Hawaii once had nine pineapple canneries, such as Hawaiian Pineapple Co. (Dole), Libby McNeil and California Packing (Del Monte). In 1959, it was estimated that they packed 10,000,000 cans a day!

They employed about 8,000 people year-round and added 15,000 in the summer harvest time. Many teens earned money to pay for family expenses, and among older kids, even college tuition.

I asked my newsletter readers to share about the summer jobs they had at Hawaii’s canneries. Here are a few of their stories:

Juice

Bill Souza said you needed some “juice” to land a cannery job. “My calabash uncle was the head mechanic at Dole and pulled me in when I reached the right age. I worked four consecutive summers, from 1961-1964.

“It was darn hard work stacking those boxes in the hot and noisy warehouse. We often worked 12-hour shifts, 7 days per week. The oddest amount of pay: I got $1.40 and 1/2 cent per hour. I’ll never forget the rate as long as I live.

“The other thing was we all had to wear a ‘Bango’ badge with a number and logo of the cannery on it. Checkers came by on a regular basis and took down the Bango number to verify we were working. No Bango displayed, you’d be working manuahi (for free). I still have all four of my Bangos as souvenirs.”

Boxing

Noel McCully said he grew up in Kaneohe in the 1950s through the late ’70s. “One of my first jobs was at the Dole cannery in Iwilei, summertime night shift, at 15 or 16 years old about 1964-65. I ran a canning machine, which put cans of pineapple into cardboard boxes.

“My high school buddy worked upstairs above me, loading a stack of boxes onto a conveyor. Every once in a while, he’d distort one of the boxes.

“When it got down to me, and I engaged the insert machine, it would crush the box and smash the pineapple cans. What a mess! I’d look upstairs and he’d be grinning, of course!

“The next year, I was a gas pump attendant at Naka Shell station in Kaneohe. The Nakashimas were great teachers and very patient. Both were great jobs that taught skills and attitudes that have lasted a lifetime.”

Hoe hana-ing

Herb Kobayashi said his first paying job was as a sugarcane and pineapple field hand. “During World War II, there was an acute shortage of adult workers so able- bodied junior and senior high school students volunteered a few days monthly.

“We were trucked to and from our schools and were paid less than a dollar per hour.

“I remember ‘hoe hana-ing’ (weeding) in the Kunia sugarcane fields, just one ridge away from the then ‘secret’ Honouliuli relocation camp.

“Pineapple field ‘hoe hana’ was easy for small plants, but when they grew and the pineapples ripened, it was sheer agony.

“We had to pick and carry the pineapples in a rectangular canvas sheet that had loops at the short sides, one loop over a shoulder and the other loop slung on a forearm. We staggered out of a pineapple row and gratefully dumped the fruit into wooden crates.

“Those conveyor- harvesting vehicles that one sees in pictures came later, after the war ended.

“I worked in the pineapple canneries during the summers of 1947-48, probably canning the fruit from the very plants I help grow a few years earlier! Isn’t it ironic?

“Field work was tough for urban teenagers doing an adult job.

But like my friends, I had brothers in the 442nd Regimental Combat Team and Military Intelligence Service, so it was the patriotic thing to do.”

Ice cold juice

Judi Moore said, “There were two canneries in Kapaa, Kauai. They were cleverly called the ‘Down’ Cannery, which was on the main street as you drove through Kapaa. The ‘Up’ Cannery was mauka of that.”

Moore worked in the can room of the ‘Down’ Cannery in 1961. “The job paid $1.00 an hour and lasted for six weeks until I went off to college. It taught me life’s lessons of hard work and the value of the dollar.

“There was a nice guy in the lab who tested the acidity of the fresh juice. He would occasionally put an ice-cold can of fresh juice by my workstation. You can’t get juice like that anywhere. It was delicious!”

Bachi

Jerry Takesono said he also worked at the Hawaiian Pineapple Co. in Kapaa, Kauai.

“They put me straight onto the high speed Ginaca machine my first day. I nearly got killed as the pineapple came tumbling down at me from the conveyor belt high above.”

Dole hired Henry Ginaca to create a machine that peeled and cored the pineapples.

“I was given absolutely no instructions except to line up the fruit in one direction and feed them into the machine,” Takesono recalls.

“Later on, I learned from one of the other boys to listen for a click of the Ginaca machine. That was the signal to line up the fruit. Don’t open the gate until you hear the click so you won’t get fruit tumbling down at you.

“I believe it was the … way of making you suffer so you will learn the hard way.

“It would have helped to learn the basics first. Later on, I took great pleasure as the supervisor burst one of the pipes by opening it in the wrong sequence. Bachi!” (Bad luck or karma.)

Stacking cases

Raymond Iwamoto was hired at Hawaiian Pineapple in the late 1950s.

“Several of us boys were divided into two groups. I was tall so I was put in the larger kid group, with football players such as Joe Kealoha from Kamehameha, John Borges from Waianae and Hank Taufausau Jr. from St. Louis.

“We were assigned to the warehouse to stack pineapple cases, row by row until we eventually reached the ceiling.

“We worked hard and fast and were exhausted by the end of the day. Overtime paid 2.5 times base pay, which was fantastic.

“Every summer when we came back to work we had the same partners. We made lasting friendships. The cannery warehouse was a memorable experience and the camaraderie was great.”

Cushy job

Jim Manke had an easier cannery job than most. “The typical cannery jobs were pretty intense — Ginaca machine operators, trimmers, tray boys, forklift drivers, can lines, etc.

“I worked at the cannery for three or four summers, but because my father was at the supervisory level with Hawaiian Pine, I got a cushy job assisting the science guys in a laboratory in the main cannery office building.”

Manke said they monitored sugar content and watched out for stray traces of pesticides that might creep into the canned product.

“One year, Dole was exploring the idea of canning fruit in natural juices for the first time — not using a sugar-based syrupy liquid. Whatever we did in the lab paid off — canned-in-juice fruit is pretty common these days.

“I must confess, the ‘work’ my fellow lab rats and I did was mainly taste-testing.

“A co-worker in the lab, Doug Kilpatrick, who was a star athlete at Punahou, was also an excellent cribbage player. I learned the game that summer and we spent hours getting better at it while waiting for lab samples to do their thing.”

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The Rearview Mirror Insider is Bob Sigall’s now twice-weekly free email newsletter that gives readers behind-the-scenes background, stories that wouldn’t fit in the column, and lots of interesting details. Join and be an Insider at RearviewMirrorInsider.com. Mahalo!