Connecting to the 'Aina with Aloha
By Jan Wizinowich
Wendell and Netta Branco
To Wendell and Netta Branco, aloha and ‘aina always go together. Raised in a plantation lifestyle, they have never lost their connection and appreciation for the land and its bounty. Longears Coffee, their current endeavor, grew out of that connection with a little added serendipity and perseverance.
The very best serendipity in their lives was meeting each other in Waimea. Netta’s independent streak landed her in Waimea from Lahaina. “There was so much family in Lahaina and I wanted to spread my wings. I worked in a supermarket, Black’s supermarket. You know where Ace Hardware is? Right by Ace Hardware. Well that’s where I worked as a cashier and Wendell worked right next door at the service station.”
The very best serendipity in their lives was meeting each other in Waimea. Netta’s independent streak landed her in Waimea from Lahaina. “There was so much family in Lahaina and I wanted to spread my wings. I worked in a supermarket, Black’s supermarket. You know where Ace Hardware is? Right by Ace Hardware. Well that’s where I worked as a cashier and Wendell worked right next door at the service station.”
You’ve heard of catalytic converters? Well Netta’s radiator was a catalytic match maker. “Every time I’d go somewhere, I had to go to the service station and fill up the radiator and that’s where I met Wendell. I said, ‘Would you like to go to lunch?’ He left the service station for us to have lunch for 3 hours. That’s where our love life started.” Wendell adds, “And we’ve been having lunch ever since.” That was the beginning of a long journey filled with aloha. But before that Wendell and Netta had very different beginnings.
Born in Honoka’a in 1942 at Okada Hospital (now serving as a medical clinic), Wendell grew up in Honoka’a. World War II interceded and swept his father, David Ishisaki, away to an internment camp on the mainland, before he was born. “Taken away form home. You gone. Bam. He was one of them, he got hauled off.” Wendell’s life journey took him as far off as Alaska and full circle back to Hamakua and Waimea where he eventually met and married Netta.
Netta was born in 1942 on O’ahu and lived in Palolo Valley until her family moved to Maui. “My father used to drive the rapid transit truck or bus on O’ahu. Also he was Samoan, from Pango Pango and he had a Samoan Band. When the war broke out it was very hard standing in line with two children, so my grandfather gave them tickets and they came to Maui. We lived in Lahaina, Maui for all those years.” Netta led an idyllic life surrounded by family, with the ocean just steps away. “The most fun we would have would be labor day. We’d go out. David Sharp he had a big barge. That was what all of us kids loved. We’d go in small skiffs to the barge. And they would bring all the picnic tables, all the coolers and we’d have all kinds of fun and we would dive and jump from the barge. The ocean is greenish blue; it was out Mapili side, way out there. Everybody would bring food and tons of watermelons and us kids would just look forward to it.”
Wanting a life connected with the ‘aina they found and purchased land in Ahualoa. After selling their house, with an agreement to live in it until a house was built in Ahualoa and having that agreement fall through, Wendell and Netta moved to their land a little sooner than they expected. Wendell said, “Pack up your things. I’ve bought myself enough lumber to build a garage. We’ll live in that garage until we build it ourselves. You got 12 hours up and 12 hours down. That’s about how the day goes. And we were, all of us in that one room. I’d say that room was 30 by 30. It was like, you know living in the yellow submarine.” But not for long. “Every time we scraped up some money, we’d build a room. Now we have three bedrooms and a big house.”
.
They moved to Ahualoa with three boys ages 3,5 and 7. No electricity, no running water but no matter, they were living aloha ‘aina. At this time, Wendell was working as the first paid fireman in Waimea. “It was just me and that old Studebaker fire truck.” This meant that he would go off for two days at a time. “They were babies. Everything, everything we own into one big shed. Toilet on the outside. No electricity. No running water. Take a bath. Japanese furo. Until this day we still have the furo. Kerosene lanterns, wood stove. Then I was working at the firehouse. So I’d be gone every other day. This poor girl is up here in the middle of nowhere. No electricity. No water that reached the house. The water stopped outside the house. So the least I can do for this girl is get her a phone. The least I can do. She needs to get a phone,” Wendell reminisced.
