Tag Archives: Hawaii

A Visitor from San Francisco

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If you’re new to Mystery Dancer, welcome! The best place to start is at the beginning and go from there.

I LOVE EVERYTHING ABOUT CREATING AND SHARING “Mystery Dancer,” but one of my favorite aspects is the detective work. My husband is amazed by my research skills, and tells me I should work for the NSA. It’s true, I love watching a picture take shape and sharpen as I discover and connect the “dots,” but I think I’ll focus on Ursula for now.

While researching her time in Hawaii, I came across a curious if confusing news item in the July 15, 1928 Honolulu Advertiser.

Honolulu Advertiser clip

Was this news brief from the July 15, 1928 “Honolulu Advertiser” correct?

Continue Reading →

Settling In To Honolulu

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1930s Hawaii tourist brochure

Cover of a 1930s Hawaii Tourist Bureau brochure

If you’re new to Mystery Dancer, welcome! The best place to start is at the beginning and go from there.

A HAWAII TOURIST BUREAU BROCHURE published not long after Ursula traveled to Hawaii boasts, “Visitors are learning rapidly that Hawaii is too beautiful for only a cursory visit, and many of those in circumstances to linger have willingly allowed a casual visit to melt into an endless sojourn.”

This seems to have been the case with Ursula. I don’t know how long she intended to stay in the U.S. territory when she first set out. Perhaps she planned to return to California after a couple of months, but found the Islands so alluring, she felt compelled to settle in indefinitely. I do know that after living at the Moana Hotel for several months, Ursula and Elizabeth’s circles widened beyond beach-going, sightseeing, and hotel reveling; they started to integrate their lives into Honolulu as residents rather than tourists. Continue Reading →

A Hawaiian Romance

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At some point during her Hawaiian adventures, Ursula met a young man named Samuel B. Riddick. I don’t know how they met, but I like to think it was at the Buick car dealership, where he worked as a salesman. It’s possible that Ursula’s friend Elizabeth bought her Buick sedan or had it serviced there, and perhaps Ursula accompanied her, catching Samuel’s eye.

Buick salesmen Honolulu 1928

Samuel B. Riddick worked for a time in his early twenties as a Buick salesman

And why wouldn’t she? She was a beautiful, stylish, vivacious and confident young woman of independent means who was intelligent and well traveled – from Europe to the Grand Canyon. A couple of future news articles (to be revealed in a later post) would mention that they had met and had a romance in Hawaii around this time. Continue Reading →

Welcome to Hawaii!

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And now, back to Ursula in Hawaii. If you haven’t read the first couple of Hawaiian posts recently (or at all), you might want to do so now: Hawaii-Bound and Ursula’s Hawaiian Adventure.

Previously on Mystery Dancer: In January 1928, Ursula and her good friend Elizabeth Everhardy sailed together for six days aboard a luxury cruise-liner from Los Angeles, California to Honolulu, Hawaii. On the 20th of January, they and their fellow passengers stepped ashore on the Central Pacific Island of Oahu to a festive welcome: outrigger canoes and coin divers circling their ship, a throng of greeters festooning them with leis, and women dancing the hula to live Hawaiian music.

1928 Painting of Waikiki Beach

A 1928 painting of Waikiki Beach (with the Diamond Head volcanic crater in the distance) by D.H. Howard Hitchcock

Elizabeth had visited Hawaii four years earlier with her mother, but this was the first time Continue Reading →