Outrigger's
Estelle Kelley
dies at 91
She and her husband, Roy,
By Star-Bulletin staff
came to the islands in 1929 and
built their hotel chainEstelle L. Kelley was a team player, just as her parents were when together they built houses as a family business in New Jersey. Later, Kelley and her husband, Roy C. Kelley, built Outrigger Hotels Hawaii, now the state's largest chain with 21 hotels and about 8,000 rooms.
She died at 11 p.m. yesterday at their home in the Outrigger Waikiki Tower Hotel. She was 91. Her husband died on March 6, 1997.
After her parents, George and Hannah Foote, moved to California, she went to Los Angeles High School. She was graduated from the University of California at Los Angeles with a teacher's certificate in business education.
While at college, she met her husband-to-be, Roy, on a blind date.
After graduation, a scarcity of teaching positions led her to become a typist for the Los Angeles Police Department.
She married Kelley in 1929, and four months later, they moved to Honolulu with $15 between them so Roy could pursue his career as an architect.
Her first job here was grading test papers at Kamehameha Schools. She later worked for Judge James Coke until the birth of their son, Richard R., a physician who now heads the family business.
The Kelleys developed their first rental units in Waikiki by adding rooms to their house, doing much of the building themselves.
They built their first hotel, the Islander, after World War II. It pioneered affordable, family-style hotel rooms in Waikiki. From that first hotel, grew the Outrigger Hotels Hawaii chain.
By 1952, she was managing hotel reservation operations full time.
Their Edgewater was Hawaii's first hotel with an automatic elevator and swimming pool.
While the Edgewater's second wing was being developed in 1952, Roy and Richard Kelley were seriously injured in an automobile accident.
Kelley cared for her injured men and two teen-age daughters, and at the same time oversaw the construction and operations of a group of hotels and apartments.
During the next decade, she continued to direct reservation operations for the growing chain without today's computer technology. When she retired in 1969, it took six people and a computer to do her work.
A $10,000 annual scholarship program in Kelley's name was created in 1989 by Outrigger Hotels Hawaii to benefit students in Kapiolani Community College's hotel operations and pre-business transfer programs.
Kelley is survived by son Dr. Richard Kelley; daughters Jean Rolles and Patricia Kelley, and grandchildren and great-grandchildren.
Services are pending.