At that time the old Mamalahoa highway was a dirt track and the only way to reach their land was by using a 4 wheel drive. “The second vehicle was not 4 wheel drive. Big old clunky Chevrolet Impala. One of those, it looked like a big old tank. So she’d take the littlest guy, which was the baby. She’d take him with her down shopping. I’d stay up here carving this place out of the woods with the other 2 little guys and she’d do her shopping for the day and for the next day. Cause the next day I’d go to work. So she could go down, but she’d never come back up. So she go shopping, she’d come. We had the signal. She honked the horn, whatever the signal was. I’d go down with the chain and bring her home,” said Wendell. “We loved it. We loved it. We loved it,” interjected Netta.
This strategy came in handy for phone installation. “There was no road. There was ginger patch, brambles. There was nothing here. So anyway I called the telephone company and they sent a man out. He couldn’t get up the road with his van, so I asked him, ‘If I can get you up here, can you put the phone in?’ And he said yeah, he could do that. So I hooked the tow cable onto his van and up he came. There’s not too many things we couldn’t do.”
Their family values have to do with work and nobody got a free pass. Their lifestyle made it easy to pass on those values. “I used to have a string of cows that I milked for about 12 years. Me and Wendell and my sons, that’s how we trained them to start working. So I would milk in the morning and in the evening. And Wendell, when we had electricity, would put a refrigerator out to barter with people, neighbors. Whatever they want, if they want to take a gallon of milk, they leave something, eggs or whatever. And I had a little jar there and if they didn’t have anything they’d put cold cash. Whatever it was worth to them. So that’s how we’d do. That’s how we trained our children to work and they hated it because early in the morning,” Netta shared. “Before they go to school they got to get those cows in that wet grass,” said Wendell. “I would train the cows how to come in the morning. I would shake the ti leaf and as soon as they hear that they would start running down and it was easy,” continues Netta. And very soon, their sons caught on how to do it. Watch and learn.
Wendell’s job at the fire station lead to the solution of the mystery of his missing ‘ohana. “My wife and I had a family. It was in the back of my mind. I wanted to know the scoop. My family tree. One half of the tree didn’t even have one twig.” Once again serendipity came into play. “Waimea had a volunteer fire station at the time. It was Parker Ranch cowboys. Then I got upgraded and they sent another fireman up there. He came from Honolulu. And one day over a bowl of saimin, I found out that he was my cousin. I says, ‘Yeah, you know I got some kind of Japanese heritage. I can’t prove anything. All I know is that my father’s name was David Ishisaki.’ And he looked at me and he said, ‘David Ishisaki is my mother’s brother.’ And we got to talking and he says, ‘You know what I’m going to Hilo tomorrow and talk to David’s mom,’ which would be his grandmother, ‘And find out just what’s happening here.’ I said, ‘But my dad’s dead.’ And he said, ‘Oh no. Your dad’s alive and he’s living in Lanikila housing in Hilo.’ And all these years. It goes beyond the fluke.”
Wendell solved a mystery and got to connect with a whole family he never knew he had. “We go to Hilo. Never saw the man for 32 years. He was bedridden. My auntie, which I now met. She would go into Hilo and prepare a bath. She falls and injures her shoulder and she can’t perform this duty for her brother. So we go in. I never met the man. We become friends and I’m helping him with his bath. But I believe the camp, the concentration camp or whatever it was, messed up his mind bad. He lives 6 months and he died.”
Wendell’s next endeavor after the fire station, was to raise mules. “I grew up around animals. Cattle, horses, pigs everything. So I always like to go into faraway places like the mountains, the valleys. I always liked to go into Waipio, Waimano and beyond. So I told myself, you know what, I’ve always heard about mules. How great mules were and how nasty mules were and I figured, I’m going to figure this out for myself, if any of this is true.” After researching locally he found that the only mules available were elderly retired plantation mules. Undaunted, he started looking on the mainland and once again, Wendell’s resourcefulness paid off when he located and purchased his prize jack named Ozark and one mule. “Those days they had stock flights, airplanes that came into Hilo. So my first mule and my big old donkey Ozark, my favorite guy, came from Missouri. And he came from Oakland California to Hilo Hawaii on a 747 jet. Flew right in. So that’s how my mule breeding program began.” As always, Wendell and Netta chose the path not taken and forged on to make another of their endeavors work. “All of my cowboy friends they’re all horse people and when I started into this mule venture, they figured I’d really lost it.”
