Tag Archives: surfing in California in the ’60s

Over Time, Comparatively Speaking

Posted on by under northwest surfing, old surfers, real surfers

                         With the inclusion of inarguably life-changing events, we determine what we remember, over time, of the rare but truly horrific and the rare but truly blissful events.

Recalling a specific moment once makes it easier to remember, more clearly, the next time.

Memory banks and memory files, images and sounds and feelings, still shots and little videos; something that happens in the present snaps the synapses and, whoa, yeah… that one time…

I quite surprisingly and suddenly realized that the official start of Autumn is only days away, one of two moments, and I may be wrong about this, when the earth is in true balance and there are equal amounts of day and night. From that point, the next defining point is the dropping of Daylight Savings Time, somewhere around Halloween, the semi-unofficial end, for the most part, of the exterior painting season in the Great Northwest.

Yet, somewhere in here is the start of the surf season, such as it is, with the hope of North Pacific storms and waves over knee high. Hope is different than expectation. Around the Strait, even hope is tempered by experience; skunkings when forecasts call for waves, defiant winds when the forecasts call for calm.   

In the Summer of 1968, the summer season defined as the interval between school sessions, Ray Hicks and Bill Buel and Phillip Harper and I were cruising in one of their cars, returning inland from a day of cruising Surf Route 101, anywhere from San Onofre to, most likely, Cardiff, in search of a beach with some possibility of girls hanging out, and with rideable waves, and with the hope that the lineup was not too crowded. We did, no doubt, surf, most likely at Grandview or Swamis beachbreak.

Whichever vehicle we were in (again, not mine) featured the latest in in-car entertainment, an 8 trac tape player. Because we were middle class suburban teens, we related to the non-bubblegum-pop tunes of Cream, the Beatles (less and less), and the Doors. Most shared, most sung along to. Yes, if we were a year younger, Led Zeppelin’s orgasmic rock might have taken over. We weren’t. We listened to the Doors. We could relate.

It wasn’t just the AM-radio/garage-band-at-the-VFW-hall stuff. Deep cuts. “Wait until the war is over, and we’re both a little older; the unknown soldier.” The war wasn’t over. It would still be there when we were older… old enough.

It was almost dark, we were parked somewhere, facing west, perhaps, more likely facing some thicket of sage like brush off Mission, the route from one or our homes to another- extending the length of the surf trip/adventure. Smoking. Click. Another tune. “Summer’s almost gone, summer’s almost gone; Where will we be… when the summer’s gone.” There was an instrumental fill at this point, the perfect four beat place in which, from my spot in the back seat, I added, “We’ll be in school.”

It wasn’t well received. ‘Fuck you’ and ‘oh, man,’ and ‘get out’ didn’t make for a unified chorus.

Yet, summer had gone on long enough that the days of not surfing, of hanging out or playing some pickup game at the high school, of listening to other groups, other songs, had gone on long enough. School was… we’d be seniors, there were girls, guaranteed. There was a certain level of anticipation.

Time seems to move faster as we get older. I have noticed. I have decided it is because, the longer we are alive, rotating and spinning, the shorter the comparative time is of any particular season. So, summer is, relatively, short. That’s my theory.

Incidentally, the reason I know it wasn’t my car is this: My vehicles never seemed to have a functioning radio. Fifty-four years later, my current surf rig’s radio started shorting out a few years ago; irritating; and then it quit completely. I do have my harmonica, and, since I usually go surfing alone, I don’t mind my singing and playing. Other than my own tunes, I will do a few of Dylan’s. I have a killer version of “All Along the Watchtower.” The Doors? No, not really.

The subject next time, perhaps, could be: “Froth.”

I’m getting some stick-on lettering made saying, “realsurfers FROTH!” So far, Keith is signed on to get one. Steve and Adam, the only others I’ve offered them to, didn’t seem enthusiastic enough; I will not beg them. So… as with everything, forever, we’ll see.

HAPPY EQUINOX!  

“Whoa, dudes; it’s like… Fall, man; it’s the best. This one time… Hey, thanks for loaning me your spare suit; you should know, three more steps, I’m peeing. Traditional. So, like, glad it’s less crowded. Those Summer-only kooks, huh? I totally plan on dominating. Say, you even wax up this board?”

FUCKCANCER UPDATE:

Dru is probably going to have radiation treatments, but, hopefully, not Chemo. Trish is doing most of the hanging out with our daughter over in Port Gamble, making sure Dru doesn’t lift heavy stuff. I’ve done like one night a week, but I, um… well, I do plan on going over tomorrow for the Seahawks game, partially so Trish can get her hands back on this computer, probably do some lifting.

