Post #511470 by Bay Park Buzzy on Tue, Feb 16, 2010 5:18 PM

On 2010-02-15 15:39, bigbrotiki wrote:
... as that telling B&W photo card I published in Tiki Modern so brutally relates:

That image reminds me of something from the family archives...

I was looking through my Grandfather's old navy stuff and came across this photo:

Some striking similarities with the cartoon. :lol:

He went close to PNG on his escape route from the Phillipines to Australia in 1941. Here's a picture from The Saturday Evening Post article of the islands they went by:

A panel detail shows contact with the natives just northwest of PNG:

Another one of his original photos of a pig cookout:

the birth of the luau...?

There were a bunch of burning and sinking boat pictures, a bunch of fishing photos, and a bunch of palm tree filled islands. Here's one of a downed Jap plane:

BigBro: here are some scans from a Navy published book about the USS TJ's travels during the war. I only included the relavant pages. there were a lot of life on the boat pictures and equator crossing shananigans otherwise. It's a nice first hand document of the era that we're discussing here. Go Navy!

Cover

Title page

Ports of call:

My grandfather joined the Navy before the war to see the world. Looks like he saw a lot of it on this boat's adventures.

It has little yearbook like memory entries for he places they went. Here's Hawaii:

the Hawaii photos were all standard 40's era stick tourist photos so I left them out

here's a nice section of photos on Ulithi:


tattoo pictures in the middle:


This part on the South Pacific mentions going to the Soloman's

Decor influence grass shack theme, lower left?:

It seems my Grandparents, all WWII Pacifis theater Navy vets, seemed to gravitate towards the Asian influenced art stuff, rather than the Polynesian decor stuff after the war.

Buzzy Out!