But registered mules were in demand. “I would buy old retired Parker Ranch horses, cowboy horses. Because they were registered horses. Basically quarter horses. And then Ozark, that’s the name of my jack. His entire handle is a: Catalonian Mammoth Registered Goldstar Dappled Red Roan jackass. And he was the only Goldstar registered jackass ever in Hawaii. And the registered mares, I would breed mules off them.”
Wendell’s mules made it possible for him to go to places on the island where few people travel. “I always like to go into faraway places like the mountains, the valleys. I always liked to go into Waipio, Waimano and beyond,” and his mules never let him or Netta down, who reminisces, “We’d go riding. I’d go down this gulch and he’d say, ‘Yes’ and I’d say, ‘No way. I’m getting off.’ And he said, ‘No. Just hand on, sit back and he’ll go.’ Next time I opened my eyes and we’re up already. Didn’t feel anything, you know.”
One of their biggest adventures though was helping Kindy Sproat build a house 2 valleys in from Pololu. Kindy wanted to build another cabin to replace the one he was born in that had been taken by a tsunami. So Wendell got his contractor friend, Jack involved, who promised that if the materials were there, he could build a house in one weekend. Wendell brought in his mules and transported airdropped materials into the valley and good as Jack’s word, by the end of the weekend the cabin was built. That began many happy journeys to Honokanaiki for the Branco family. “So we went in there and built a couple shelves. We built one bed. Box bed with the mattresses on em. Fixed the toilet house. Then we’d spend the weekend. We all loved it.”
When their jack Ozark died ten years ago,Wendell and Netta looked around and noticed Arabica coffee plants, “…from Hamakua’s coffee glory days fended for themselves on our ranch.” So after picking 300 pounds of cherries they found out that no one wanted to buy beans from the Hamakua area. So once again, Wendell and Netta struck out to learn something new and decided to process and roast and sell their own coffee beans. Quite by accident because they couldn’t sell their coffee beans, they learned about aging coffee, which produces a much smoother, more flavorful coffee.
Not having enough coffee cherries on their land, they looked around for other farmers in the area that had coffee trees, which is when they met old time farmers who shared something about the history of coffee in the Hamakua district. Brought in by a couple of traveling missionaries, Arabica coffee has been growing in Hamakua since the early 1800’s and according to Wendell, “To this day, the coffee that exists in these valleys is the same Aribica coffee.” With the sugar plantations came Western ideas, one of them being coffee. “There were people who lived up in the hills, homesteaders. Most of them Japanese. They started taking the coffee plants and planting them up on their homesteads….the people we buying coffee from now, that’s how their farms began.”
Now with the coffee company a going concern, their farm is a center of activity. Netta’s elderly mother, a living treasure with her own quilting story to tell, lives with them and their sons stay in close contact. While doing this interview one of their sons arrived to bring them some dragon fruit and looks of love and admiration. Not too different from the looks they have for each other. After 40 years of marriage and 3 kids they are obviously still in love. Their looks are full of spark, understanding and kindness. Netta and Wendell have created a vortex of Aloha.
Born in Honoka’a in 1942 at Okada Hospital (now serving as a medical clinic), Wendell grew up in Honoka’a. World War II interceded and swept his father, David Ishisaki, away to an internment camp on the mainland, before he was born. “Taken away form home. You gone. Bam. He was one of them, he got hauled off.” Wendell’s life journey took him as far off as Alaska and full circle back to Hamakua and Waimea where he eventually met and married Netta.
Netta was born in 1942 on O’ahu and lived in Palolo Valley until her family moved to Maui. “My father used to drive the rapid transit truck or bus on O’ahu. Also he was Samoan, from Pango Pango and he had a Samoan Band. When the war broke out it was very hard standing in line with two children, so my grandfather gave them tickets and they came to Maui. We lived in Lahaina, Maui for all those years.” Netta led an idyllic life surrounded by family, with the ocean just steps away. “The most fun we would have would be labor day. We’d go out. David Sharp he had a big barge. That was what all of us kids loved. We’d go in small skiffs to the barge. And they would bring all the picnic tables, all the coolers and we’d have all kinds of fun and we would dive and jump from the barge. The ocean is greenish blue; it was out Mapili side, way out there. Everybody would bring food and tons of watermelons and us kids would just look forward to it.”
