Beginning on November 1, 2024, which is the date of my mother’s first letter from her Hawaii trip 84 years ago, I am serializing day by day, the book, Cecilia King’s Extraordinary Senior Trip, which you can obtain from Amazon in either Kindle or paperback.

I hope you enjoy the upcoming nine-months in Hawaii 1940-41. You can order the entire book from Amazon in either paperback or Kindle format, click here.

Honolulu Wednesday, April 16, 1941

Dear Daddy and Mother –

Just sitting down to catch my breath between a day’s laundry and the beauty parlor job – to jot a few lines of news. Max just called to say we’re having dinner at DeRussy tonight with Bob hand & Mully – should be fun. But threw me in circles all over again getting an evening dress pressed & fixed as I hadn’t planned to dress tonight.

Lots of local excitement and tragedy yesterday – five airplane crashes in one day – two deaths, one escape, and two men still missing. Then last night at a sailor soldier dive, an argument over dancing with a wahine left the sailor stabbed to bits! It happened at Ted Lewis’ just across from Kau Kau, so Bob and I got the low-down on it from the car hop when we had supper there last night. She’s married to a sailor. As a matter of fact, we became so interested in the “neighborhood gossip” that we missed the movie we’d planned to see. So just spent the evening puttering around Waikiki – drinking jumbo malts and window shopping.

By the way, I had such a good hula lesson yesterday, that the old Hawaiian had me do an exhibition of one of the steps for the class! Some stuff!