Abel Medeiros (1920-2005) was born at ‘Oma‘o Homesteads, the son of John Medeiros Jr. and Mary Medeiros, and was a great-grandson of Louis Medeiros, who’d immigrated to Hawai‘i from the Azores in 1878.
His father, one of the original homesteaders in ‘Oma‘o, raised sugarcane on 20 acres under contract to McBryde Sugar Co. until the 1930s, when McBryde stopped taking sugarcane from homesteaders.
Abel recalled: “Right above our place at ‘Oma‘o, there used to be a derrick where they used to load cane when they brought it in by carts and then loaded it into cane cars. There were train tracks all the way to Koloa, to Kukui‘ula, and then to the McBryde mill.”
Regarding work on the homestead, he said: “I used to come from ‘Oma‘o, as a little boy, on horseback to Koloa School, instead of walking. After I did my chores in the morning, like milk the cows and feed the animals and whatnot, and then my father allowed me to bring the horse because that would make me come home faster and do more work.”
While attending Koloa School, he was hired at age 11 by McBryde to “what we call ‘kalai,’ weeding and ‘huki lepo,’ which is hilling the furrows. I used to ‘hapai ko’ in the harvesting field and change horses for the supervisors, and I was a waterboy, too.”
In his teens, he became a tray boy at the Kaua‘i Pineapple Co. (Kaua‘i Pine) cannery in Lawai, and after graduating from Kaua‘i High School in 1939, Abel was with the McBryde office staff until 1940, when he went into the Army.
Following his military service during World War II, he served in the Hawai‘i National Guard for 23 years.
In 1952, Abel became assistant personnel director at Kaua‘i Pine, and was the industrial relations assistant at McBryde from 1963 until his retirement from McBryde in 1985.
Abel Medeiros also served in the state House of Representatives and on the Kaua‘i County Council.
He and his wife, Helen Medeiros, had three children: Peter, Carol and Suzette.
•••
Hank Soboleski has been a resident of Kauai since the 1960s. Hank’s love of the island and its history has inspired him, in conjunction with The Garden Island Newspaper, to share the island’s history weekly. The collection of these articles can be found here: https://bit.ly/2IfbxL9 and here https://bit.ly/2STw9gi Hank can be reached at hssgms@gmail.com
