Post #223610 by tikijackalope on Tue, Mar 28, 2006 2:44 PM

Silverline's find has furnished me with no small amount of entertainment.

I found a very nice woman near Grove who was able to tell me a little about Suttles' Tiki Point, but there is no indication I know of, at present, that ties it to having been a nudist colony. That's the kind of thing that gets conveniently forgotten, though.

My information (second-hand, but I have a good feel about it) so far is that the head was built in 1967 by camp owner Earl Suttle, who had been to Hawaii and also had an interest in Easter Island. He is now deceased and the property has been sold; I think it was parceled into residential lots. The tiki still resides on one of those lots, not easily accessible by land, and latest info indicates it currently sports an ear ring.

Now here's where it gets even more interesting to me: Suttle's widow says he took a fiberglass mold from a "big Easter Island head" in Wichita, KS.

I've lived about 45 minutes from Wichita for 22 years and have never seen such a thing there, but if her recollection is correct and a Wichita moai did exist, it was probably concrete and might be extant. That is, unless it was a mini-golf obstacle and was thin concrete over wood and wire, in which case it might have vanished with the wave of mini-golf banality ushered in by the Putt-Putt chain (the mini-golf equivalent of back-lit plastic signage).

The only tiki I know of in Wichita is associated with a small bar and the bar owners know nothing of a giant Easter Island head having existed anywhere in the Wichita area. I'm doing quite a bit of photography of googie and other mid-century signage and structures in Wichita, and will add the moai to the list of things I usually ask about.

I'll dig more and may manage to visit the Oklahoma lake site by water. One can't see too many moai, you know; it simply can't be done.