Check out this find! I was walking through Valu-Village one afternoon when an employee was walking towards me. In her hand she held something that kinda looked like a tiki mug so I stopped her and demanded to know where she was going with it. She said "please, sir, you're hurting my arm. I'm just going to put it on that shelf over there." I told her that she need not waste any more footwork and that I'm commandeering the vessel. It was ugly--the mug, not the situation. I thought to myself, should I get this thing? It's pretty bad. It looked like a home-jobber that some wise-cracker was trying to pull off but then I thought, well at least it's one-of-a-kind. When I brought it home, Kamala looked at it and said that it was really ugly and that I really didn't need it. I told her "yeah, but it's one-of-a-kind." She grabbed it from my hands and was about to smash it on the floor but something stopped her and she looked at it more closely and then said "Hey, this is a Trader Vics." I grabbed it from her and looked and yes, it was! In relief, on the back-side of this ugly mug were the faint words "Trader Vics." SCORE!
Other scores include this classic mug from legendary San Fran (defunct) tiki bar "Tiki Bobs." I got this bad boy from a second-hand store/cobbler shop on Main Street for 5 clams.
From the Book Of Tiki: "....“Sneaky” Bob Bryant had worked as Trader Vic’s bar manager, but when they had a falling out in 1955, Bob moved down a block from the Trader’s Cosmo Place location and opened his own watering hole......The Sneaky Tiki was the specialty of the house, and the Super Sneaky Tiki was served in the signature mug that was yours to take home."
This next tiki was found at an antique shop in New Westminster. It has mother-of-pearl eyes and a maori influence.
I did a little googling about the S.S. Mariposa and found out that it was originally a cargo ship that was converted into a luxury passenger ship. Her maiden voyage was from San Francisco to Sydney, by way of Honolulu and Auckland on October 27, 1956! From what I've found this ship had a real tiki/polynesian theme and I suspect that this tiki was a gift to all (or some) of the ship's first passengers.
Finally, I bring you this decanter of Hawaiian screech. It is from a Hawaiian distillery and is hand-crafted out of lava. It's still half-full of Okolehao. To get at the nectar, one lifts the top piece off (where it reads "Hawaiian"). There is supposed to be a base that it sits on and this base doubled as an ashtray.
I was rummaging around a garage sale one morning in North Vancouver and I spotted it poking out of a box that a man was carrying out. I stopped the man and asked what the deal was. He said, "Please, sir, you're hurting my arm" so I loosened my grip (slightly) and told him to speak up! He told me that it once belonged to Warren Beatty when he rented a house in N. Van during the production of McCabe & Mrs. Miller (1971). According to legend, Beatty and Robert Altman were busy re-writing some scenes for the script one evening when the two men heard a ground-level window breaking. Altman quickly grabbed all the writings and locked himself into the bathroom. He was so scared that it has been said that he not only hyperventilated and passed out, but he wet himself. Warren on the other hand, wasn't going to go out like a little boy and decided to investigate. He grabbed the heftiest object he could find, a near-full-bottle of just opened Okolehao, and headed downstairs. Warren found the scallywag busy routing through some boxes and quietly sneaked up on the hood (turns out that sneaking up quietly wasn't necessary because the rogue was deaf) and clobbered him over the head with the decanter (this is where the crack came from). The louse collapsed "like a wet sack of boiled spuds" and Warren called the police.
don't even try to tread on Warren
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