ISLAND HISTORY: McBryde Sugar Co.’s harvesting ‘Visaya Gang’

In the early 1980s, I was employed at McBryde Sugar Co., Kauai as a haul cane truck driver assigned to one of three sugarcane harvesting gangs.

These gangs worked around the clock in three shifts, rain or shine, during harvesting season.

Each gang was composed of a luna, assistant luna, crane operators, push rake and liliko rake operators, haul cane truck drivers, utility equipment operators, and Joey Freitas, who lit cane fields afire prior to harvesting.

As a haul cane truck driver, I drove a big Kenworth pulling cane trailers loaded with tons of sugarcane to McBryde’s Koloa mill from cane fields that spread across southern Kauai from Eleele to Mahaulepu.

And, my gang was unofficially called the Visaya Gang, since quite a few of its men were descendants of Filipino immigrants who’d originated from the Visayan Islands.

There were also Hawaiians, Portuguese, Japanese, Puerto Ricans, and local Ilocanos in the Visaya Gang.

Several immigrant Ilocanos were also employed in the gang, but I was the only haole and was not born and raised in Hawaii.

Regardless, I was accepted, because I did my job.

Still, it helped that I spoke some pidgin, and that my wife, Ginger Beralas Soboleski, was born and raised on Kauai and was of Visayan ancestry, and that two of my wife’s high school classmates worked on the Visaya Gang.

McBryde’s “coconut wireless” also spread the news that I was actually related to men on the gang through marriages of my wife’s relatives, or were friends of her family.

Among the men of Visayan ancestry was utility equipment operator Claudio Lumacad.

Claudio reminded me of the actor Gilbert Roland, and he liked to “suck ‘um up” and dance at Kauai Surf, and was good friends with Ginger’s mother, bartender Julie Esquirra Beralas.

Assistant luna Cereal Fernandez’s favorite expression whenever something went wrong, like a flat tire, was “No can help, Henry.”

I also recall luna Cecilio “Bacilio” Dacay standing alone in the pouring rain one night in a harvesting field and shouting “You gotta try, Henry!” while I drove my truck through deep mud.

Great men, the best!
Source: The Garden Island