Post #106032 by tikijackalope on Tue, Aug 3, 2004 5:25 PM

As I survey the aisles of Target and squeeze past 20-somethings in Hawaiian shirts at Spencer's, I wonder what it was like to be a tikiphile in the classic period...say, 1950's and 60's.

Most of us know the historic overview well enough from sources like the Book of Tiki; we know the big picture of the rise and decline of tiki. We also have a good mental picture of the proliferation and attrition of tiki bars, but what I wonder about is the minutia of living in that period and wanting tiki stuff for your home.

We know what the mugs, masks, etc. looked like then because they've trickled down to us, but when that trickle was a torrent, where did it flow? Did "respectable" department stores like Macy's have tiki mugs in the "Notions" department? This would have been before the age of the huge discount stores, but what about lower-end places of the period like Woolworth's and Ben Franklin?

I get the impression that some mug manufacturers (i.e. Daga) sold only to bars and restaurants while others (i.e Westwood, PMP) offered mugs to retailers. But what about Orchids of Hawaii? I've seen no Daga mugs that didn't have the name of a specific place, but I've seen lots of generic OoH mugs.

The spike in the current tiki trend probably won't last out the year, a victim not only of trendy public tastes but of boardroom meetings to predict the next hot thing (i.e. Spencer's moving toward a Vegas look). However, the classic period of tiki was well over a decade long, so, since merchants like for stock to change every so often, did mug and decor makers introduce new models every season which we now think of as from one period because we have a distant, telescoped view of them?

It'd be great if there was an online source or a book that showed manufacturers' catalogs from post-WWII through the Vietnam era. In the 1980's there was a book called The Big Toy Box at Sears that reprinted Sears Christmas catalog toy sections from about 1950 to 1970 and thus gave a great cultural overview of what was going on if you read between the lines (i.e. GI Joe ceases to be a soldier and becomes an adventurer at about the same time that soldiers burning grass huts on the evening news helped make tiki not so cool). Lacking such a compilation book for mug and decor manufacturers, TC seems to be the place to ask.

As to decor, did furniture stores across the US sell Witco or was a niche market confined to large urban areas and the coasts?

Were there tiki aficionados in the 60's and 70's that sought the stuff of the 50's? Of course that was pre-internet, but garage sales abounded.

And how fast did the phenomenon die? A local antique store owner tells me that when the "big woody tiki wall hangings" died, they died overnight.

It occurs to me that a person who was 30 in 1964 would be 70 now; do we have any tiki elders that can tell us their tales of daily life when men were men, women were wahines and tikis didn't have bar codes?