PREFACE

The heart of the Aloha Wanderwell story spans twenty-seven years, from 1906 to 1933, beginning with the early years of a young girl named Idris on Vancouver Island, through her teenage debut as “Aloha” in the South of France, and across ten years of adventures on the road, travelling around the world by automobile.

Twenty-seven years is a relatively short period in a normal life; however, Aloha’s life was anything but normal. Her adventures — the places she travelled, the people she met, the things she achieved and endured — would fill several volumes. The challenge in conveying her story wasn’t just deciding what should go in, but making tough calls about what should be left out. That’s not to say that her story was easy to tell. Many of her achievements, especially in less industrialized parts of the world, have been lost to history. And even many of her activities in Europe and North America have not been remembered or recorded over the years, so we’ve had to piece together many of her life’s details from a bewildering variety of sources, including 254 print resources, dozens of visual archives, and the collections of family members who so generously shared what they had. Other important sources were Aloha’s ghostwritten autobiography (Call To Adventure!, 1939), her unpublished 679-page hand-typed, double-sided reminiscences (“The Driving Passion”), her handwritten log books and diaries from the period, as well as letters, cards, notes, candid family photos, and mementoes.

Even these sources left out many crucial aspects of her life story, which is why we undertook ten years of research in archives and repositories in more than a dozen cities worldwide. Along the way, we uncovered historical documents, maps, charts, films, videotapes, microfilm, and audio recordings within university collections and museums and buried in the stacks within the Library of Congress, the Smithsonian Institution, and the National Archives at College Park, Maryland. We also filed more than sixty American Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests, and a half-dozen Canadian Access to Information Act (ATI) requests. As for online resources, until very recently the Internet “history” of Aloha revealed only a handful of arcane references containing mostly inaccurate information. That’s not surprising, since the name, notoriety, and accomplishments of Aloha Wanderwell have long since drifted into the fog of a bygone era.

Since the 1960s, others have attempted to tell Aloha’s story in various forms; Aloha herself tried to publish a second book about her travels and life experience. We know of six other biographies that also failed to gain traction due to the lack of credible sources and references. Discovering the “real” Aloha has been no easy task.

It was in comparing “official” archives with original source materials, and also against third-party accounts including newspapers, that we came to a dramatic realization: Aloha’s life and times were far more sensational, thrilling, adventurous, life-threatening, death-defying, rewarding, and devastating — not to mention of greater historical significance — than even her own recollections and writings would have anyone believe.

The challenge any biographer faces is to distill the endless “facts” of someone’s life into a coherent and compelling narrative. In Aloha’s case, however, this task was made considerably more difficult by her dogged attempts to revise, reinterpret, or flat-out fabricate some of the events in her life. She had her own ideas about how she wanted to be remembered, the facts be damned. But facts matter, which is why we undertook such a protracted, expensive, and often frustrating research adventure. It was, truly, the only possible way to accurately reconstruct her life, tell her story, and return her legacy to its rightful place in history.

Aloha’s story began over a century ago, during the social, political, and economic upheavals of the early 1900s. The events of those years set the stage: a young girl drove off on a global adventure, set world records that have yet to be broken, entertained audiences around the world, and created a life that only Hollywood could compete with.

No wonder Aloha Wanderwell became known far and wide as “the Amelia Earhart of the open road.”

 

Randolph Eustace-Walden

Christian Fink-Jensen

October 2016