Barney West

Almost every founding figure in this trade invented himself. Ernest Gantt became Donn Beach; Victor Bergeron built a persona around a wooden leg and a rum list; a good many of the men who sold America the South Seas had never been further than Catalina. Barney West is the one whose biography is not a costume.

He was born in Seattle in 1919, raised in Oakland, and was studying journalism at Berkeley when the war took him into the Merchant Marine. He served as a steward on Liberty ships running the South Pacific, and his ship was torpedoed. He swam to an island, where the people who lived there took him in and kept him for six months until he was rescued — and during those six months he learned to carve. He stayed at sea fifteen years altogether, and the art of Easter Island, Tahiti, Bora Bora and Hawaii got into him properly, from the places themselves rather than from a picture book.

He came ashore in Sausalito in 1958 and in 1963 set up Tiki Junction on a patch of ground near Zack's, which was a yard and a workshop rather than a bar — tikis, totem poles, ship figureheads, the occasional cigar-store Indian. His first customer was Trader Vic himself, and West's carvings went on to stand outside and inside Trader Vic's restaurants across the United States and beyond. That is the quiet fact worth holding onto: when you look at photographs of the great mid-century Polynesian rooms, a good share of the wood you are looking at was cut by a man who had learned the craft as a castaway, from islanders who had no idea what a supper club was.