
Boom times did not last. Drew W. King Sr. came to the rescue of the Pelican Hotel in 1928. I was delighted to find the exact date on newspapers.com.
I knew that King Sr. owned and operated the King Hotel in Tullahoma, Tennessee and wondered if he came to Stuart because of a connection with affluent families from the Nashville area who had been guests in the Pelican Hotel. Members of Maxwell House Coffee Cheek family and H. G. Hill family, with 500 grocery stores in Tennessee, were big Pelican Hotel boosters. Newman Cheek built a house adjacent to the hotel that still stands.

After managing the Pelican Hotel for a decade Drew King, Sr. purchased it in 1939 and, with the help of his son Bill, continued to manage it. However, Drew Sr. died in December 1944 at the young age of 61. Two of his three sons were in the US Army. Drew, Jr. was serving in the invasion forces in the Philippines. Grover arrived for the funeral from Camp Beale, California. His daughter, Libba, was married to George Parks Jr. and another daughter, Lillie, was married to Bernard Coker.

Bill and Nina King’s five daughters; Nancy, Kay, Lillie May, Elsie Ann and finally, Quintina, grew up in Stuart and were, and continue to be, very popular. (The Kings’ use of the prefix quin meaning “five” or “fivefold” always makes me smile.)

Running the Pelican Hotel was a family affair. When Sue Fletcher, the girls’ cousin came to visit and help out, she was soon married to the town’s young second generation dentist , Dr. H. H. “Dale” Hipson .
There are so many angles to the Kings’ era at the Pelican Hotel, it will take several blogs to cover them.

I reread the article “Looking down from the Third Floor,” by Christina Martinez, written when she was a South Fork High School Student in 1991. The article about the King girls living in the Pelican Hotel, is in Florida Cracker Sampler produced by South Fork High School teachers Paul Catano and Ron Ashley with a grant from the Florida Endowment for the Humanities. (Now Florida Humanities.)
The Florida Cracker Sampler has been scanned in Martin Digital History and is available to all.
https://www.martindigitalhistory.org/items/show/3468
I think this link will take you right to the PDF of the Florida Cracker Sampler. You can leaf through the whole book. The article about the King sisters is on pages 70-72. The students who wrote the articles and did the interviews are more than “grown up” now.