March 28, 2023 Aloha!

The Liberty Gazette

March 28, 2023

Ely Air Lines

By Mike Ely and Linda Street-Ely

Mike: The story often begins like this: In 1922, a 16-year-old Canadian girl who had been sent to a convent in Europe found her way out by answering an ad in a Paris newspaper looking for a partner in adventure. 

Idris Galcia Hall Welsh was a tomboy who read voraciously from her step-father’s collection of adventure books and dreamed of sleeping “with the winds of heaven blowing round her head.” She was already an explorer at heart. The gig was run by a Polish adventurer whose name most people couldn’t pronounce, so he gave himself the stage name, Walter Wanderwell. Idris signed up for the deal: to drive around the world in a Ford Model T, and Walter gave her a new name: Aloha Wanderwell. They’d show films from their travelogue, sell photos, and give lectures to make money. 

From that point, her story mostly focuses on the wild tales that came from the years that made her the “world’s most widely traveled girl.” She was a beautiful gal, six feet tall, blue eyes and long blonde hair that twisted and curled like Shirley Temple’s hair did, and she carried a pet monkey. Eventually, the pair married and had two children. Those are a few of the basics. Now let’s get on to the flying – because she did that, too. 

Linda: In 1931, motivated by the desire to search for the lost explorer, Colonel Percival Harrison Fawcett, and the Lost City of Z (the legendary city of Eldorado), which he was looking for when he vanished, she and Walter flew a German seaplane called a Junkers to Descalvados Ranch in Cuibá and set up camp. When they took off to fly over uncharted Mato Grosso in Brazil, their plane ran out of fuel, and they landed on the Paraguay River. Walter hiked out to get help while Aloha stayed in the Amazon basin with the Bororo tribe. They all got along well, and Aloha just kept doing what she had been doing (sans airplane), that is, documenting everything on film. Turned out, hers was the first footage ever taken of this tribe, making it an important contribution to anthropology and other studies of humanity and cultures. The tribe performed a ceremonial dance for the camera and men demonstrated having sympathetic labor pains. God bless them! 

Aloha and Walter never found Percy Fawcett or the lost city, but when they finally got home, she edited the film and released it as, “Flight to the Stone Age Bororos.” They later used some of the footage for other films, “River of Death” and “The Last of the Bororos.” The Smithsonian has copies in their Human Studies Film Archives as does the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences.

Mike: Aloha had wanted the pages of those adventure books to come alive. I’d say she surpassed her dreams, exploring the most exotic places on earth and taking to flying a seaplane like it was just another page in a story to live out. 

ElyAirLines.blogspot.com