Milan Guanko

Milan Flores Guanko learned to carve from his father in the Philippines and brought the skill with him to the United States in 1928, at twenty-two. For years it was a sideline. By the Second World War it was the whole living, and what followed was one of the odder careers in American décor — a Filipino craftsman supplying the props for an invented Polynesia, working out of a lot at Gray's Nursery on Beach Boulevard in Westminster where the public could walk up and buy a god off the shelf.

His work travelled a great deal further than he did. The signature tiki at Ren Clark's Polynesian Village in Fort Worth was his; so was the monumental carving that met diners at the Islands in Phoenix, and the population of the Miramar's Polynesian room in Santa Monica, which Eli Hedley dressed. Hedley also sold Guanko's carvings out of the Island Trade Store inside Disneyland's Adventureland, which is as close as the documented record comes to putting his hand in the park. Collectors read his style in the surviving postcards of the Hawaiian I in Las Vegas. He was one of two Filipino carvers working Los Angeles in those years — Andres Bumatay was the other — and the two names travel together through the Southern California record, both of them supplying the Cabang family's Royal Hawaiian down in Laguna Beach. The largest surviving group of his carvings stands in Tucson, where the Kon Tiki has kept at least a dozen since 1963: the idol at the door is his, and the house mug is modelled on it.

A photograph ran in the Reno Evening Gazette in 1958 showing a carver at work on the tikis for Dick Graves's new Trader Dick's in Sparks. The caption gives his name only as “Milano” and calls him a native of the South Pacific; the decorator and designer it credits by full name is Eli Hedley. Collectors who have set that picture beside the portrait on page 249 of Sven Kirsten's Book of Tiki believe the carver is Guanko. If they are right, the clipping is a small and exact record of how the trade worked — the man holding the chisel was Filipino, the man with the byline was the designer, and the newspaper turned the craftsman into scenery.

He kept at it after the rooms began to close, moved the shop to Glendale, and died there in 1994 at eighty-seven. There is no monograph, no archive of drawings, no shop that carried on his name. The estate is the work itself, scattered across a country that has largely forgotten where it came from — some of it still standing where it was installed, a great deal more of it carried home in the back of somebody's car.