Aloha Wanderwell: The Border-Smashing, Record-Setting Life of the World's Youngest Explorer
CBC Books | CBC | Posted: September 12, 2017 8:40 PM | Last Updated: September 12, 2017
Christian Fink-Jensen & Randolph Eustace-Walden
In 1922, a 16-year- old Canadian girl, fed up with life in a French convent school, answered an ad for a travelling secretary. Tall, blonde, and swaggering with confidence, she landed the job. Her assignment was to become the first woman to drive around the world. Her name was Aloha Wanderwell.
Aloha's mission was foolhardy in the extreme. Cars were alien to much of the world, and drivable roads were scarce. The Wanderwell Expedition modified a Ford Model T for the journey, with gun scabbards and a sloped back that could fold out to become a darkroom. All that remained was for Aloha to learn how to drive.
Aloha became world-famous. She was photographed in front of the Eiffel Tower, parked on the back of the Sphinx, firing mortars in China, shaking hands with Mussolini, and smiling at a ticker tape parade in Detroit. By the time she was 25, she had become a pilot, a film star, an ambassador for world peace, and the centrepiece of one of the biggest unsolved murder mysteries in California history. Her story defied belief, but it was true. Every bit of it. Except for her name.
Drawing upon Aloha's diaries and travel logs, as well as films, photographs, newspaper accounts, and previously classified government documents, Aloha Wanderwell tells the astonishing story of one of the greatest — and most outrageous — explorers of the 1920s. (From Goose Lane Editions)
From the book
Aloha arrived in Paris with just one hundred francs in her pocket. She arranged to meet the captain at the Paris Ford Agency, where she was thankful they were "in the usual fishbowl crowd or I would surely have rushed up to him like a fool." The agency had arranged a photo shoot to christen Wanderwell #3 — Cap's new creation and, as he spun it, the car that would represent the City of Light in the Wanderwell Around the World Endurance Contest, or WAWEC. He'd built the car himself, starting with the chassis of a 1917 Red Cross ambulance to which he added a host of new components, including a gleaming dashboard, floorboards, and headlights. Most remarkable, however, was the body. Instead of the light gauge steel used for Unit #2, he opted for aluminum. "The metal of future cars, airplanes, anything!" he crowed. His enthusiasm for the automotive uses of aluminum was prophetic. Major auto manufacturers would not start using aluminum components until the late twentieth century.
Aloha was impressed. "She had sleek lines, lower sides, wider comfort, leg room. It was love at first sight." Her enthusiasm doubled when the captain told her the car would be hers to pilot. "My very own Jolly-Boat. I quickly took an initial fling behind the wheel. She purred. . . . With muffler, her throb was smooth. [She was] built for derring-do."
Adding to Aloha's excitement was the multinational crew the captain had assembled. There were two war veterans: one solidly built American named Eddie Sommers and a gangly German-Pole called Stefanowi Jarocki, former enemies who once "tossed grenades, fired at, cursed each other across the barbed wire. Now they united efforts in horizon chasing." There was also a blond Dutch girl called Lijntje van Appelterre, more widely known as Mrs. Siki, wife of a French-Senegalese boxer known as Battling Siki. Siki had recently become the world's first black light heavyweight champion, defeating Frenchman Georges Carpentier with a knockout punch. Convincing a celebrity wife to join the expedition was a stroke of marketing genius.
For Aloha, though, the most interesting new member was pretty seventeen-year-old Amanda Hoertig, "from South America, richly dark, handsome; she and I really hit it off together." Amanda, who they'd nicknamed "La Princesse," had been Wanderwell's interpreter since Bordeaux and quickly built a reputation as an artiste de hoopla, a free spirit with infectious energy and little regard for social norms. Even Cap, usually so serious, couldn't help admiring her expansive effervescence. "Full of the joy of living," he said, "uninhibited as a young puppy."
From Aloha Wanderwell: The Border-Smashing, Record-Setting Life of the World's Youngest Explorer by Christian Fink-Jensen and Randolph Eustace-Walden © 2016. Published by Goose Lane Editions.