes died in 1998. COH’s The Closing of Sugar Plantations: Interviews with Families of Hämäkua and Ka‘ü, Hawai‘i, is a collection of oral history interviews with displaced workers and their families. In 1996 COH director Warren Nishimoto talked with Mendes about his youth in the plantation community of Pa‘auilo, jobs on the plantation, and feelings about the end of this way of life. 202 Talking Hawai‘i’s Story PARENTS AND GRANDFATHER My grandfather was John Mendes, Sr. And then my father was John Mendes, Jr. Me, I get Stanley. My oldest boy [Stanley “Butch”] is the fourth generation of the Mendes family [in Hawai‘i]. His boys is the fifth generation of the Mendes family. [Grandfather] was not a very smart man. (Laughs.) He was a wise man in other ways, but really not a reader, you know. He could take care of his business because he always had something in his head to do. He took care of his family, built nice home, all of that. He was appointed to all kinds of community services and even during the war [World War II], he was the CD [Civilian Defense] person up Ähualoa, all those areas there. He used to supply the plantation with firewood, the camps. They get a big—what they call ox. And he had big trailer, you know, wagon, for supply the wood to the plantation. My father was [also] a wise man. He was a workingman. A man that was skilled doing anything. Wake up in the morning, go to work, and work till dark again. He started out with T. H. Davies Company. And he used to work with a portable track. You take ’em [i.e., tracks] in the field and lie ’em out in the field, so that they could take the cane cars into the field, and they load ’em up with cane. Throw [cane] inside the car. That’s what they call häpai kö. Then, after that, the mules pull that cane car out [to the main train line]. He was with the mule, you know, the steersman of the mule, just like the driver. He was a serviceman for the plantation. He go and put fuel for all the equipment get there at that time. Sometime the equipment no start. He go check the equipment out in the field, start the equipment. And he used to supply the camp, the houses, with kerosene. You know, they go around the camp and they fill up the kerosene for the people in the camp, ’cause the plantation supply the kerosene. You get your own five-gallon can. The kerosene usually is for cooking. Because they use firewood [to] make hot water, things like that. When the union came to Hawai‘i, my father was the first president in Pa‘auilo. That’s the CIO [Congress of Industrial Organizations] union. Then, little by little, the ILWU [International Longshoremen’s and...