Andres Bumatay

For fifty years the tiki record held Andres Bumatay as one of the two Filipino carvers working Los Angeles in the boom years, the name that travels beside Milan Guanko's through the Southern California scene. Half of that is right. He was born in Kona, on the island of Hawai‘i, the youngest of five children of a Filipino father and a Native Hawaiian mother; the surname was not even his father's, but his father's mother's maiden name, taken by a man born Bacilio Narte before he left the Philippines for the islands. The account comes from Bumatay's daughter, Andrea Kanuha Bumatay-Jefferson, who wrote it out on Tiki Central in July 2015, and it is the only substantial biography of him that exists anywhere.

What he made in California he made in a few short years, as a bachelor, before a family and a steady job. His tikis stood on the sidewalk in front of the Sea and Jungle import store on San Fernando Road, and two of them fronted the Royal Hawaiian in Laguna Beach, whose owners — the Cabangs, Filipino themselves — were friendly with the carvers working up the coast. One stands at the back of a period photograph of Kelbo's on Pico. He and Richard Ellis, the apprentice he had taught in the 1950s, are jointly credited with the redwood poles that dressed a run of Los Angeles apartment houses built to lean tropical — the Polynesian Village in Playa del Rey, the Kona Kai in Rosemead, the Kona Pali in Granada Hills. In 1958 he was carving for a Long Beach nursery whose owner, uneasy with the word tiki, was calling the pieces aumakua instead.

Then the style got away from the man. Around 1961 the Otagiri Mercantile Company took one of his carvings, made a ceramic mug of it, and sold it through the Chicago wholesaler Johnson Products to bars that had never met him — which is why the most reproduced object of his career turns up stamped underneath with the names of rooms he never worked in, Hala Kahiki among them. The complication runs deeper than that. Collectors who have looked hardest at the attributions now credit the great tiki at the Islander in Stockton — the carving the famous mug is usually said to have come from — to Ellis rather than to Bumatay; the two hands are, in one collector's phrase, indistinguishable to a non-carver's eyes. So a Bumatay has become a word for a look at least as often as a credit for a piece, and this page names two rooms and stops, because two is what the evidence carries.

He left. He met his wife through her brothers, moved north to Washington, and went to work at Todd Shipyard in Seattle, where he stayed until he retired in 1996; he died at sixty-four. He kept carving — a tiki with two round shelves for his daughters' things, a profile of a Hawaiian girl in plumeria as a wedding present, two more for the Seattle nightclub where he played in his own Hawaiian band — but he did not talk about California, and his family did not know the work was collected until 2015, when Andrea went looking online for a photograph of her late brother and found strangers discussing her father's tikis instead. “When I looked at the newspaper clippings,” she wrote, “it touched my heart and it immediately brought tears to my eyes, I sighed and said, it is my dad.”