Post #782163 by MadDogMike on Sat, Dec 9, 2017 10:34 AM

Here is the text of that book excerpt, from The Tender Soldier: A True Story of War and Sacrifice to guard against net-rot. Written by Vanessa M Gezari, based on interview with Montgomery Carlough McFate, who's mother was married to Barney West before she married Montgomery's father.

"Sometime around 1950, Frances Poynter and her husband, Cecil Westenberg, made their way to the San Francisco Bay area They bought a property near the Mount Talalpais ridgeline in the Muir Woods and opened a small business - McFate thought it might have been a restaurant. At some point Westerberg, who went by the nickname of Barney, got arrested for dealing marijuana. As part of his rehabilitation, he learned to carve wood. "He basically changed his name and created an entire fictive narrative for himself", McFate told me. Instead of Cecil Westenberg, he became Barney West.

West told people he had served in the merchant marine and been shipwrecked on a Polynesian or Micronesian island. During his time on the island, he said, the natives taught him how to carve wood. This was in the early 60s, a decade after the publication of Thor Heyerdahl's Kon Tiki, when Elvis Presley starred in Blue Hawaii and Hula Hoops and tiki bars were the rage. In McFate's view, America's cultural obsession with Polynesia streched back even farther, to Margaret Mead's Coming of Age in Samoa. The cultural eye, Mc Fate told me, was focused on Polynesia.

Poynter and West moved to Sausalito, a city just north across the bay from San Francisco, and started a little woodworking shop called Tiki Junction, where West carved giant, iconic Tikis that he sold to Trader Vic's, a Polynesian themed restaurant; McFate's mother painted the carvings. West, a handsome, muscular man with a handlebar mustache, relied on his story of shipwreck and native tutelage to give the carvings authenticity, and to patrons of Trader Vic's, with mai tais in hand, they were indistinguishable from the real thing. He had found a way to turn mid twentieth century America's facination with the primative to profit, but the cultural artifacts he supplies were "all fake", McFate told me, it was all made by Barney, painted by my mom.

McFate's mother and West eventually divorced..."