Surfing the 60s with Nietzsche…

It’s a rare 2022 California Central Coast day, here in the Cambria bunker refuge I retreat to whenever I sink into one of my increasingly frequent reflective moods on the dismal tragedy that is ‘humanity’. This is the same ‘Fortress of Solitude’ I used to frequent, fairly regularly back in the 80s and 90s, whenever a spurt of creative energy hit.

Actually, Superman should have it so good! This cozy little (4 room) abode sits perched on the edge of a rather large and somewhat isolated, windswept seacliff, directly overlooking the beautiful (but typically moody) Pacific Ocean, and given its drop-dead gorgeous location, it would be well beyond my meager abilities to actually own it, but thanks to my protective Gods and some unknown wellspring of good fortune, it has been made available to me over the past decades by its owner (who is quite a wealthy, if reclusive entertainment executive). Despite the property’s astronomical value (probably in the millions), the place itself is a very modest, older wood-framed hideaway, probably originally built back in the late 40s or early 50s. Regardless of this, it’s a perfect ‘hideout’ to get away from the enemy…that is to say, as Jean-Paul Sartre once expressed it, from “other people”. And if Sartre regarded others as “Hell”, this place is truly Heaven! With a protected rear verandah, its own septic tank system and a great little wood-burner stove, it doesn’t get much cozier than this and being there, safely ensconced by the stove, Husky girl at my feet and a warmed glass of Martell Cordon Bleu at hand while the storm sweeps in off the Pacific, it is truly an earthly Heaven among Heavens! Whenever I am thus ensconced, it isn’t long before I start to wax philosophic, of course.

Now I don’t wish to upset anyone’s philosophical paradigm, but Nietzsche was a surfer. You read that correctly. Nietzsche was into surfing. Lest there be any confusion in terms of what I’m describing here, we’re talking ‘surfboards’, more specifically (during the 50s), the classic balsa or foam & fiberglass longboards that averaged about 10 feet in length. It’s a historically, absolutely unassailable fact that inarguably defies contradiction.

Not convinced? Bear (or ‘bare’, as you wish) with me as I regress into a phase of my formative teen years…roughly the span of time from 1960 through 1964, which is roughly coincident to the the length of the sentence I served as a high school student.

I was (academically) incarcerated during my high school years at a small South-Central California institution known as WUHS. The city it is in now (Wasco, CA) hosts one of the State of California’s newest (minimum and medium custody) correctional facilities. Prior to the establishment of the 634-acre prison facility there (and the region’s potatoes and cotton aside), Wasco gained a small amount of questionable notariety from its unique bio fermentation processing plant, known locally as the ‘BioFirm’. The BioFirm, in addition to producing large quantities of industrial yeast (talk about massive ‘yeast infections’, hee-hee), had an ineradicable stink about it. Wasco consequently garnered mostly unwanted fame for the vaguely nauseating aroma of fermenting yeast that managed to permeate the entire vicinity, day in and day out.

As a mere agricultural bump on the road noted solely for its wealth of potatoes and cotton, after the prison was built ‘Wasco’ decided it needed something to both offset the malodorous taint of the BioFirm and somewhat ameliorate the prison’s ominous presence (as well as replace the cotton and potato crops revenues which had all but disappeared), so some likely lad hit on the idea of growing roses for the ever-increasing business of supplying roses to the world’s unrequited lovers. Thus, the insignificant little berg of Wasco, obsessed with making some sort of more positive reputation for itself, became what they today proudly taut as ‘The Rose Growing Capitol of the World’. Well, despite the Bard’s immortal epithets, in this particular instance a rose by any other name may well-prove to be ‘unremarkable’. And Wasco is exactly that, sad to say.

Wasco has a sort of claim to fame for being situated about 8 miles from Central California’s former sole major artery, Highway 99 (at the junction where the mid-60s ‘Famoso dragstrip’ was located) on state Route 466 (now redesignated simply Route 46, which winds its way eventually to the San Louis Obispo County city of Paso Robles…think wine, here). Back in the early 60s, the Famoso Dragstrip was more or less the deodorant of this otherwise 'armpit' of the Central Valley. Aside from this dubious distinction, Wasco was and still is a remarkably ‘nowhere’ place to be an inmate of any kind (either scholastic or criminal).

