Don The Beachcomber 1933 Vintage Men’s T-Shirt

“Donn Beach” was born Ernest Raymond Beaumont Gantt in Texas in 1907. After traveling the South Pacific and Caribbean, he landed in Hollywood and worked as a bootlegger, making moonshine during Prohibition. After Prohibition was repealed in 1933, the bootlegger known as ‘Ernie’ changed his name to Donn Beach and opened Don the Beachcomber, a small café and bar where he mixed exotic rum drinks for his customers. Inspired by his travels, Donn filled the new place with Polynesian flair, including a bamboo bar with matching barstools, fishing nets draped on the walls, large glass fishing weights in every shade of blue and green imaginable, and the now-ubiquitous cocktail umbrellas adorning his drinks. Thus, Donn Beach became the founding father of the Polynesian “tiki” bar. With his formula refined and proven with consumers, Don The Beachcomber moved into larger digs and opened a second location in Chicago. 15 additional locations would follow, but they wouldn’t materialize until after WWII as returning G.I.s and their significant others looking for fun places to go out together helped bring about the tiki fad that would last into the early ’60s.

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Like all our designs, this one is treated with our signature ‘relic-ing’ process which includes our own secret recipe of hand-painted chipping, cracking, fading, and just the right touch of yellowing to ensure that it looks the part of a true vintage imprint.** We lay these works of art down on premium Bella+Canvas 3001 Unisex Jersey Short Sleeve Tees, one of the softest, best-wearing t-shirts available today, via state of the art direct to garment (DTG) printing which allows us to create a vintage effect that simply can’t be accomplished with other printing methods. In short, these shirts are everything you’ve dreamed of and more – it feels soft and lightweight with just the right amount of stretch making it comfortable and flattering for both men and women.

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Not sure what size is your best fit? We recommend taking one of your current t-shirts, laying it flat and measuring it. The measurements in the chart below are taken with the shirt laying on a flat surface. To get the length, measure from the high shoulder point down to the bottom of the shirt. To get the width, measure approximately 1-inch below the armhole, across the chest, from seam to seam. While our tees are all made using premium, pre-shrunk, ring-spun cotton, there can be some shrinkage depending on your personal wash and dry cycles. With that said, if you’re on the fence, we always suggest going up a size.

All sizes are provided in inches!

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*Heather colors are 52% combed and ring-spun cotton/48% polyester. Athletic and Black Heather is 90% combed and ring-spun cotton/10% polyester. Ash color is 99% Airlume combed and ring-spun cotton and 1% poly. **Due to the nature of the printing process and different sizes of shirts offered, imprint position and scale may vary slightly from the product images, but we do our best to be as accurate as possible.