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| Beginning on November 1, which is the date of my mother’s first letter from her Hawaii trip 84 years ago, I am going to serialize, 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.
Prologue
Cecilia King (1922-1991) was my mother. In 1940, the year she graduated from high school at age 18, she embarked on a nine-month journey from a small town in Arkansas to stay with her Uncle Edgar King and Aunt Susan in Honolulu.
She chronicled the experience I exquisite detail with hundreds of pages of letters to her parents, Harry and Helen King, living at the time in Beebe, Arkansas (1940 population 1,189). The letters, which would be more accurately described collectively as a diary, along with a scrapbook of mementos, were only examined in detail in 2022.
My brother, Jack, writes:
We necessarily think of our elders as the old people we actually knew, simply because we weren’t there before then – our familiarity with them is that they are older, slow, not very exciting, perhaps not very interesting; but everyone was once young, and frequently had amazing experiences in their youth that equal or exceed anything we ourselves had, but it’s hard to find the windows to that, often limited to a few short family yarns and some old faded pictures.
My brother, Jack, addresses Cecilia’s great grandchildren about Herman Wouk’s “Winds of war.”:
There is a great novel, which you should read, the Winds of War, by Herman Wouk, which portrays with great accuracy, the color, romance, excitement and drama of the long buildup to World War II – While in a way it happened “all of a sudden” for the U.S. with the bombing of Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941, there were huge political, cultural and military goings on throughout the 1930’s in Europe and throughout the world, not unlike Russia into Ukraine now; Germany had invaded Poland in 1939 without cause or justification, destroyed its military and was gathering up Jews and others without rhyme or reason for deportation and work camps, which brought Britain and France into it, and soldiers and civilians were dying by the thousands, cities were being bombed and conquered, and friends, relatives and close political allies of U.S. families were swept into the war. So by 1940, the U.S. was sending ships, guns, and supplies to Britain and France, and losing ships and sailors to German submarines – the U.S. was mobilizing, and there was high political excitement and tension about whether and how the U.S. should react – we having lost over 100,000 young men (and many more maimed) less than 20 years earlier in the fields of Europe during World I - that wasn’t ancient history, that was many fathers, brothers and sons who were missing in U.S. households. Our military was mobilizing, and your granddaddy was part of that, having made a decision after law school in 1938 to go into the military, rather than practice law, because that was where things were happening. Of course, he didn’t know Cecilia at that time, but they were being swept along by the same currents.
So put yourself there, when your great-grandmother, at age 18, just out of high school, boarded a train by herself in Batesville, Arkansas, bound for New Mexico to visit one uncle, enroute to put herself on a steamship across the Pacific to Hawaii to visit a second uncle, where she was to stay for an indefinite amount of time.
She wrote home practically every day to her parents – sometimes including several days in a single letter. The letters were all saved, and will put you amidst the excitement, the romance, the anxious anticipation, in a tropical paradise, where young men and young women are having the best of times but expecting the worst of times -- beautiful young ladies in gorgeous ensembles, flowers in their hair, bedecked with tropical leis, dancing away the tropical nights with dashing young officers - many of whom probably died only months later. She stayed in Hawaii for almost a year, until late summer, 1941, when she steamed and trained home, only a few months before the U.S. fleet was practically destroyed and over 2,400 young men were killed in the December 7, 1941, attack on Pearl Harbor. Grandmother’s Uncle Ed was the medical officer in charge of medical care for those casualties and soon after Pearl Harbor was promoted to Brigadier General.
Although her parents lived in Beebe where her father (my grandfather) was a Methodist pastor, Cecilia had finished high school in Batesville, Arkansas (1940 population 5,267), staying with her grandparents because Batesville was larger with better schools than Beebe,.
It’s not clear what precipitated the Hawaii adventure, but Cecilia’s Aunt Susan appears to be a main driver, and Cecilia responded to her invitation with enthusiasm. Susan had two daughters who, in 1940, were 27 and 30, respectively, both married and living on the mainland. It seems she somewhat took on Cecilia as a “project, with the ultimate goal of finding her a husband from among the numerous bachelor Army and Navy officers in Hawaii.
