Joseph Punilei Manini, Sr.
Year Inducted: 2005
Makaweli Ranch | Kaua'i
Pu`u Opae Ranch | Kaua'i
When you have a good ranch hand, you never let him go. That certainly was true about Joseph Manini. He worked for Gay and Robinson’s Makaweli Ranch for nearly 47 years! Every morning he got up early to catch the ranch truck to go to work in Pakala at Makaweli. There he labored, rounding up and branding cattle, fixing fences, clearing and watering the pastures. The Ranch relied upon Joseph to keep the pastures watered for the cattle, which he accomplished by siphoning water from the ditch for the large sprinklers.
One day he called his family around him and told them he had been awarded a Hawaiian Homelands Homestead lease. He shared with them his vision of starting his own ranch, and asked for their commitment to the effort. That’s how Joseph and his family started Pu`u Opae ranch.
Their immediate task was to fence the entire 285 acre parcel as well as some smaller pens of 20 acres each. They accomplished this using a pick and shovel, an o`o stick and spam and tuna cans to dig the post holes. When Joseph had saved enough to get a post- hole digger, he set a quota of setting 50 posts a day on the weekends. All of the work Joseph put in developing his own ranch he did while continuing to work at Makaweli Ranch. How he found time to also go from one end of the island to the other shoeing horses is hard to imagine. When he wasn’t working both ranches or shoeing horses, he was managing Joe’s Saddle and Repair Shop. One day, in 1952, his saddle broke, so Joe became a self-taught Hawaiian saddle maker. The trademark of a true paniolo, Joseph understood the importance of keeping his working equipment in top shape.
After devoting over 50 years of his life to cattle ranching, Joseph took an interest in taro farming. His son is carrying on at Pu`u Opae Ranch.