Wanting a life connected with the ‘aina they found and purchased land in Ahualoa. After selling their house, with an agreement to live in it until a house was built in Ahualoa and having that agreement fall through, Wendell and Netta moved to their land a little sooner than they expected. Wendell said, “Pack up your things. I’ve bought myself enough lumber to build a garage. We’ll live in that garage until we build it ourselves. You got 12 hours up and 12 hours down. That’s about how the day goes. And we were, all of us in that one room. I’d say that room was 30 by 30. It was like, you know living in the yellow submarine.” But not for long. “Every time we scraped up some money, we’d build a room. Now we have three bedrooms and a big house.”
.
They moved to Ahualoa with three boys ages 3,5 and 7. No electricity, no running water but no matter, they were living aloha ‘aina. At this time, Wendell was working as the first paid fireman in Waimea. “It was just me and that old Studebaker fire truck.” This meant that he would go off for two days at a time. “They were babies. Everything, everything we own into one big shed. Toilet on the outside. No electricity. No running water. Take a bath. Japanese furo. Until this day we still have the furo. Kerosene lanterns, wood stove. Then I was working at the firehouse. So I’d be gone every other day. This poor girl is up here in the middle of nowhere. No electricity. No water that reached the house. The water stopped outside the house. So the least I can do for this girl is get her a phone. The least I can do. She needs to get a phone,” Wendell reminisced.
At that time the old Mamalahoa highway was a dirt track and the only way to reach their land was by using a 4 wheel drive. “The second vehicle was not 4 wheel drive. Big old clunky Chevrolet Impala. One of those, it looked like a big old tank. So she’d take the littlest guy, which was the baby. She’d take him with her down shopping. I’d stay up here carving this place out of the woods with the other 2 little guys and she’d do her shopping for the day and for the next day. Cause the next day I’d go to work. So she could go down, but she’d never come back up. So she go shopping, she’d come. We had the signal. She honked the horn, whatever the signal was. I’d go down with the chain and bring her home,” said Wendell. “We loved it. We loved it. We loved it,” interjected Netta.
This strategy came in handy for phone installation. “There was no road. There was ginger patch, brambles. There was nothing here. So anyway I called the telephone company and they sent a man out. He couldn’t get up the road with his van, so I asked him, ‘If I can get you up here, can you put the phone in?’ And he said yeah, he could do that. So I hooked the tow cable onto his van and up he came. There’s not too many things we couldn’t do.”
Their family values have to do with work and nobody got a free pass. Their lifestyle made it easy to pass on those values. “I used to have a string of cows that I milked for about 12 years. Me and Wendell and my sons, that’s how we trained them to start working. So I would milk in the morning and in the evening. And Wendell, when we had electricity, would put a refrigerator out to barter with people, neighbors. Whatever they want, if they want to take a gallon of milk, they leave something, eggs or whatever. And I had a little jar there and if they didn’t have anything they’d put cold cash. Whatever it was worth to them. So that’s how we’d do. That’s how we trained our children to work and they hated it because early in the morning,” Netta shared. “Before they go to school they got to get those cows in that wet grass,” said Wendell. “I would train the cows how to come in the morning. I would shake the ti leaf and as soon as they hear that they would start running down and it was easy,” continues Netta. And very soon, their sons caught on how to do it. Watch and learn.
Wendell’s job at the fire station lead to the solution of the mystery of his missing ‘ohana. “My wife and I had a family. It was in the back of my mind. I wanted to know the scoop. My family tree. One half of the tree didn’t even have one twig.” Once again serendipity came into play. “Waimea had a volunteer fire station at the time. It was Parker Ranch cowboys. Then I got upgraded and they sent another fireman up there. He came from Honolulu. And one day over a bowl of saimin, I found out that he was my cousin. I says, ‘Yeah, you know I got some kind of Japanese heritage. I can’t prove anything. All I know is that my father’s name was David Ishisaki.’ And he looked at me and he said, ‘David Ishisaki is my mother’s brother.’ And we got to talking and he says, ‘You know what I’m going to Hilo tomorrow and talk to David’s mom,’ which would be his grandmother, ‘And find out just what’s happening here.’ I said, ‘But my dad’s dead.’ And he said, ‘Oh no. Your dad’s alive and he’s living in Lanikila housing in Hilo.’ And all these years. It goes beyond the fluke.”
