Vintage Honolulu Broom Factory Hula Girl Label 🖼️ Hawaiian Chromolithograph Advertising, Honolulu Hawaii Broom Advertising Label #2

Why a Hula Girl on a Honolulu Broom Label? 🌺 A Hula Girl With a Broom

Size: 5 3/4" x 4" ~ Bright, unfaded color, clean edges, never pasted to a broom.

I'm a sucker for old advertising labels, and this one's a favorite: a hula dancer, lei and grass skirt and all, sweeping the floor with a straw broom. She stands mid-sweep in front of two palm trees and pale rocks under a blue sky, dark hair loose, a red-and-white checked headband, a full lei of red and yellow blossoms, a yellow grass skirt and one bare foot forward on a red floor. Below her a crowned shield carries the numeral 2 over HONOLULU BROOM FACTORY, HONOLULU, HAWAII, all inside a border of green triangles on brown. No printer's imprint and no date.

🧹 Three Generations of Brooms

The Honolulu Broom Factory goes back to Wah Hin Lum, who came to Hawaii from China as a young boy around the turn of the last century to join his father. The story he passed down is that the neighborhood kids teased him until he learned English and cut off the pigtail he wore. At 16 he went to work for a clothing-store owner who became his mentor and taught him how to run a business, and in 1923 he opened his own broom factory, next door to his father's grocery on Vineyard Street near River Street, at the edge of Chinatown. The city directories still had it on North Vineyard in 1932 and 1940. His son ran it until he died in 1993, and then his grandson Brian Lum took over, by then on King Street in Kalihi-Palama. In 2002 Lum and three long-time employees, including master broom maker Sze Kee Yeung, who had been making brooms there since 1964, were turning out about 2,000 brooms a month. A newspaper reporter who watched them work came away saying there was both art and science to making the perfect broom. By 2011 it was called the only broom factory left in Hawaii.

Old-timers remember the Chinatown streets around that first shop, with the herbalists, noodle shops and temples, and the Lums' brooms right there among them. And at City Mill, the hardware chain that carried them, customers just asked for "the hula broom."

Broom-making was a real trade of its own long before the vacuum cleaner came along and made it seem old-fashioned. A broom starts as broomcorn, a sorghum grown for its long, fibrous tassels, and back when every broom was sewn by hand, one took about fifteen minutes to make. In Wah Hin Lum's day the brooms were made entirely of broomcorn. His grandson Brian said their brooms had the same basic makings as anybody else's, and the difference was all in how they were put together, starting with just the right amount of straw on the handle. "With practice, you know how much to grab," he said. He also admitted he once figured vacuum cleaners would put him out of business. They didn't, and I'm glad of it.

🎨 The Hula Girl Herself

The company dates its hula-girl logo to 1935, and by then the hula dancer had been Hawaii's calling card on the mainland for better than thirty years. In 1903 the islands' merchants and hotel people put together the Hawaii Promotion Committee, which turned out brochures and souvenir postcards and sent troupes of hula dancers touring the country. Then at the 1915 Panama-Pacific Exposition in San Francisco, the Hawaiian pavilion's daily shows of island music and hula drew the biggest crowds of the whole fair and set off a mainland craze for anything Hawaiian. Tin Pan Alley answered with songs like "Hula Hula Dream Girl" (1924), with island scenery on the sheet-music covers. So 1935 put her right in the golden age of Hawaii's hula-girl advertising. Matson Navigation had opened the Royal Hawaiian Hotel and launched the liner Malolo in 1927, and its travel ads of the late 1930s made the hula dancer the face of the islands. Pualani Mossman, who danced at the Royal Hawaiian's opening, became the Matson poster girl in 1937. DeSoto Brown's book "Hawaii Recalls" shows this very broom label next to hula girls on soda bottles and macadamia-nut cans. One Hawaiiana book dates the design to the 1920s, but the company says 1935, and the Kovels point out that labels reading "Honolulu, Hawaii" instead of "Territory of Hawaii" usually come after statehood in 1959. Either way, she's been sweeping for a long time.