William Westenhaver

Nearly every carver on this chart worked one commission at a time — a client, a room, a set of figures cut for that room and no other. William Westenhaver worked in editions. Born in Aberdeen, Washington, a Grays Harbor timber town, in June 1925, he was an artist by training and a manufacturer by circumstance: the company he founded with his cousin Robert Post Jr. at the end of the 1950s, Western International Trading Co., began by importing art and mosaics out of Central and South America. It was Westenhaver who proposed they stop importing the tropics and start carving them. After a Los Angeles furniture show at the close of 1958 the carvings were the business, and the firm's contraction — Witco — became the most widely distributed name in American tiki decor.

The work came out of a plant in Mount Vernon, in Washington's Skagit Valley: western red cedar, soft and open-grained, roughed out with a chainsaw, finished by hand, then torched and stained dark. What Witco sold was not a commission but a catalogue — bars and stools, tables and chairs, bedposts, masks, totems, hanging lamps, menu holders — and the catalogue went everywhere. Witco built the furniture for the three-peaked longhouse on Seattle's Pier 51 and furnished a round room with a bar in the middle of it in Key West; a Witco fountain was the emblem the Mainlander printed on its matchbooks in Clayton, Missouri; Witco panels lined a motel dining room above the Ohio River outside Pittsburgh. The largest gathering of it anywhere is still standing and still pouring — the Hala Kahiki in River Grove, Illinois, room after bamboo-lined room of it.

The trade has never entirely known what to do with him. A Witco piece was a product, ordered off a page, and the one-chisel carvers were doing something else entirely. But the catalogue is the reason a great many rooms had any carving at all: a neighbourhood Chinese-Polynesian restaurant in Worcester or a bowling-alley lounge in north Seattle could not commission a monumental tiki, and could order a Witco mask. And the sameness collectors once held against the work is now the most useful thing about it — a Witco piece is identifiable on sight, so a photograph of a room nobody thought to document can still be read and dated. In this registry his is the most frequently recorded decor credit of any maker, which is to say his hand shows up in more of these vanished rooms than anyone else's.

Production stopped in 1979. Westenhaver kept carving on his own account, and through the 1980s made etchings and watercolours — nautical scenes, mostly. In 1998 he began handing the whole method to Ken Pleasant, his granddaughter Heather's husband, working on the factory's own vintage chainsaws slung from a pulley to carry their weight; the Pleasants hold the Witco name and carve to his designs still. He died on Whidbey Island on December 14, 2016, at ninety-one. As for the story everyone tells about him — that Witco furnished Elvis Presley's Jungle Room at Graceland — the published tiki literature states it flatly, and Graceland's own archivists told the Chicago Sun-Times they cannot confirm it, because the receipts do not survive. The furniture looks like his. Nobody has the paperwork.