Stephen R. Davis is staying in Bellevue and going for procedures in Seattle. He is getting a full ‘workup’ (not fun in itself) ahead of two doses of Super Chemo. I will get a proper copy of Steve’s painting of a fantasy surf spot this week and will post it here with info on how you can purchase a limited-edition copy. Evidently Steve has already promised the original to some lucky person.   

Tim Nolan (part x-60)

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Tim Nolan is, unquestionably, a legendary boat designer. Architect might be the correct term. He is also one of the first people I met out on the Strait, when I got back into surfing, at somewhere over fifty, after a complete absence from the water for somewhere between eight and ten years. And I sucked. I should say he was one of the first people I met who was older than me.

“Hey,” I said, “isn’t there an age limit on this sport?” Tim said something like… I don’t really remember, not nearly as snarky or as profane as I might have. Nice, actually; but I was still, mostly because I did still suck, kind of polite. “Is there a life for a surfer, like, my age?” “You will find that your best years are still ahead.”

Tim was pretty much right. Sort of. There is nothing I would trade for my time learning to surf, switching from a mat to a board (1965), going on surf adventures, alone and with friends in my teens, surfing comparatively uncrowded Southern California spots in the 70s, coping with the San Diego surf ghetto mentality up until I moved here at the end of 1978. I didn’t expect to have any kind of surfing life in the northwest. I have. In fact, even if I don’t include my early years of surfing less and less frequently, I have now been surfing longer up here than I did in California. Not as often, to be sure.

There is some unknown number of people who call themselves surfers. It is remarkable how the origin stories can be similar. Tim and I both started young, stuck with it for years; surfed less and less as career and family responsibilities or other distractions took control of our surfing time; and then we tried to get back into it when those forces lessened (somewhat).

Okay, I can’t really relate to those who learned to surf at a camp or a wave pool or tried to learn in their forties or something like that. Great. I guess. It’s fun, huh? Surfing, surfing well, takes a certain level of persistence, commitment. If I make a distinction between real surfers and surf enthusiasts, and I do, Tim Nolan is a real surfer.

He will always be older than me; three or four years; and as long as he stays with it, I have hope.

One of the photos, not that Tim isn’t ripping in each of them

Hi Erwin,
Here are some historic images grabbed from an 8 mm movie my father took of me surfing below our house at Abalone Cove in the summer of 1960. My board is balsa, a gift from my brother who bought it from his friend Dave Gregerson for $3.50 after it had been stripped of glass and surfed finless at Haggerty’s and thrown off the cliff as a sacrifice. The board was waterlogged and ends were split and embedded with rocks and pebbles. I dug  out the rocks and trimmed and bondo-ed the nose, but the tail was toast. I cut out the last 12” in a V shape with my Dad’s saw and glued up some pieces of balsa salvaged from life jackets that had failed the rip test used by the Coast Guard in those days to see if the canvas was rotten. My employers at that time, operators of the Marineland of the Pacific excursion boats noticed that the Coast Guard inspector was gentler during the lifejacket tests if they drank a coffee cup of whisky first.
So, I sawed the rubber off the salvaged life vest  sections, glued them together and made a new tail. I got resin, catalyst, fiberglass and pigment from the Maritime Supply store in San Pedro and went to town. I forgot to add catalyst while I was doing a yellow and green abstract pigment job on the deck, so I put in twice the amount for the gloss coat, which sort of worked. The deck got waxed and was supposed to be sticky anyway. The board was heavy, especially for a 12-year-old to carry down a cliff and then another half mile walking on rocks. But the board surfed well. It caught waves, coasted through sections, and was unstoppable once I got it to the water. In the movie, I am catching the most and best waves and getting the longest rides, same as I try to do now. (forgivable at the time because my Dad was watching, less so now because I’m not sure he still is..) The  quality is pretty fuzzy, having been copied from aged 8mm celluloid movie reel to VHS, then to DVD, and then to JPEG via Screen Capture, but it captures, for me, the moment and thrills of my first summer surfing as if it were yesterday.
We had consistent 1 to 3 ft waves at “Alpert’s Reef” (named by my neighbor, friend, and surfing mentor Jeff Alpert) all that summer, and then it never broke again for the remaining 5 years I lived there.

It only takes a few moments of talking with Tim Nolan to realize his love for the ocean is real, it is deep, deeper than merely sliding a boat or a board across the water. He is a waterman. I can’t do justice to his or anyone else’s feelings about, really, anything. I will give Tim a chance to share his relationship with surfing in the future. I already have a few more photos. Thanks, Tim.