As you read through the letters, the level of frivolity, indulgence and even hedonism, especially on the eve of WWII, is striking. However, it appears that such was the objective assigned and supervised by Aunt Susan.
On December 5, 1940, Cecilia wrote:
I feel like a snake for being so carefree & playing around & using so much money when you are having to pay so dearly for it. It is hard to keep asking for so much that I don’t deserve. But I’m like a puppet – Aunt Susan and Uncle Ed pull the strings and censor me before I can go on each act.
On March 19, 1941, Cecilia wrote:
…. wish she’d let me go to school or something – but she absolutely wants me to play. For once, probably never again, in my life I’ll get fed up on play, no work, and sleeping.
On June 8, 1941, Cecilia wrote:
Aunt Susan said she thought school wasn’t a good idea at all – and should be where I’d meet men who are the ones I might marry right away, and if that place be here, then I should stay here.
Cecilia’s assignment from Aunt Susan appears to be to have been to socialize, date and party as much as possible, and in that, she excelled. It was not unusual that Cecilia had as many as three or four dates a day with young bachelors, including tennis or beach time in the morning, lunch, and picnics, dinner, dancing or movies in the evening. She stayed out late and slept in.
The trip started and finished with rail travel to and from Arkansas and Los Angeles. The passage to Hawaii was by ship, first going from Los Angels and later returning to San Francisco.
One of her father’s brothers, Arthur, (Cecilia’s uncle,) was an optometrist in El Paso, and a visit with him anchored the brief first leg of her journey across the country by rail and is the subject of the initial letters.
But the real adventure starts in Honolulu, where another brother of her father, Edgar King, and his wife Susan lived. Army Colonel Edgar King, an M.D. in psychiatry, was the ranking medical officer in the Pacific Theater. From November 1940 to July 1941, Cecilia stayed with her Uncle Edgar and Aunt Susan, enjoying access to the perks of a high-ranking Army officer, including access to multiple officers’ clubs and other military base amenities. Honolulu was swarming with young bachelor Army and Navy officers, including a Lieutenant William Westmoreland[1], whom she dated several times.
For the most part, the young officers, the wives of those who were married, and the daughters of military families became almost exclusively her social milieu. Interestingly, the young, junior grade officers she dated and socialized with were typically five years older than she. All had completed college, many having graduated from Annapolis or West Point, and had a few months to a year of training in some previous assignment.
As you can gather from reading her letters, this was the calm before the storm, in retrospect an eerie time that seems to be dominated by social events and reverie just months before the U.S. was plunged into WWII with the bombing of Pearl Harbor, where Uncle Edgar found himself at the top of the chain of command in charge of treating casualties.
In all of Cecilia’s letters, there are only four mentions of “war.” On March 28, 1941, she wrote:
Everything is at a higher tension. Yet no absolute acts of war – haven’t even mentioned sending families home, so guess it can be much worse before any actual action or fear of fighting soon. It may never even touch here.
On April 22, Cecilia wrote:
Last night Bob Dunlop came for dinner – late as usual. And from hellos to goodbyes the conversation only of heated war arguments (I being the only silent neutral fixture). A. Susan & Bob vs Uncle Ed. So this morning A. Susan called me in * said, for the benefit of my social training, that it was an excellent example of what dinner conversation should not be. We got quite a laugh about it after all the drilling she’s given me on dinner parties –
On June 8, 1941, she wrote:
We are definitely feeling the war hysteria over here now, a great change since November. Words, troop movements, armament, preparations are all under tight secrecy. Posts, previously open, are guarded strictly – and even those stationed there enter & leave only with passes.
On June 30, 1941, Cecilia wrote:
… have just finished dinner & listened to the news cast – war is certainly a cloud over us all now. Gen. Short, in command of Haw. Dept. says all Army dependents will probably be evacuated (not officially announced yet) by Sept. on account of food, etc.
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