Tiki Navy

We visited the Seabee Museum at the Navy base in Port Hueneme north of Malibu. I found some cool Tiki items in their collection.

Cool stuff. My mom's boyfriend (of 23 years) was in the Seabees but there was no tiki on Iwo Jima from what I can gather. Those guys have the best logo ever, don't they?

Awesome Timo!

What a time capsule... I can practically hear Hope & Crosby on the radio...
Picked up some cool new gritty decor ideas for "Son-of-The-Revenge-of-the-Return-of-Cosmic-Tiki-Hut IV".
Mahalo for these!
SOK

That is great! The beer keg is priceless.

There have been two submarines that have a Tiki-sort of theme. The USS Kamehameha was a ballistic submarine that had King Kamehameha on the ship's seal. The USS Honolulu is an attack sub that has a Ku on her seal.

USS Kamehameha seal with The King

USS Honolulu with the Ku

When I was a kid in the sixties, we would ride our bikes out here and browse the exibits for hours.

Seabee Museum 1967
Behind the museum is a golf course that once held a VC village made of bamboo and thatch, lots of trees. This was where they trained Seabees for Vietnam. There were two huts about 100 feet apart. We explored the huts one day and discovered a hidden 100 ' tunnel that connected the two and the instructors would ambush the rookies who thought they had cleared the first hut. We met the curator Kim, she said they had over 12,000 relics and will have much more on display in the new building. The quonset hut style of this original museum will be replaced with modern. I think its only open there for the next year so if you want to check it out, do it soon. Here are a few shots of Republic camera crews filming the Fighting Seabees 1943.

Another Seabee film Blood and Steel 1959

[ Edited by: Ojaitimo 2007-12-13 14:56 ]

Great building! Of course they're gonna tear it down. :(
And I love that miniature diorama, that could be in a Tiki bar. That training village sounds like a great playground for boys, too!

The quonset hut buildings will still be standing , that place is sacred to the Seabees and I'll bet it will never be torn down.
They are building the new museum about 100 yds away, just outside of the gate. The Missle Park at Point Mugu which is another cool place on PCH about 5 miles from the Seabee Museum. Anyone can visit, get off at Wood road, its also near the landing pattern for the runway.
Where else can one picnic while gazing at a missle park?

On 2007-12-13 23:52, bigbrotiki wrote:
Great building! Of course they're gonna tear it down. :(
And I love that miniature diorama, that could be in a Tiki bar. That training village sounds like a great playground for boys, too!

Luckily the original Quonset buildings will still be standing, here is the new buildings rendering to be built close by. I have to admit, it looks cool too.

Bad reflection, sorry.

I think I see a bartender wearing a apron,
I'll go back and get a close up. At the time the Seabee's were building these Tiki Bars, they probably used some ancronyn like "Recreational Buildings Multi Purpose" RBMP's? for official records, but I'm willing to bet they called them Tiki bars and looked better in real life with the decor,nurses and island girl's.
Col. Donn Beach was setting up clubs all over Europe at the same time as the Seabee's were building these, I can imagine there was a competition of sorts as famous as nearby Don the Beachcomber's bar in Hollywood was was during the war.

Just off the PCH Pacific Coast Highway on the east side of Hueneme Road is the Missle Bar.

This was a local watering hole for base employees for decades, it is half way between the Missle park at Point Mugu NAS and the museum at the Seabee base in Port Hueneme. Next door to the Missle was the Launch Pad, another bar. All that remains is this sign face.

The farmer who owned the land where the land was leased for the bars in the forties, kept the signs up. Good for him.

When I took this picture of the F-14 at the park, I thought about being a 17 year old kid in the Navy with my camera, taking pictures of Tomcats in my squadron much like this one.

I was in VF 124 Gunfighters at the time where I worked as a Aviation Machinist Mate (jet mechanic).

Our squadron did not have a photographers mate so I happily volunteered and took many photographs while I was at Miramar.
I had lost all my prints and negatives in the late seventies after a move so I thought I would never see any of the pictures again.
I walked up to the bronze plaque that sits under the Tomcats nose.
The plaque read "This F-14 Tomcat, etc etc etc " was recieved by VF-124 at NAS Miramar in April 1973"

I was floored, the exact aircraft that I had worked on and photographed so long ago. In my excitement, I forgot to take the picture of the plaque. So armed with new info like the tail numbers and such, I found some of my old photographs of some ones 8x10 black and whites that I had given back then. They had scanned these same photoss and submitted them to a web site devoted to the Tomcat.
The F-14 Tomcat's moto was "Any Time Baby". But thats another story.
My thanks to the person who shared these.

Here is my photograph of the same aircraft when it was new.

April 1973

Dec 2007

A few other aircraft that I photographed back then.

I just thought of this, sometime in the mid sixties, my mother Ione decorated the officers club at Point Mugu. With the Trade Wind's only being a few miles away and being as popular as it was, I'm thinking it may have been done in Tiki. There must be some pictures of the interior of the club somewhere.

[ Edited by: Ojaitimo 2007-12-17 13:47 ]