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To understand what the Royal is now you must first understand what it was, from 1927 through the Thirties, the distant and mildly exotic “pink palace” of the Pacific, the resort built by the Matson Line to rival and surpass such hotels as the Coronado, the Broadmoor, Del Monte. Standing then almost alone on Waikiki, the Royal made Honolulu a place to go, made all things “Hawaiian”—leis, ukuleles, luaus, coconut-leaf hats and the singing of “I Wanna Learn to Speak Hawaiian”—a decade’s craze at country-club dances across the United States. During the fourteen years between the Royal’s opening and Pearl Harbor people came in on the Matson Line’s Malolo and Lurline and they brought with them not only steamer trunks but children and grandchildren and valets and nurses and silver Rolls-Royces and ultramarine-blue Packard roadsters. They “wintered” at the Royal, or “summered” there, or “spent several months.” They came to the Royal to rest “after hunting in South Africa.” They went home “by way of Banff and Lake Louise.
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