A brief digression

What most do not know, speaking of old Highway 466, is that at one particularly desolate section of it, not far from unincorporated ‘Lost Hills’, famed Hollywood celebrity personality and actor James Dean met his end in a custom-made Porsche 550 sportscar named ‘The Little Bastard’ ,at the hands of a Cal Poly student (and US Navy vet) with the unusual surname of Turnipseed (in his ’50 Ford).

Honest injun! “Donald Turnipseed” was his name. Dean (the driver) of the Porsche was killed in the crash but his passenger (his personal German mechanic) managed to survive, albeit with severe injuries.

Apparently, Turnipseed’s car had inexplicably swerved into the oncoming lane just as Dean’s Porsche passed him and despite Dean’s trying to avoid a head-on collision, the left side of aluminum-bodied 550 took the full impact of Turnipseed’s ‘Detroit iron’, inflicting what were described as ‘horrendous’ injuries (his casket remained closed during the later funeral) on Dean; one can only imagine! It was determined that he died almost instantly, as a result.

At nearby Cholame, a small watering hole about a mile from the actual crash site (the original juncture of State Routes 46 and 41), a memorial monument funded by a Japanese fan has been installed for Dean. As for Turnipseed, it if weren’t for his quaintly vegetative name, Donald Turnipseed’s memory would’ve faded quickly into the area’s Tule Fog forever, then and there.

Interestingly, Dean’s Porsche (he had named it ‘The Little Bastard’ after a series of problems that plagued it during a race) seems to have had a curse on it, since parts of the car’s mechanical components were salvaged after the crash and used on other (sports/race) cars, each of which suffered inexplicable accidents. The remaining wrecked aluminum body of the Porsche ended up as part of a California Highway Patrol traveling safety exhibit before it vanished mysteriously.

Hollywood custom-car celebrity George Barris, who last had it, may have been covertly trying to hype the romance of Dean’s death by encouraging belief in the car’s bad juju, but that also remains an unproven hypothesis. At any rate, it constitutes a rather convenient augmentation to the enduring James Dean bad-boy-mythos to this day.

Beautiful downtown Wasco (not)

So, there I was, entering my freshman year at Wasco Union High School in 1960, the son of a Wasco grammar schoolteacher who had a rep for being exasperated with all the little dim-bulb dummies she had to edjumicate (sic) properly. I can guarantee that this fact earned me no great number of friends as I held my breath and dived into the soul-shaking experience that is public high school in the Disunited States of ‘Merca (DSM material? Well, mebbe not, but it’s an amusing metaphor anyway), since high school often seems like a low-grade mental asylum to many of the more introverted students like myself.

This immediate post-50s era was, as most know, quite a unique period in our (reasonably) recent national history. The 60s were a time of great upheaval and social ferment that set the stage for the modern ('woke') mess we find America in today. And in California, always a trend-setter for the rest of the nation, the youth culture that existed when I began high school seemed to be divided into two primary groups: the 'Surfers’ and the ‘Greasers’. [If it helps here, think of England's 'Mods' and 'Rockers', back in the 60s.] It might be useful to recall that that ubiquitous TV serial known as ‘Happy Days’ (which itself was inspired by the 1973 movie ‘American Graffiti’) was quite popular with a great number of people, back then. But if nothing else, you should take note of the fact that the film’s locale was the Central California city of Modesto, located not that far from little old Wasco and just a bit north of us.

With a substantially large underclass population of Chicanos, stemming mostly from California’s heavy reliance on what were then termed ‘Braceros’, or imported seasonal Mexican nationals (farm workers), kids from this demographic group essentially became what we knew as ‘the Greasers’. With their dark Latino looks, black hair (well-pomaded and slicked back in ‘ducktail’ styles in most cases) and Hispanic origins, they stood distinctly apart from the demographically dominant WASPish, long-time ranchers and settlers of this region. And yes, this was back in the bad old days of widespread white racist sentiment among the non-intellectuals (read: the working class) in American society, well after the whities 'stole' California from Mexico.

In socially ‘acceptable’ contrast to the adversely regarded Latinos was the group of kids who came to be known as ‘surfers’ and whom were enamored with the ‘good clean fun’ natural ethic of the evolving California surf culture.

And what exactly constituted the surf culture of that period, you may well ask? Well, considering that the nearest Wasco was to the Pacific Ocean was about 150 miles (in other words, WELL inland, and smack-dab in the midst of an agricultural valley where kids used to wear work boots and denim bibbed coveralls to school, occasionally), ‘surf culture’ as we knew it was actually the product of Hollywood’s never-ending, always self-promoting, stereotyping, commercial exploitations. In this case, surf culture was mostly all a purpose-built spin-off of Hollywood’s post-50s Rock’n’roll music industry (and later, the added impetus of a nascent ‘surf flick’ business, starting with the original and iconic 1959 teen epic, ‘GIDGET’).

Surf culture hits the Meso North American interior

As most of us know, the big youth culture obsession of the post-war 50s was rock and roll music, a distinctive form of American music largely cobbled together from black musical roots in the blues and jazz traditions. Turn a bunch of white kids loose on that sort of stuff and pretty soon you have a whole subset of budding musical wannabes who are (of course) not black but who think the primitive emotionality, overt sexuality and hormonal angst of black music is RILLY COOL stuff.

Surf music naturally morphed from straight rock’n’roll into a wildly popular and unique genre that was inspired by what was originally a Polynesian sport: ‘He’e Nalu’ (or surfing waves on wooden boards); freshly imported from Hawai’i and transplanted onto the west coast of America, it took root and flourished in the culturally fertile climate of Southern California (or ‘SoCal’, as we knew it, and contrasted to ‘NorCal’, our neck of the coastline woods). ‘SoCal’, although generally representative of the whole of California’s coast from about Santa Barbera downwards to San Diego, was actually a catalytic manifestation of LA culture (technically and specifically), since that’s where the Hollywood entertainment industry’s lifestyle and heavy commercial hype stemmed from.

‘SoCal’ may be regarded for all intents and purposes therefore as that part of the state that exists in and on the periphery of Los Angeles, whereas for ‘NorCal’ people, our socio-demographic eipicenter has always been San Francisco (that is, well before San Francisco transmogrified itself a fortress of whacko deviancy on a scale not heretofore seen by ‘straight’ America). California’s two early major centers of population were, naturally, Los Angeles (in the south) and San Francisco (in the north) and were, from their onsets, about as similar to each other in almost every aspect of their respective mindsets and outlooks as Russia's Putin is to Ukraine's Zelensky.

Surf culture may be defined originally, therefore, as a specifically musical isotope that spun off from mainstream rock’n’roll when the latter collided with the newly imported Hawai’ian surfing sport of the 50s (technically, surfing had already established its earliest roots on the mainland back in the 30s when a few of the very early (white) Hawai’ian surf legends had immigrated from the islands to the mainland’s west coast, but it only became really BIG when Hollywood discovered a way to milk the phenomenon dry with ‘surf music’ and ‘surfing flicks’, a la ‘GIDGET’ and all of that film’s subsequent ‘surfsploitation’ clones).

GIDGET the film was inspired by the real-life daughter (Kathy) of a Hollywood writer named Frederick Kohner, who was fascinated by the new Hawai’ian sport of board-surfing and wanted to be accepted by the male surfers as their equal (women surfers were highly frowned upon at the time) and routinely herded away from the prime surfing locales). The name Gidget, a contraction of ‘girl midget’, was selected as the title of a film by a group of Kohner’s colleagues who thought the story might make a great youth flick. From that humble inspiration it may fairly be stated that the whole and entire surf culture sprang forth more-or-less fully matured, as if from the head of The Big Kahuna himself!

In the fictionalised film version of GIDGET, Gidget is played by very blonde Sandra Dee, since blondes were deemed to more perfectly fit the SoCal surfing mythos than darker-haired types (after all, ‘blondes have more fun’, don’t they?), although Kathy Kohner was herself actually a brunette. It should be noted here that in 1965, a date generally considered to be the beginning of the end of the original surf culture craze (Phase-1, at least), actress Sally Field (then still a kid herself) also played Gidget in a television series of the same name; Sally was, as we all know, a brunette and therefore ‘closer’ to the original genuine article than blonde Sandra Dee.[For what it's worth, 'The Flying Nun' schmalz aside, I've always regarded Field as a flaming-hot BABE!]

Well, it’s no great mystery to extrapolate the fact that the culture that followed the release of the movie GIDGET instantly resonated with youths everywhere…first with those in SoCal but very quickly the entire American population under age 20, as the film was subsequently shown all over the country.

Shortly after that, since Hollywood had discovered a whole new way of exploiting highly influenceable teenagers caught up in the youth fad of surfing (whether coastal types or farm-kids from deepest Kansas!), a complete crop of Hollywood follow-ons quickly emerged in theatres. These included some of the most nauseating Grade-B flicks ever made (in my opinion) starring former Mickey Mouse Club ‘Mouseketeer’ Annette Funicello, etc., etc. [YUK!] A few of those more memorably terrible films include the ‘Beach Blanket Bingo’ clones which were truly wretched sops to sappy, puerile banality in every way imaginable.

Naturally, these films encouraged the development of a whole consumer industry devoted to surfboard manufacture, surfing fashions and so forth and so on. It’s never been accurately estimated how many hundreds of millions of dollars were generated from the surfing youth market but it certainly would not be exaggerating much to say ‘somewhere in the billions’ (in today’s money).

But this is perhaps getting ‘horse before the cartish’…

Actually, the original driving force (but concurrent with the surf film scene) behind surf culture was what is somewhat quaintly described as ‘surf music’. Surf music was actually a bastard child of rock’n’roll, as has already been intimated, but the specific individual musician generally credited with popularizing the genre most widely was Richard Anthony Monsour, a rock guitarist of Lebanese descent (yes, another of those infinitely clever, talented and innovative Lebanese who seem to be everywhere behind lucrative ventures!). Monsour became better known as ‘Dick Dale’, the stage name he adopted, and he had the rugged, dark good looks that were quite popular at that time; this undoubtedly helped the spread of his fame among young females. Dick’s group was known as ‘The Deltones’ and his style came to be called ‘surf rock.’

An innovator and pioneer of early amplified guitar, Dale worked with the Fender Company to develop Fender’s famous line of amplifiers, but most notably their ‘reverb’ unit, which Dale claimed took the soft edge off guitar strings and gave it a sort of driving, metallic forcefulness more resonantly associated with the driving, pounding vibes of heavy surf.

Dale’s music was entirely instrumental and as such purely instrumental interpretations literally characterised early surf music as a genre distinct from conventional rock. Only somewhat later did what we can call ‘vocal surf music’ develop, in which puerile lyrics were just as important as the backbeat and driving rhythms that propelled it. Perhaps the most well-known vocal surf artists of all types were (thanks to a very successful and heavy promotional campaign) The Beach Boys, Jan & Dean, The Chantays, The Ventures, The Mar-Kets and a small host of others whose core hits made the big charts once or twice before they faded into the coastal fog banks; but back in those early 60s days it seemed as if almost every home had an aspiring garage surf band, so popular was the sound, and out of them came many of the ‘known' names in surf music.

Then, in 1964 the sudden ‘British invasion’ by the Beatles occurred and this entirely new sound immediately had a major impact on mainstream American youth music tastes. For this reason, the period from 1959 through 1964 is today generally regarded as the apex of the original surf culture phenomenon. The new wave of imported ‘English sound’ dynamic wrought some substantial changes in America's youth, not least upon surf culture also.

Which brings us back to ‘inland surfers’…

As already mentioned, surfing in California began and remained largely a proprietary development of the SoCal youth cultural domain, principally owing to the fact that the coastal waters of the state’s south are significantly warmer than those in the north. In fact, from about San Luis Obispo northwards, the coastal currents get progressively colder due to the encroaching flow of the frigid Alaskan Current. By the time one reached Half Moon Bay (immediately south of San Francisco), the water temp back in the 1950s seldom got any warmer than about 51 degrees…cooler indeed (in fact San Francisco Bay is typically about 53 degrees, year-round!) than the 70s/80s water temp in LA.

Eventually, surfers who wanted to surf some of the large waves of the icy waters in the northern part of the state partly licked the cold problem by using neoprene wetsuits, similar to those worn by skin divers, to stave off hypothermia (they didn’t actually keep you WARM, but merely warmer!) and originally pioneered by the WW2 UDT (Underwater Demolition Team ‘frogmen’) and Jacques Costeau’s innovative undersea developments. [I well recall surfing in the Pismo Beach area clad in a wetsuit, hoping it would more suitably favor my ectomorphic, "Chilly-Willie" physique. A wetsuit extended the time you could remain in the water before your feet and hands turned blue, but northern waters were still palpably much colder than further south!] It was this compelling quest by surfers for some modicum of warmth that resulted in another multi-million-dollar accessory market (surfing skinsuits) for items that are today considered basic equipment on the northern coastal mainland, if not throughout the entire world!

Once NorCal surfers discovered the wetsuit, a whole new and colder part of the California coast opened up, of course, such as at ‘Mavericks’ (near Half Moon Bay) where truly monstrous waves of, on occasion, up to almost 100 feet are located, and even those of us who lived over 150 miles inland had at least one such thermally protective wetsuit outfit. Mavericks quite understandably scared the living pahootie out of me to even think about getting in the water there!

Given our distance from the actual waves as ‘inland surfers’, we all subscribed to several exclusive magazines for surfers so as to stay current on all the latest surfing culture developments. There were also the occasional traveling surf shows to look forward to (one of the most famous being ‘The Endless Summer’), which consisted mostly of home movies, slides and ‘canned’ surf music, usually accompanied by a spoken commentary. These were commonly booked in local armories, public halls, auditoriums and school gyms and were well-attended by all of us aspiring wave shredders.

And if one was lucky, a genuine surf band would blow into town for a show now and then, since surf music was intended to be ‘danceable’ from the onset. Dancing, as everyone probably knows, remained the number-1 teen activity back then, just as it had been during the height of the rock/roll era, and teen dancing (although actually a modern form of primitive ‘mating ritual’) was usually ‘good clean fun’, recognised by adults as a ‘safe’ outlet for teens in which to expend their surplus of energy (and always carefully chaperoned!).

The fact that, as always, teens are attracted to alcohol was an insolvable problem that adults hoped would simply disappear (alas!). Towards that end, at least in our small Podunk of a berg, adults contrived to ‘host’ teen parties in their own homes, so they could moderate and control any excesses in behavior. It usually worked well enough and such parties were extremely tame by today’s ‘anything goes’ standards. They didn’t call surf dances (like surfing itself) ‘good clean fun’ for nothing, naturally!

Of course, being ‘inland surfers’, we all had to know and use the surf jargon, terms and nomenclature to really portray an authentically ‘cool’ style. This included (if one could afford it) buying a real longboard (either glassfiber-covered balsa or the ‘newer’ foam core boards) and riding around town (on a hot California Central Valley summer day, baking in 110-degree heat, this was often a hilarious sight to behold) with a board strapped to the roof of the car. ‘The car’ considered the ultimate status symbol for someone in our set was a ‘surf wagon’…usually a 30s/40s vintage ‘woody’, (a wood-paneled station wagon) but sometimes an old hearse, or even something even a bit more esoteric…like an old, retired ambulance or fire-engine…would be pressed into service.

In terms of affecting ‘the look’, certain articles of surf attire were considered de rigueur for any perspicacious surf-poser, such as the ubiquitous Pendleton wool shirt, a cotton Madras shirt or two, ditto for a Madras-patterned belt, faded blue denim pants (the lighter the better, even if they were bought that way), blue US Keds ‘boat shoes’ (originally used in yachting to keep from slipping on wet decks) and made-in Mexico huarache sandals (with soles made from chopped-up tire treads).

Polynesian-inspired Tikis were also highly favored by cool surfer wannabes of both the type you can wear on a string around your neck and the larger ‘Idolo Verde’ types you would put on your car’s dashboard. Finally, the ‘look’ was finessed with a shock of thick and wild, bleached-blonde hair to top it all off. This was the standardized look everyone in the surfer group strove to achieve and seeing everyone together at a party was often quite a comical matter, since it sometimes looked as if somebody had unleashed a whole roomful of identical clones.

A few other items that began as surfer duds included the ‘hoodie’ (a hooded sweatshirt), which since becoming popularised among surfers as a highly functional article of warming apparel on the beach, has…unfortunately…undergone a radical transmogrification in the intervening several decades into today’s mandatory teenage political statement of radical wokeist ideology. [I’ll never wear another hoodie myself, given that unsavory connotation! Back in our day, a ‘hoodie’ was merely a cheap sports sweatshirt with a hood attached that would keep off the ocean breezes a bit, but since then it’s become as much the ‘uniform’ of teens and radicals as a blue blazer is to an upward-striving, high-society, yacht-set wannabe.]

As regards actual beach attire, guys wouldn’t be caught dead in a skimpy swimsuit like the racing Speedos we all wore on the swim team (God forbid!), opting first for loosely fitting cut-off pants until about 1960, when Doris Moore and Duke Boyd (in Seal Beach, CA) started the ‘Hang Ten’ surfing apparel line and began to market the first real ‘board shorts’ known commonly as ‘baggies’. In quick succession all subsequent board shorts (of which today the Aussie ‘Quicksilver’ Company's products are perhaps best known) emulated the front-laced Hang Ten pattern, and no inland surfer worth his affective pretensions would wear anything else!

Speaking of Hang Ten, 1960 essentially witnessed the start of a highly lucrative, broadly diversified surfing accessory market that would eventually become such a major commercial force that the big surfing apparel concerns would end up as big-money sponsors for the new professional surfing competitions. Once that dynamic took hold, the sport was never again the same and its simple, basic nature ‘local’ nature changed almost overnight, sparked by a massive influx of gobs of money (like all pro sports, just another co-optive scramble for obscene profits by wealthy commercial interests out to scalp the naive youths).

While the ‘real’ surfers (AKA: ‘Locals’) who actually lived a surfing lifestyle on the coast could afford to be a bit more ‘genuine’ and less slavish to faddish trendiness, we inland pretenders got caught up in a whole plethora of surfing stereotypes in our eagerness to look the look, walk the walk and surf the surf! Looking back on it all, it’s hard not to overlook all the absurdity manifested by us fawning ‘true believers’ in chasing after all the commercially hyped stereotypes and bullshit that corporate surfing rapidly came to personify!

When we inlanders were able to actually make it to the beach and try to surf a few sets, most of us were pretty miserable at it. I myself well recall, not without a huge amount of chagrin, that I could never stay balanced on a board for more than about 10 seconds (if that!) and certainly NOT on any wave higher than about 6 feet. And if we were so unfortunate as to not even OWN a board of our own, we had to rent boards from the local (coastal) surf shop, which was in itself a stigma of shame that would instantly mark one out as definitely NOT a local. Sigh! You can’t imagine how we envied those kids who lived right on or near the beach and who could skip school for a day if the surf was up!

For us it was truly, as the Broadway ‘Man of La Mancha’ play had it, 'an impossible dream', of course, but when you’re young the chances are about 9 out of 10 that the other half of your head that isn't already waterlogged is full of horse feathers, anyway. So we were into it ‘ankle, thigh and upper half!’ (as the other big hit Broadway play ‘Paint Your Wagon’ put it).

The world’s worst surfer (except possibly Buster Keaton)

So, how did I stack up in terms of achieving any notable peer status through my blind dedication to the surfing image? I won’t kid you. I was a miserable failure at it. No cute beach bunnies EVER took a second look at me, either at a small ‘surfer dance party’ in my dinky berg of a Central California town or at the actual beach (the nearest beach town being Pismo, or Avila). I was as hopeless at attracting their attention with my posing as I was anywhere else. I guess I just lacked the sheer ‘bad boy’ chutzpah that any successful young dude has had to project since the dawn of history, in order to win the attention of a really cute girl!

As far as surf dances went, several main styles predominated, including the Twist (the only dance nearly everyone could do without much effort) and The Surfer Stomp. This was originally popularised by a group called the Mar-Kets in 1962, and it quickly swept the youth crowd caught up in surf culture. It was pretty basic, of course, but the onomatopoeic name just about says it all and there was a whole lotta stomping going on! [One suspects that the popular English 'Bristol Stomp' had something to do with its origins.]

Interestingly, surf style required male surfers (real and/or imagined…”Hodads” or 'surf posers' and “Gremmies” who were what are today called 'Groms', or youthful beginners) to affect an almost detached, disdainful attitude when they danced and since female surfers were censured and rejected by surfers, the chicks the males danced with were usually awe-struck female admirers (but non-surfers). Surfing back then was exclusively a male preserve, “Gidget’s” efforts notwithstanding, so the main effort while dancing was to look aesthetically aloof and emotionally removed from the partner. This quirky style was mandated by the self-perpetuating image of the ideal surfer as a singularly ‘lonely’ dude who was such a unique individualist that his regard for the ocean and surf was totally incapable of being understood by mere ‘mortals’ (i.e. mere ‘chicks’ and ‘surf bunnies’).

And coincidentally, this is where our friend Nietzsche comes into the picture. The Nietzsche in reference was not Frederick Nietzsche (the philosopher) but Jack Nitzsche the guitarist. Being also of German extraction, his family name had originally followed the traditional Germanic custom of spelling it as ‘Nietzsche’ with an ‘e’ but somehow it morphed into Nitzsche when they came to the USA.

Jack Nitzsche became well known at that time for writing and performing a plaintively haunting song he called ‘The Lonely Surfer’ and it quickly became the siren-song of all righteously individualistic surfer dudes (who thought they were all experiential singularities and therefore totally incapable of being understood by the chicks). Narcissistic? Oh yeah, you betcha, but many of us (including moi) faithfully tried to hew to that image and enthusiastically attempted to live it! I guess we figured that since we weren’t the Sierra Hotel chick-magnets we felt we ought to be, it was a convenient protective subterfuge to adopt that would justify (and explain) our failure to dazzle the babes!

I, of course, couldn’t afford my own board back then, not even a so-called ‘popout’ board (a cheaper, mass-produced board, made in the Far East using an automated machine that hot-molded a fiberglass layer on a foam/balsa core), and certainly not one of the very expensive ‘custom board’ products (ideally made by Hobie, Weber, Dale Velzy or one of several other big-name surfboard shapers of that era), so I usually had to creep over to the local surf shop at the beach and shame-facedly rent a cheap longboard for an hour or two. They were all longboards in those early days, not one of the so-called ‘recreational boards’ being shorter than about 9-10 feet (by contrast, “big wave guns” for pro-surfing were sometimes 14-16 or more feet long!).

Once thus armed and in the ‘soup’ (the small, soupy wavelets washing up on and receding from the sand after every shore-break), I’d valiantly struggle to get up on my board, after making it through the milder cresting waves nearer the shore by ‘turtling’ under them. It wasn’t usually a pretty sight and I regularly swallowed gallons of salt water in the process, despite my swim team prowess as a fairly good breast-stroker (no pun intended, but watching our HS female swimmers do their stuff, I could dream, couldn't I?)!

All true wave shredders must have a ‘surfmobile’

I was no exception to this dictim, having picked up a strangely maroonish (primer-painted) old 1940 Chevy Master Deluxe Coupe in my sophomore year for only $50. Even back then before becoming a car all the old geezer boomers wanted to have in their garage, it was already an emerging classic. One of my fellow Wascoites (he perfectly fit the idealized image of a surfer with a lanky build and a shock of naturally yellow-blonde hair…his family were Ukrainian emigrees and his father was a house painter by trade) who was a regular surf buddy, was named Steve. One day, Steve’s dad offered to paint my drab, dull Chevy with the remnant of some mint-green house paint he happened to have left over from a recent job, gratis, a gesture I quickly accepted. The car ended up looking like a big block of mint ice cream on wheels but what the hey! The only other 40 Chev in town was a bit spiffier than mine, with a bright canary-yellow finish done professionally by an auto shop, but I was just fine with my make-do mint-julip on wheels!

This is the vehicle Steve and I (plus another budy) made our occasional weekend ‘surfaris’ to Pismo and Avila Beach in, although the car had a leaky radiator that required carrying about 6 one-gallon jugs of H20 on the back shelf-seat which we used to fill the radiator, about every 20 miles or so. But we were young and life was just one big adventure, despite the inconvenience, so no problemo!

It was in this conveyance that we had traveled to Pismo Beach on the weekend of the Great Alaskan Earthquake of 1964 (Friday, 27 March). Arriving late in the day at Pismo, after a quick clam-burger (don't even ASK!) at the local greasy spoon café, I drove down one of the public access ramps onto the beach and we headed about 3 miles south on the hard-packed sand, finally parking about 10 feet above what we estimated was the high-tide mark would be. There, a tent quickly went up and we tossed out the sleeping bags. As we settled down to snooze for the night, the coastal fog was also sweeping in from the ocean, obscuring everything, and it looked like it would be a real pea-souper but no sweat, eh?

I forget exactly when, but sometime in the very early AM the next morning (3AM?) we were suddenly jolted from a sound sleep by amplified loud-hailers higher up on the shore that ominously blared out “TAKE TO HIGH GROUND: A TIDAL WAVE HAS BEEN REPORTED”. At about the same time, the local Pismo Beach civil defense siren started wailing the same way it would if Nikita Kruschev had finally launched his ICBMs at the US. The effect, coming through a solid wall of opaque fog and total blackness is hard to describe but I came about as close to messing my pants at that moment as I have ever come! It was frightening to say the least!

It was by then impossible to see in any direction more than about 10-15 feet, of course, and the high tide was fully in, too…meaning that all that formerly hard-packed sand we have driven in on was now submerged. Our sole concern at that point quickly became how to get the HELL off that beach and head for the safety of the nearby hills! Pronto!

Tossing a few vital possessions into the car, we all jumped in and decided the only option was to head back up the beach in the direction we had come from, but the risk of getting stuck in the soft sand meant we had to travel back up that route through the soup! My Chevy was never intended to double as a submarine, (even on the rainiest of San Joaquin Valley days) and the problem was compounded by the fact that the steering linkage was also a bit loose, requiring a full quarter-yank on the steering wheel to get the vessel to respond to the helm! You simply cannot imagine the navigational difficulties all these factors imposed on three high school students who were expecting a 50-foot-high wall of water to come crashing down on them through the fog at any second! Like I said, it’s a good thing the car’s upholstery was made from a drab, brown fabric material!

Eventually, by simple dumb luck, we managed to keep both from veering off into the dry sand OR out into the waves, despite the foggy darkness, and safely made it back to the first of the beach off-ramps, about 3 miles back up the beach! I probably set a new speed record for beach driving but to any spectator who might have seen the car, I’m sure it would have appeared as if it were being driven by a spastic suffering a grand mal seizure!

The rest of that night, spent huddled in that old Chevy on top of one of the nearby coastal bluffs, wasn’t quite equal to escaping the doomed RMS Titanic in a lifeboat but it sure came close, by our fevered reckoning, I can assure you!

Next morning, after the sun had burned off the fog, we timidly ventured back down the beach to see the effects of the tsunami. It was anticlimactic to say the least, since the highest point of the coastal surge reached was only about 6 feet up the beach from where we had camped for the night. I lost a pair of surfing tennies, but otherwise it was no big deal! It took a couple of hours for that big quake’s tsunami to travel down the cost from Alaska and sure, Crescent City in Northern California suffered a massive hit from it, but Pismo, by contrast, was spared almost entirely. Still, viewed retrospectively, it was about as big an adventure as anyone from a sleepy little San Joaquin Valley town had any right to expect on an otherwise halcyonic visit to the beach!

Truth be told, I was never, ever a ‘comfortable’ wannabe surfer, even when I was sitting out there just beyond the outer break on my rented board. When you’re out on the water, waiting for a break in the kelp fields, you assume a sitting position on the board, with your legs (those tasty sharky hors d’oeuvre that certain members of Class Chondrichthyes are so fond of) dangling enticingly down into the murky water below like so much shark chum. As a kid with a markedly overwrought imagination, it didn’t take much for me to spot a suspected dorsal fin slicing through the nearby water, whether it really was one or not! If my name had been Norvis, I would sure enough have been known by my gremmie peers as ‘nervous Norvis’, accordingly.

Putting away the toys of boys

Many years after all this, you would expect me to have left all these fond adolescent remembrances in the past, safely buried in my chest of memories. In my case, after I hit sixty-five, I had by then acquired at least six well-preserved old longboards (one of them a brand-new, expensive clone of Hobie’s classic ‘Pig’ longboard in bright yellow fiberglass that I had not been able to afford when I was 18). Among them was a 16-foot Freeman ‘big gun’, another was a gen-u-wine pop-out Duke Kahanamoku longboard (1961), still another was a Rich Custom Surfboards longboard and I even had a real 1960'ish Dale Velzy longboard (all of them with single laminated wooden skegs...or 'fins' as they are now called, on shortboards)! And all peacefully resting, largely retired, in the rafters of my garage. Eventually, when I turned 70, I came to my senses (after being subjected to a relentless campaign to ‘downsize’ my toy collection by wifie) and donated most of them to a local Hawai’ian Hula Helau (Hula dance group), including the Duke Kahanamoku classic, as scenic backdrops for their public appearances and competitions.

Today, although I was verily and truly nothing more than an inland ‘Gremmie’ at best, back then, I was in it heart & soul, for as most of us know, old, passionate youthful dreams typically take a long time to die. It was indeed a long, difficult and prolonged dissipation process and today I still get serious pangs of puerile latency whenever I hear the Beach Boys sing ‘Little Surfer Girl’, Jan & Dean crooning ‘Ride, Ride, Ride the Wild Surf’, ‘Pipeline’, 'