An abnormally warm winter this year in Minnesota has had the state’s inhabitants thinking of springtime two months early, and among the places Minnesotans have loved to visit on Spring Break, the islands of Hawaii have been a long time favorite. And NWA was taking Northlanders all the way there since the end of 1948:
Initial services started with just three weekly roundtrips using Douglas DC-4 equipment, but NWA would route the double-deck Boeing 377 Stratocruiser to Honolulu in the early 1950s, and the Douglas DC-6 in the late 1950s.
Northwest had already applied for Tokyo – Honolulu – Los Angeles route authority in the late 1940s, but it would take another twenty years for that dream to be realized.
We recently picked up this little gem of a brochure at an antique show, enticed by the images of its cover and back. The 46 pages inside are excerpted from the hotel guest magazine Here’s Hawaii, from the Tongg Publishing Company of Honolulu, with a copyright date of 1957. Subsequently we have seen a similar publication with a Pan Am cover, so it looks like Tongg Publishing ran custom runs of the same basic information.
Inside, there are segments for each of the main islands talking about what to see and do, where to eat and stay, and how to get around, with the most pages dedicated to Oahu. The resort destinations of Kona on the Big Island, and Wailea and Ka’anapali on Maui, were not even conceived of when this guide was published – and even on Oahu, most of the hotels and restaurants famous since the Jet Age had not yet been constructed. So the booklet is a window in time back before statehood and the Elvis films brought truly mass-tourism to the Islands, so hard to see today without getting well away from the main cities and beaches.
Read the full brochure for yourself at https://northwestairlineshistory.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/02/Brochure-NWA_Airventure-Guide-to-Hawaii_1957.pdf
Aloha!
