Post #774747 by RanchoMahalo on Sun, Apr 2, 2017 1:07 PM

I was just recently listening to the Inside The Desert Oasis podcast, and I'm so stoked, because my old pal Von Franco and Erich Troudt are on there hanging out in The Hut and smoking cigars - making me miss those old times with Franco - and you guys start talking about his old bar & place, and I hear my name pop up!

Man oh man - so I realize I started posting build pictures of my place here a few years back and then just stopped. Jeez, life gets crazy sometimes, sorry. I came back here to check out Erich's Hut photos and it reminded me that I left this thread hanging - so I need to catch up. Hope you see this again Erich - the Hut is AMAZING! and I love that your dad is helping out so much - Claude is the best.

So maybe I need to backtrack a whole lot to many years back and put the pieces of the story together here and get it all up to date - this would be the perfect place to tell it to folks who would be into it, and I've got some great photos to share with fellow tiki fans - so stay tuned to the thread, and I promise not to disappear this time.

If you listened to that podcast - and I recommend you do at http://polynesianpop.podomatic.com Episode 10 - they are talking about Franco's old place, the half enclosed porch he set up, and the bar that Bruce Yoakum of B-One Tikis built - that I now have and built my place around.

This is the bar, and what Franco's old place looked like - man, some good times were had back there. We would hang out when we came to California to visit for car shows - which is how we met and became friends, through the hot rod scene.