Post #716999 by Ojaitimo on Wed, May 14, 2014 11:38 PM

Pele Paul,that is a great collection you have. Being in the Navy forty years ago and into Tiki since I can remember, some of your collection brought back many personal memories. Lived on Okinawa in 1969 and the Scout troop I was with would go to battlefields around the island. This camp out were about to land on the island Admiral Is, where in a WW2, Ernie Pyle was gunned down. This guy really is an unsung hero. He wrote a column that GI's read in the Stars and Stripes until a Japanese machine cut him down on the beach I was going to land on. There I was in a Higgins boat with the dropping ramp. Peering over the top, I thought about those guys about to storm the beach over twenty years before. Many of them made it after all of the island campaigns and it was these soldiers who returned to the states and for awhile every town in the United States had a Tiki bar. The Tiki Ti bar in Los Angeles serves a drink called the Blood and Sand. Today if you order it, everyone chants Toro but I'll bet when Ray Buen introduced the drink that the beach battles were remembered not the bull fights
.