Meanwhile, there are a few other real surfers I would like to feature in the future. We’ll see.

Painful Cuts to “Swamis”

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This is another chunk of my manuscript for “Swamis” that I have to cut. It is backstory on one of the main characters, Portia Langworthy, and… and I love dialogue. Maybe too much. Despite going into the manuscript with the purpose of cutting-and-pasting this particular scene, I couldn’t resist making a few, just a few, changes.

Because, yes, I care. The main way I sort of justify the hours I’ve spent in thinking, writing, editing, rewriting, and now cutting portions of my novel is that I know the characters well enough, hopefully, that I may not need to include a backstory for each one. Maybe it’s enough that I know where they come from.

I will have other characters’ stories cut and moved here. My hope is that a smaller portion of literary fruitcake is about all one can be expected to… read. I do feel compelled to add that this is copyrighted material, cut or not.

We’d been in the office too long. We were all a bit more… relaxed.

Dickson closed the door when he reentered with two more cups of coffee, handed one to Jumper, said he put a little coffee in with the sugar. Wendall took the other cup, said Frederick Thompson had not been drunk or under the influence of drugs as far as the medical examiners could tell. “Just crazy.”

“Helicopter pilot, Korea, then Vietnam, early on,” Jumper said, as if this explained something.  It seemed to.  

Wendall lit up another cigarette.  “And… all of this… craziness, Langdon is claiming, and he has the ear of the politicians, is because of the Sheriff’s Office laissez-faire” (he pronounced it la-zy-fair) “policy toward pot growers and dealers in the county.”

“Miss Ransom got that part right,” Dickson said, “La-zy-fair for sure.”

Wendall leaned over the desk as far as he could. “It wasn’t your father, Jody; Gunny thought he had it under control. It’s just… grown… too fast, too many new, um, participants. We knew about Chulo; that he was collecting money from the hippie dealers. Chulo and…?”

Jumper and I both said “Portia” at the same time.

“Oh yeah,” Wendall said, “Portia. She’s actually Patricia Sue Langley. Patty Langley, runaway from, um, Many Wives, Utah; busted for petty theft…ha ha… back in ’65.  No, um, end of ’64.  She was a minor, so… So… and… oh, then she got… sexual. Oceanside. Marines, mostly; easy pickin’s.”

Dickson interjected. “Not our, as you know, jurisdiction.”

“Oh, but then Patty got herself down to Leucadia,” Wendall said, “across 101 and down from where you live now, Jody; one of those motels.”

Dickson pointed toward Jumper. “Second one past your family’s place.”

“When I was a kid,” Jumper said, “Chulo and I’d go around, pick up coke bottles at the Log Cabin Inn, other motels; turn them in for the, the deposit. Good money for a kid.”

I felt compelled to join in. I spoke quickly to make up for the obvious lack of interest by the others. “A neighbor kid, Roger; he and I went to this ball game down by Live Oak Park. Fallbrook. Roger’s brother was playing. We picked up bottles; took them to the guy at the little… the stand. The guy said they were his bottles, wouldn’t give us the deposit money.”

“You tell him who your dad was?”

“No.” I looked at Wendall, Dickson, Jumper. They were waiting. “Roger did.”

Wendall cleared his throat. Loudly. “So. Jody’s dad… Gunny… Joe; he always liked to point out how most all the motels were on the south-bound side; like that showed nobody’s coming up from San Diego looking for a place; it’s all from the north.  L.A.”

“Anyway,” Dickson said, “guess she… Patty, um, slash Portia, got tired of… servicing… Jarheads; fresh-outa-boot-camp Ji-rines; they’d probably want to go two or three times.” He did a subtle hip thrust motion, adding, “First time ought to be free. Ha! Probably wouldn’t even make it out of his skivvies.”

Wendall took over. “It was my call. Disturbance. The proprietor actually called it in; but Gunny and…” Wendall pointed over his shoulder. “Gunny and Big Imagination here show up. I’m standing outside a room with some fat business type from Covina… West Covina. So… fat. He claimed he hadn’t gotten his money’s worth.”

It was a brief pause, but Dickson took the story. “So, Joe goes, ‘money’s worth of what?’ The guy… hey; it’s your story, Wendall. Did you take a bribe on that one?”

