Press Photo of Rikan Konishi with the “Pele’s Transport” Cage He Used to Retrieve the Remains of Margaret Enos and Sylvester Nunes from Kīlauea Crater, Island of Hawai’i, June 1932.
New York City: ACME Newspictures, June 23, 1932. Photograph measuring 8 ¾ x 6 ½ inches. With caption, ACME and N.E.A stamps, manuscript, and later sticker verso. Slightly wrinkled; excellent. Item #List3885 A photograph of Rikan Konishi (1887–1982) with the “Pele’s Transport” cage, part of the contraption he used to retrieve the bodies of Margaret Enos and Sylvester Nunes from Kīlauea Crater in June 1932. On June 2, after Enos, a high school student, had rejected one too many of Nunes’ marriage proposals, Nunes kidnapped her from her home in Hilo. He drove her to Kīlauea where he shot her and then jumped, with her body, into the 900-foot-deep crater. The National Park Service first decided that recovering the bodies would be impossibly dangerous, and suggested a funeral at the edge of the crater and burial by creating an avalanche into it. However, Rikan Konishi, a local contractor, offered to make the recovery for a payment of $1,000. The story of Konishi’s daring retrieval is told in detail in the August 1932 edition of the Park Service Bulletin.[1] Here, Konishi stands with a crowd of men and an NPS ranger beside the box he constructed to descend into the crater, labeled “Pele’s Transport.” In Hawaiian mythology, Pele is the goddess of fire and volcanoes who resides in Kīlauea. [1] “The Hawaii Tragedy (From the July Report of Superintendent Leavitt),” Park Service Bulletin 2, no. 6 (August, 1932): 25–30.
Price: $350.00