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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 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, Monday, November 25, 1940
4534 Kahala Ave
Honolulu H.
Dear Daddy & Mother –
Am just jotting this for Uncle Ed to get off on the clipper tomorrow – he wanted to radio the message but I didn’t quite feel the financial strength to do so. Speaking of money, I am going to need some money by the end of the month anyway but have explained for why & how much. And think by Christmas I will have to have another evening dress – not taffeta & not net – maybe with a jacket – need a formal (very) chiffon or something and a rather informal evening dress for game nights. So whichever & whenever you can get something of the sort – keep it in mind or send it out because it is impossible to get a thing here unless I pay horrible prices – even to have it made. And it takes so long to get mail back & forth that I thought I’d send a little previous warning.
About this other business – Uncle Ed is very anxious for me to get a drivers license right away – and thinks that being under 21 I will have to have both of your written dated consent to do it (according to Oahu law) so please send it return mail by air if you possibly can.
Will send volume III by steamer, so it will be about two weeks getting there. Am very anxious to hear how you all are – where we live – where Carol and Pink are – about the rug business.
An Arkansas Gazette would really look beautiful right now. But, then, so does Honolulu.
Uncle Ed has been drilling me on traffic rules, etc. all day so I can hop through the test. So please send the consent as soon as possible or else I’ll have another radio gram on my last of the month bill in addition to about forty eleven ten other things from the PX & Shafter doings.
Am awfully anxious to hear from you ---
Love, Cecilia
Editor’s Note:
“The Clipper;” The Martin M-130 was a commercial flying boat designed and built in 1935 by the Glenn L. Martin Company in Baltimore, Maryland, for Pan American Airways. Three were built: the China Clipper, the Philippine Clipper and the Hawaii Clipper. All three had crashed by 1945. A similar flying boat, (the Martin 156), named Russian Clipper, built for the Soviet Union, had a larger wing (giving it greater range) and twin vertical stabilizers. Martin named them the Martin Ocean Transports, but to the public they were the "China Clippers", a name that became a generic term for Pan Am's large flying boats - including, retroactively, the smaller Sikorsky S-42 (first flown in 1931) and larger Boeing 314 (first flown in 1938). ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Martin_M-130)
Carol’s husband, Charles Pinkney Reid
Cecilia’s mother, Helen Martin King had become an expert on hooked rugs, a designer of hooked rug patterns and a purveyor of materials for rug hooking. “She created over 1,000 original rug designs and served as a consultant with the Putnam Dye Company and the Dorr Mills of New England in order to acquire materials that met her exacting specifications. She created cottage industries in Batesville and Searcy, providing jobs in the cutting of stencils and in the printing and assembling of rug kits for sale throughout the United States. In 1940, an article about her appeared in Life, and she was featured in National Geographic magazine in 1946” (https://encyclopediaofarkansas.net/entries/helen-martin-king-1690/)
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