show us your Barney West

On 2015-12-22 09:06, HopeChest wrote:
As if Barney West wasn't intriguing enough already...

"There were three of them, Frank Lee Morris, the brains of the outfit with an IQ of 133, and the Anglin brothers, Clarence and John W. … would their plan work? Sometime in the early hours of June 13, 1962 they put their plan to work and escaped from Alcatraz. Their bodies were never found but in Sausalito, the escape raft washed up at the foot of Johnson Street and was discovered by artist Barney West. The police were called and the scene took on a life of its own."

Now THAT is random.

Wow! :^ )

On ebay now is this unidentified photo but I recognized it right away. It is a copy but if you like it here is a link: http://www.ebay.com/itm/12-By-18-Black-White-PICTURE-1966-Chevrolet-BelAir-4-door-wagon-by-Totem-pole-/221582338422?hash=item3397562976:g:aYgAAOSwQJ5URpIK&vxp=mtr

8ft,

Thanks for posting that photo, I bought the photo and it ended up in Sven's new book The Art of Tiki!

Here are a couple old Polaroids of Barney West's compound in Sausalito.

And a photo of a big one that was located in the Southgate Shopping Center in Sacramento.

If you compare the last two photos you can see that the Sacramento Tiki got a bit of a circumcision before being displayed in public in front the children!

DC

I was looking for dates of birth and death on Barney West for my On This Day in Tiki History. I read about how he was in the Merchant Marine in the South Pacific and that his ship was torpedoed. That we was stranded on an island for 6 months and learned to carve from the natives, escaping from the island just before the Japanese attacked. Very cool

Then I read that his name was Cecil Westerberg (nicknamed Barney), that he got into trouble for smoking marijuana (oh the horror :lol: ) and that he learned to carve as part of his "rehabilitation" Then he shortened his name from Westerberg to West and made up the story about South Pacific!

I'm not trying to speak ill of the man and it wouldn't the first time someone embellished their past. Anyone know anything of this?

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..."

Great stuff, thanks for sharing!

-Randy

“I would like to update some information on the Totem pole. New info has come to light. This totem was created by Barney West from Redondo Beach, Ca in 1962. He only made two, one was at Lake Tahoe in 1963 at a height of 22'. The second was the tallest Barney ever created. This one is in Weed,Ca at a height of 32'. He called them Tiki Totems because all Barney made was Tikis from the South Pacific. The one in Lake Tahoe is gone due to the elements. The one in Weed will be replaced with a REAL Northwestern Totem Pole. Also, there is no Totem like it at the end of the Alcan highway. Safeway bought both from Barney and had nothing to do with the towns they (were)(are) in. This Tiki Totem is also for sale.”

I’ve never heard that Barney was from Redondo Beach. Everything I’ve seen points to him having come from Seattle. Interesting.

There’s another wrinkle to this story. The Barney West Tiki Totem in Weed was commissioned in 1962 as a replacement for an actual indigenous Alaskan-carved totem, sourced in Seattle, that had been placed at that location in 1922.

It’s still possible that there was an indigenous totem that matched the original Weed totem in Dawson City YT, although a quick Google Maps image search of the town didn’t make that look likely to me.

Doesn’t mean that there might be a match in someone’s backyard or inside a house up there, something like what happened to the original Weed totem seems possible (detailed in the article below)

https://www.siskiyou.news/2025/07/14/the-totem-pole-mystery-of-weed-california/