Frank "Skipper" Kent

Most of the tiki barons bought their South Seas by the crate. Frank Kent sailed for his. Born in San Francisco one month after the 1906 earthquake — his family lost everything in it and started over on a Hayward farm — Kent was working as a salesman for the Continental Baking Company when he spent three years building himself a 38-foot double-ended ketch. He named her Magic Carpet, and with his wife Lucille aboard he crossed the Pacific collecting the folk art, weapons, jade, and curios that would one day hang on his walls. He raced, too — twice taking second in the Transpacific Yacht Race — and reportedly shared deck time with Humphrey Bogart and Errol Flynn.

On May 13, 1942, Kent and partner "Hafe" Hafer opened Zombie Village at San Pablo and 65th in Oakland — directly across the street from the original Trader Vic's, making one intersection the axis of East Bay Polynesian pop and Vic Bergeron his neighbor and rival. Two years later Kent carried the formula across the bay and put his own name on the door at 1040 Columbus Avenue in North Beach. Skipper Kent's was the more personal room: driftwood and ship's wheels on the walls, a fountain of Japanese glass floats, tropical plants he grew himself in Walnut Creek hothouses, a curio shop that would trade drinks for South Seas artifacts, and a bar claiming 160 kinds of rum. The menu carried his manifesto in a footnote: "Drinks originated by the Skipper but copied by many."

The empire ended the way empires do — the Oakland room burned in 1967, the San Francisco room faded around the end of the decade, and the collection was eventually dispersed through a family gallery. But Kent's is the rare ghost story with a standing hull: 1040 Columbus never came down, and behind later tenants' signage the bamboo trim and lauhala matting of the original room survived in plain sight. Among the men who invented the tiki restaurant, most were showmen first. The Skipper was a sailor first — and the walls were his logbook.