LeRoy Schmaltz & Bob Van Oosting

Nearly everyone else in this registry put their name on a door. These two never did, and that is the point of them: for sixty-five years, if an American room was going Polynesian, there was a fair chance the carvings, the thatch, the lamps and the lauhala came out of one workshop in Whittier, California. LeRoy Schmaltz and Bob Van Oosting met as students at Mt. San Jacinto College, where LeRoy was carving palm-frond masks for an art project. They started carving them together down by the Rio Hondo, worked out a version that could be made quickly, and sold them to Builder's Emporium five hundred to an order. That was the entire business plan.

What turned it into a trade was Robert Carter, an importer bringing tapa cloth, canoes and tikis back from the South Pacific for Donn Beach and Victor Bergeron. Carter put the two of them to work, and their carving — New Guinea and New Caledonian pieces, Tahitian support posts — began arriving in Trader Vic's and Don the Beachcomber rooms years before their own name meant anything. Then, in 1960, they went to see the places themselves: "3 1/2 months and 37,000 miles, by Air, Boat, Motor-Scooter, Jeep, and Hiking-by-Foot," as their own company history puts it, starting in Hawaii and working west through Tahiti and its outer islands to New Guinea. They came home nearly broke, with buying contacts across the Pacific and a new name for the firm: Oceanic Arts.

After that the shop simply kept growing into bigger buildings — a walnut-packing barn they called the Green Barn, then a small block building, then fifteen thousand square feet on railroad land with its own spur, then the Whittier Boulevard warehouse most pilgrims remember. The client list reads like a table of contents for this whole chart: Don the Beachcomber's rooms in Marina del Rey and Dallas, Kon-Tiki Ports, Tur Mai Kai in Michigan, the Las Vegas Tropicana, Coco Palms on Kauai, the InterContinental at Papeete, Walt Disney World's Polynesian Village Resort, and Disneyland's Enchanted Tiki Room. Some of what came back in those crates would be handled very differently today — by their own account one of them contained a human skull with an arrow hole in it, which ended up at the Mai-Kai in Fort Lauderdale.

The division of labour held for six decades: Van Oosting ran the business and steered what it made, Schmaltz did the carving and the heavy fabrication, and neither of them ever seems to have wanted the other job. "We were supposedly just young punk kids who didn't know anything," Van Oosting told an interviewer in 2016. "We kind of made ourselves an authority." They closed for good in November 2021, both in their late eighties, and the following April the community came to Whittier to say goodbye and to bid on what was left. Schmaltz died that June; Van Oosting outlived him by two years. Between them they never opened a bar — and there is more of their work standing in this trade than any bar owner's.