Introduction

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Page 384

WE CREPT up on Oahu in the night and awoke to find ourselves anchored in Honolulu harbor, the guests of hospitable Hawaii.
The transport was surrounded by the famous "diving boys" who meet every incoming ship and proudly display their astounding aquatic skill.
Lithe, brown-skinned, graceful pocket editions of the renowned "Duke" himself, whom we met later at Waikiki, they were only
too eager to dive from the crow's nest for a ten-cent piece or chase a handful of pennies down to the very bottom of the bay.
...
From the day I learned to "toddle" I had always wanted to see the beach at Waikiki.
Irving Berlin and a score of other spellbinders had invested it with a romantic glamour and chimerical charm that enslaved my fancy and made me rush to Waikiki before I had found a place to park my suitcase.
Nor was I disillusioned.
...
The "nut-brown maidens" that you read about were on the beach when we arrived, but their bathing suits were far less startling - and more in evidence - than the suits you see at Coronado or Atlantic City.
Scores of tourists from the States were sprawled on the sands, and Duke Kahanomoku was teaching a fair Bostonian how to navigate a surf-board.
Our artificial thrill-producers such as "scenic railways" and "shooting the chutes" seem tawdry, ineffectual, mechanical toys after you have mastered your surf-board or outrigger canoe and raced shoreward on the curling mane of a roaring breaker at 40 miles an hour; it is like comparing a turn in a ferris wheel to a flight in a fast plane.
The average temperature of the water is 74 degrees, and moon-light bathing parties are enjoyable as well as popftar.
To be "in the swim" you must join the "After-the-Ball

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Swimming Club" which meets every night after the orchestra has played "Home, Sweet Home."
The Duke deserted his fair pupil long enough to tell us that we must see the Pali, so after a hurried lunch at the beautiful and strictly modern Moana Hotel that overlooks Waikiki we hired a powerful looking car and started up the hills.

Pages 424-425: Plates

On the Beach, Waikiki. Fair Devotees of the Surf-board (Visiting members of the Los Angeles Athletic Club, including diver Mary Aileen Allen, left.)

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Infantry Journal Journal of the United States Infantry Association Washington, D.C Volume 20 Number 4, April 1922. Hathi Trust https://hdl.handle.net/2027/uc1.b2861502

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