“Well.” Wendall looked around to make sure everyone was watching. “Sort of. Gunny, he goes up to the guy, looks down at his…you know, package. The guy was in… he’d put on his business jacket. Seersucker; some sort of sales guy green. Sears or Pennys; one of those. No shirt, and, you know, tidy whities; size, um, enormous. For his butt. No big bulge; not that I would notice. Black socks, the kind you hold up with garters. Garters. This Chipper, Mortenson, shows up and the… West Covina guy is acting like we’re supposed to be… like we’re on his side. Mortenson, you remember him, huh; tough bastard, loved to pull over kids.”

“And beaners,” Dickson said, looking directly at Jumper, before giving Wendall a sweeping ‘take-it-away’ gesture.

Wendall was leaning forward, both elbows on my dad’s old desk. “So, Gunny, he’s got Mr. West Covina’s wallet in his hand and, I guess, repeats, ‘Money’s worth of what, Mr. um, Redwick?’ Red… wick.” 

We all may have chuckled. Wendall continued. 

“So, Patty’s standing there, wrapped up in a blanket. Not because it’s cold… and the motel owner, older woman who thought she’d be renting places for artists; like, you know, like Leucadia’s Newport Beach or something; she’s got an arm around Patty, and Patty’s got a bottle of Coke up against one eye, and Gunny’s just waiting for Humpty Redwick to answer. And I say, ‘Maybe he was getting some, um, advice on, um, clothing choices.’ Morty… Mortenson, this cracks him up. But Gunny’s all business; serious. I mean, Morty’s seen some shit. He’s a vet, too. Korea, at least. Army. Chosin Reservoir. Bad shit. And he’d been cruising up and down 101, ‘Slaughter Alley’ for years. He was still, those days, still on a motorcycle. So, yeah; blood… tough guy, and he’s just… laughing.”

Wendall put a cigarette in his mouth, pulled out his Sheriff’s Office Zippo from his shirt pocket, snapped the lighter open with a jerk of the wrist, hit the wheel with a snap of the finger. More theatrics. “So, now Morty sees your dad’s serious. I mean, Morty was big, but Gunny was looking… you know how he could… that look; fierce, fierce-like; and Gunny he… he opens up Redwick’s wallet, then holds every photo of the guy’s wife and kids up to his face; whole, you know, string of them; and then shows them to me. And the owner. And Patty. Gunny takes out all the cash. He asks the proprietor if the motel fee has been paid. She says, ‘Diner’s Club,’ and Gunny holds a twenty and a couple of singles up in Redwick’s face, puts that cash back in the wallet, sticks the rest out toward Patty, sticks the wallet back into Humpty’s inside coat pocket. 

“Probably two hundred bucks. She, Patty, she shakes her head. And I say, ‘Oh, the advice,’ and she, no one would take her for dumb; Patty says, ‘Maybe Mr. Redwick should switch to some, um, boxers… maybe some, uh, dark color; that might be a choice.’ She takes the money. Now Gunny’s smiling. We’re, all of us, laughing. Not Redwick. He does look a little relieved, maybe.”

Wendall stopped, inhaled, blew the smoke out kind of forcefully. We all watched the cloud get sucked into the fan, some of it actually going out the window.

“Wait. Wait. So, Morty gets a call; three car pile-up by the Carlsbad Slough. He gets on his bike, starts it up, peels out. Lights and sirens.”

Jumper filled in with, “Not your jurisdiction.”

“Right. Then, two doors down, this other guy tries slipping out of a room. Gunny’s watching Patty. She must of looked over. The motel owner, she seems, um, concerned. Gunny gives me a look. The other guy, he tries to duck back into the room. I run down… yeah; I can run… I push open the door, grab this guy. He must have thought it was all over when Morty left.”

Wendall did a sort of relaxed pose, casually inhaled, slowly blew out smoke.

“And?” Jumper and I both asked.  

“And…” Wendall looked pleased. “And there’s another, definitely underaged girl inside; not beat up, but… I mean, it was obvious. So, short story long, it all went official. Other than the money.”  

Oh, might as well give credit to Fine Art America

On the surfing front; I decided to surf some small waves without my earplugs and without booties. It wasn’t like, critical. Would have worked out fine except… you know how you’re in the water, and you just think, ‘Why can’t it just be, like, four feet and barreling?’ and it never seems to happen? And then it does. And you’re too busy getting alternately thrashed and thrilled to go in and… no, these rare events demand strict attention.

Result: Stephen Davis says he will not invite me to Hawaii; locals don’t abide with blood in the water. AND both feet are cut and gouged AND one ear is still plugged up. “Worth it?” you might ask. “Sorry, can’t hear you right now. Ow!”