Connecting the Dots

The Tiki is Not For Sale

From Anne Drew, printed in TV Times, Australia, April 8, 1961
Gardner McKay is Determined to Own a Yacht With a History

One of the most glamorous stars on TV is acknowledged to be a lady by the name of Tiki.

Tiki is the 85 ft. schooner which now cruises Pacific waters with Captain Adam Troy at the helm. Troy, is of course, Gardner McKay, who in real life is one of Tiki’s most ardent admirers.

Her real name is Pilgrim. She is owned by Mr. and Mrs. Harry S. McGill of Torrance, California and leased to 20th Century-Fox for their Adventures in Paradise TV series.

Recently, McKay came to New York to try to make arrangements to buy the Tiki; but she is not for sale.

Good-looking, debonair McKay, who seems so at home at the helm of Tiki, really is. Before he became a TV star he was a professional charter-yacht captain.

He is the great-great grandson of Donald McKay, 19th Century Boston shipbuilder who produced such historic clipper ships as Flying Cloud and Sovereign of the Seas.

“One of these days, I’ll own Tiki,” McKay vowed. “If the McGills still refuse to sell her, I’ll just keep after them until they do. Any sailor will appreciate the attachment I have to the vessel. She’s got class.”

McKay has traced Tiki’s history.

“She was once owned by actor Lewis Stone (Judge Hardy of the Andy Hardy movies),” he said, “and although she wasn’t born to show business, she performed in quite a few pictures before I commanded her in Adventures in Paradise.

“She was designed for her original owner, Boston attorney Donald C. Starr, by John G. Alden, one of he world’s foremost designers of sailing yachts.

“Then she saw wartime service as a Coast Guard training ship. Afterwards another owner sailed her off Central America hunting sharks.”

Dark days befell the Tiki when a new owner virtually dismantled her, installed bait tanks and anchored her off Redondo Beach, California, as a sportfishing barge.

“If I’d only known about her then,” McKay said wistfully.

“The McGills rescued her from that horrible fate. She was lying neglected in Los Angeles Harbor when they bought her and refitted her as a seagoing home for their family.

“Then they leased her to 20th Century-Fox for her role in Adventures in Paradise.

“I feel exactly as Adam Troy does in the series. That in this ship I feel completely at home and that I want no other life. She seems to belong to me and I to her and I try to treat her as a lady should be treated.

“Some day she really will belong to me.”

Note: Though it says "MORE", and clearly there was more, because the information is not finished, that is all I received. There were only two sheets stapled together,
I am missing the third sheet.

The real vessel used for the stock seagoing shots of the character boat “Tiki” was originally named “Pilgrim” and it had an impressive history. The “Pilgrim” was an eighty-five foot Alden Schooner which had sailed around the world, starting in the summer of 1932, a voyage that was chronicled in National Geographic in 1937. Her original owner was Boston Attorney Donald C. Starr, who along with a group of friends, circumnavigated the globe sailing her.

The schooner was subsequently owned by several owners, (but never by Gardner McKay, which is merely a myth).

The Adventures in Paradise series was shot almost entirely in California on the 20th Century Fox backlot. A smaller version of Pilgrim was built at 70% reduction in size, floating but dock bound, and used for most of the episodes’ scenes. It could leave the dock and return, as is shown in several episodes.

The Tiki, formerly Pilgrim met a sad but colorful end when it sank in 1980 in the category five Hurricane Allen in the Grenadines.

There are online references to the ship (which seem to keep proliferating as others keep copying and making the same mistake) as “Tiki III” but that is incorrect. This particular vessel did not have any number after ‘Tiki’.