Off Beat: Ties to mariners’ good-luck statues run deep in area

This Billiken is apparently one of several left in the Vancouver era. It was the Pet Rock of its day. (Steven Lane/Columbian files)

A recent Columbian story took a look at a Billiken, a museum artifact unearthed by archaeologists during a construction project in downtown Vancouver.

Turns out the piece of glassware, which spent most of the previous century in a garbage pit, has some distant family members in the area: Billi-kinfolk, you might call them.

Two Columbian readers let us know that the Billiken still is a much-loved image in a couple of local homes. One of them also reflected on its role as a good-luck piece: The ‘‘god of luckiness” angle might have been a marketing gimmick, but the towboat skipper who left his Billiken behind never made it back home.

The image has been recreated in many formats, including coin-shaped tokens. Lea Hornbeck of Washougal came across one of the copper good-luck pieces several years ago.

The token includes the date 1908, when the Billiken was patented. But native Alaskan artists have taken a shine to the design, and Hornbeck has a small ivory Billiken carved by one of them.

“I have a friend who lived in Alaska,” he said. “He saw my coin and gave me the Billiken to go with it.”

Lois Mullins has two of the ivory figures from Alaska. One had belonged to her late husband. Cecil Mullins went to sea at 17, and was on the first oil tanker that steamed into Pearl Harbor after the United States entered World War II, she said.

Cecil became a master mariner who captained cargo vessels to the northern-most point in the United States — Point Barrow, Alaska.

He needed a bit of good luck to make it through some perilous waters: “He went overboard three different times during 48 years at sea,” she said.

Her other ivory Billiken originally belonged to a mariner friend of theirs, Lois Mullins said.

“He showed it to me one day. I admired it, and he offered it to me,” she said.

She refused to take it, but “When he went on his next trip north, he left it at the office where I worked for the navigation company.”

She never saw their friend again, she said.

“They found the barge in the Gulf of Alaska. It was still tied to the tow boat, which was at the bottom.”

Off Beat lets members of The Columbian news team step back from our newspaper beats to write the story behind the story, fill in the story, or just tell a story.