José Valencia "Popo" Galsini

Almost every name in tiki belongs to someone who owned a room. Popo Galsini never did. He was born José Valencia Galsini in Bautista, in the Philippines, in 1900, crossed to San Francisco in 1928 aboard a Japanese liner, and spent the next forty-odd years working the front bar of other people's tropical restaurants up and down Southern California — a dozen of them at least, rarely for more than three or four years at a time. He is on this chart because he was probably the best competition bartender the tiki era produced, and because one of his drinks outlived every room he ever poured in.

The list of his postings reads like a gazetteer of the Southern California scene: the Tropics on Vine Street by 1941; the Palm Springs Tennis Club in 1948; Kelbo's Hawaiian barbecue in the early fifties; The Islands out in Phoenix in 1958; the Hukilau at the Long Beach Marina; Billingsley's Outrigger at Laguna Beach from 1962; The Palms in Anaheim; the Kona Kai in Huntington Beach; Fisherman's Grotto in San Francisco; the Disneyland Hotel; and, at eighty-one, a bar in Laguna Beach where a reporter thought he looked about fifty-five and a regular said simply, "I just love him, he's so cute."

What he did with his evenings off was enter contests, and win them. He took third in the California Bartenders Guild competition in 1952, first in 1953 with a drink called the Pekake, and kept placing for the next fifteen years. In about 1966, tending bar at the Kona Kai in Huntington Beach — a room full of Douglas Aircraft engineers — he built a gin drink around passion fruit, lemon, falernum and orgeat and named it after the rocket plane those engineers were all talking about: the X-15. Then the Apollo 1 fire killed three astronauts in January 1967, and Galsini quietly renamed his drink for a different rocket. As the Saturn, it won the Guild competition that May and carried him onto the United States team at the world championship in Mallorca that November, where the Americans took first place.

Then he vanished from the record. He died in September 1982 after his car hit a tree, and the drink went with him — until the mid-1990s, when Jeff "Beachbum" Berry turned over a commemorative bartenders' guild rocks glass in a thrift store and found the recipe printed on the side. Berry put the Saturn back into circulation, and it is now poured in tiki bars that have never heard the name of the man who made it, in rooms he would have recognised instantly, having worked in a dozen just like them.