Wendell solved a mystery and got to connect with a whole family he never knew he had. “We go to Hilo. Never saw the man for 32 years. He was bedridden. My auntie, which I now met. She would go into Hilo and prepare a bath. She falls and injures her shoulder and she can’t perform this duty for her brother. So we go in. I never met the man. We become friends and I’m helping him with his bath. But I believe the camp, the concentration camp or whatever it was, messed up his mind bad. He lives 6 months and he died.”
Wendell’s next endeavor after the fire station, was to raise mules. “I grew up around animals. Cattle, horses, pigs everything. So I always like to go into faraway places like the mountains, the valleys. I always liked to go into Waipio, Waimano and beyond. So I told myself, you know what, I’ve always heard about mules. How great mules were and how nasty mules were and I figured, I’m going to figure this out for myself, if any of this is true.” After researching locally he found that the only mules available were elderly retired plantation mules. Undaunted, he started looking on the mainland and once again, Wendell’s resourcefulness paid off when he located and purchased his prize jack named Ozark and one mule. “Those days they had stock flights, airplanes that came into Hilo. So my first mule and my big old donkey Ozark, my favorite guy, came from Missouri. And he came from Oakland California to Hilo Hawaii on a 747 jet. Flew right in. So that’s how my mule breeding program began.” As always, Wendell and Netta chose the path not taken and forged on to make another of their endeavors work. “All of my cowboy friends they’re all horse people and when I started into this mule venture, they figured I’d really lost it.”
But registered mules were in demand. “I would buy old retired Parker Ranch horses, cowboy horses. Because they were registered horses. Basically quarter horses. And then Ozark, that’s the name of my jack. His entire handle is a: Catalonian Mammoth Registered Goldstar Dappled Red Roan jackass. And he was the only Goldstar registered jackass ever in Hawaii. And the registered mares, I would breed mules off them.”
Wendell’s mules made it possible for him to go to places on the island where few people travel. “I always like to go into faraway places like the mountains, the valleys. I always liked to go into Waipio, Waimano and beyond,” and his mules never let him or Netta down, who reminisces, “We’d go riding. I’d go down this gulch and he’d say, ‘Yes’ and I’d say, ‘No way. I’m getting off.’ And he said, ‘No. Just hand on, sit back and he’ll go.’ Next time I opened my eyes and we’re up already. Didn’t feel anything, you know.”
One of their biggest adventures though was helping Kindy Sproat build a house 2 valleys in from Pololu. Kindy wanted to build another cabin to replace the one he was born in that had been taken by a tsunami. So Wendell got his contractor friend, Jack involved, who promised that if the materials were there, he could build a house in one weekend. Wendell brought in his mules and transported airdropped materials into the valley and good as Jack’s word, by the end of the weekend the cabin was built. That began many happy journeys to Honokanaiki for the Branco family. “So we went in there and built a couple shelves. We built one bed. Box bed with the mattresses on em. Fixed the toilet house. Then we’d spend the weekend. We all loved it.”
When their jack Ozark died ten years ago,Wendell and Netta looked around and noticed Arabica coffee plants, “…from Hamakua’s coffee glory days fended for themselves on our ranch.” So after picking 300 pounds of cherries they found out that no one wanted to buy beans from the Hamakua area. So once again, Wendell and Netta struck out to learn something new and decided to process and roast and sell their own coffee beans. Quite by accident because they couldn’t sell their coffee beans, they learned about aging coffee, which produces a much smoother, more flavorful coffee.
Not having enough coffee cherries on their land, they looked around for other farmers in the area that had coffee trees, which is when they met old time farmers who shared something about the history of coffee in the Hamakua district. Brought in by a couple of traveling missionaries, Arabica coffee has been growing in Hamakua since the early 1800’s and according to Wendell, “To this day, the coffee that exists in these valleys is the same Aribica coffee.” With the sugar plantations came Western ideas, one of them being coffee. “There were people who lived up in the hills, homesteaders. Most of them Japanese. They started taking the coffee plants and planting them up on their homesteads….the people we buying coffee from now, that’s how their farms began.”
Now with the coffee company a going concern, their farm is a center of activity. Netta’s elderly mother, a living treasure with her own quilting story to tell, lives with them and their sons stay in close contact. While doing this interview one of their sons arrived to bring them some dragon fruit and looks of love and admiration. Not too different from the looks they have for each other. After 40 years of marriage and 3 kids they are obviously still in love. Their looks are full of spark, understanding and kindness. Netta and Wendell have created a vortex of Aloha.
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