The tiki trade is full of men who went looking for the South Seas. Eli Hedley never had to: it washed up at the end of his street. He was a grocer in Oklahoma when the Depression closed him out, and like a few hundred thousand others he drove his wife and four children west and arrived with nothing. What he found at White Point cove in San Pedro — below the crumbling ruins of the Royal Palms resort — was a shoreline that delivered a fresh cargo twice a day: barge timber, ship's rope, Japanese glass floats, bamboo off the decks of wrecked freighters. The family combed it, and in autumn 1945 they began building a house out of what they had picked up. It took two years. Hedley described its rooms in ship's language — galley, bunk room, hold, poop deck — because that is what the material had been.
The joke, in the beginning, was that this was a business at all. LIFE put it that way in January 1946: "one of the weirdest businesses in California," run by "a 42-year-old ex-grocer … who makes a living out of things the Pacific Ocean throws back." Within a few years the joke had become an industry. Department stores took his housewares; Hollywood took his look; the studios and the star houses hired him, and so did the restaurants. When Kelbo's opened on Pico in 1947, the tiki gods and fishnets and glowing blowfish lamps inside were his. So, over the next two decades, were rooms in Santa Monica, Denver, Nashville, Sparks and Lake Tahoe — and, in 1960, three thirty-foot blocks of volcanic featherstone hauled down from a northern Nevada quarry and cut into the moai that guarded the Stardust's Aku Aku. Walt Disney hired him to dress Adventureland at the start, and instead of a fee gave him a shop inside it; for about a decade Hedley sold carvings out of the Island Trade Store, his own and other men's — Milan Guanko's among them.
What makes him the grandfather of the trade is not volume, though the volume was considerable. It is that he arrived at the look from the opposite direction to everyone else. Don the Beachcomber and Trader Vic built a fantasy of the islands and then went shopping for objects to prove it. Hedley started with the objects — real salvage, real sea-worn wood, real rope — and the fantasy assembled itself around them. Every beachcomber bar built since is working from a vocabulary he wrote by picking things up off the sand, and the word he is remembered by is not "designer" or "decorator" but the one he actually earned: the Original Beachcomber.
He retired in the late 1970s to an apartment complex in Santa Ana called the Islander, which he had decorated himself, and died in 1981. The driftwood house is gone — the cove is a county beach now, and only the foundation and a plaque are left. The trade is not gone. His grandson, Ben Bassham, works today as Bamboo Ben, and has built rooms from Alameda to Petaluma to the resurrected Pacific Seas on the fourth floor of Clifton's. Three generations of one family, and the line runs unbroken from a Depression grocer picking up barge timber to a bar that opened in 2023.
Research further: every mention of Hedley across the chart →