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Recalling Maui’s near and distant past, compiled from Honolulu Star-Advertiser archives:
30 years ago …
Maui Pineapple Co. will be bringing workers for its cannery operations as well as for field work this summer because of the increasing difficulty in getting local seasonal workers. Cannery manager Doug Schenk said the company will build a two-story, 40-room dormitory to house seasonsal workers next to its Kahului cannery. He said the company will depend on Youth Development Enterprises of Utah, which now supplies young workers for field work at the Honolua and Haliimaile plantations.
In an effort to attract young workers, the cannery raised pay for first-time workers to $5.50 but it wasn’t enough. Schenk said the cannery needs about 200 workers from June through August during the peak of the canning season.
100 years ago …
After occupying a full week in the 2nd Circuit Court, the Japanese kidnapping case came to an end when the jury brought in a verdict of acquittal against three men and a woman who were charged with abducting a female from her husband’s home and taking her by force back to the home of her parents.
The female married a Kokomo automobile driver without her parents’ consent. She disappeared from her new home during her husband’s absence. The female herself testified she left her husband of her own accord, but the contention of the prosecution was that she was forced to take this course to shield her parents, who would have possibly been sent to jail had they been convicted.
110 years ago …
When Wailuku townsmen saw Ward Walker and Douglas Marshall start off on horseback last Saturday morning, they never dreamed that these two men would attempt the most daring feat of the last five years of Maui history. Such a feat they did attempt, however, and brought back accounts of their success in climbing the Needle.
The Needle, as every Mauiite knows, is a sheer piece of rock rising 1,500 feet above the bed of Iao Stream. The only possible approach is from the mountain side of the Needle where a narrow neck of land extends downward and also mountainward. Here Marshall and Walker made the ascent and at the top found the bottle the last expert climbers of Maui had left there.
Five years ago Mr. C.B. Wells’s two children, Miss Laura Wells and Ward Wells, and their friend Fred W. McGraw made the Needle and left their names on a piece of paper in a pickle bottle.
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