Hawaii Performing Roller Club
Kulia I Ka Nu'u - "Strive for the Highest"
"The most important thing no one should forget is that this is a hobby and a hobby should be for fun!" ~ Heine Bijker
Tom Mendes: Don’t forget the late Zane Miyashita in Mountain View. He helped us get started with our NBRC affiliation as an official NBRC region. He also encouraged us to be competitive even though we were just starting out.
Robert Perry: Yes, I forgot Zane had many friends in the NBRC and he got the NBRC to make us a region even before we started to do club flies. They the NBRC finally told us we needed to participate or we'd lose our region and if we wanted to go back one day we'd be put in one of the California regions so we started our club flies. Our scores were anywhere from a DQ to 35 points...lol.. I guess things got better over the years. I do feel the importation of all the birds have made us a better group of roller guys and gals... but yes Zane has done us a big one for sure.
15 years later, in 2014, we have over 20 members on 2 islands and 2 NBRC 20-Bird National Champions, with more to come in the near future.
The Start of Something Awesome
Robert Perry
This all started in 1998. I started raising rollers and started to seek out others who flew my “newly favoritests” pigeon ever. I would drive around on the weekends and look for pigeons flying. One day I saw some birds flying in Waipahu and followed them to where they landed. I went to the house and found out that it was the wrong house; the birds had landed on their neighbors’ house. I went to the house next door and found Rodman Pasco.
I visited him a few times and asked to buy a few birds from him. He would fill up a box full of birds that I could choose from, but by the time I would leave, Rodman would have taken all of the birds out of the box. I think he changed his mind about wanting to sell those birds. This went on for two weekends. I gave up on trying to buy birds from Rodman but Rodman did give me the phone number to Ale Lacuesta.
I visited Ale and got to know him well. We started to talk about putting a club together. Next I found Irving Pang and then Kevin Ancog. Next was Dennis Nakashima. We did family loft visits with the wives and kids in tow. The group of fliers I was finding was getting bigger so we, (as in me and Ale), decided it was the right time. We did more visits and tossed the idea around with those we saw.
In 1999 we had our first meeting at Dennis Nakashima’s house with me, Ale Lacuesta, Dennis Nakashima, Irving Pang, Tom Mendes, and Rodman Pasco and from the Big Island, Zane Miyashita, the HPRC was official. I was the first President, Dennis Nakashima was the Treasurer and Ale Lacuesta the Secretary, and as they say “The rest is history”.
Aloha, Rob.....
