Post #586541 by bigbrotiki on Mon, Apr 25, 2011 11:28 PM

Sabu, I have been wanting to answer to your wonderful post for a while, but all this other "stuff" came up and needed to be clarified...

I have been fascinated by the figure of Frank Kent ever since bifcozz came into his amazing inheritance of papers and ephemera. Obviously Kent was much more than just a Trader Vic train jumper with his Zombie Village across the way. His is a mysterious story of synchronicity, and looking at your time line we may never know for certain who influenced whom.

One thing seems to be for certain, though: He was a REAL Polynesiac, a lover of the islands, and it seems (all this is hypothetical) that that made him a lesser business man than Victor Bergeron and Steve Crane - another thing he shared with Donn Beach. Ultimately he was less influential to Polynesian pop, and certainly to Tiki style, because at the time it REALLY took of, he had already checked out and gone native - just like Don did.

One letter particularly strikes me...here is its context: By the mid-50s, the big American hotel chains began to compete with each other for designers of Polynesian lounges. Trader Vic had opened his first franchise in Seattle in 1949, Don the Beachcomber in Chicago in 1940. The "Hotel Corporation of America" pegged Skipper Kent to be their man from Polynesia:

Here Kent is not telling the Hotel to use his name, he is feebly offering it as a suggestion, while worrying about the lack of the public's understanding of Polynesian names (within a few years, Polynesian names were everywhere). And he speaks of putting his HEART AND SOUL into building the Polynesian Room, which I believe is true. This shows to me that Frank Kent was less of a pragmatic business man who was just playing with the theme, but a ROMANTIC who was really living it, and living for it.

Another factor could have been age: With his romanticism, he seems to have belonged to the Don Blanding generation more than the Rat Pack generation, and probably was kinda "old fashioned" in comparison to someone like Steve Crane. In any case, the fact remains that, though he was into the Polynesian theme ahead of the pack, and thus positioned to be successful, his franchises did not really take of.

The complexities of opening franchises on the other side of the continent become apparent in his letters, be it training the backstage help, or delegating other responsibilities. Maybe the hotel execs were control freaks and committee decisions were too indifferent, who knows.

This brings me to the conclusion that while Skipper Kent may have been influential behind the scenes, his influence on Polynesian pop was not as widespread as Don's, Vic's and Steve's. Which is just an observation, not a judgement, to me he seems much more interesting and sympathetic because of his romantic, unbusiness-like nature.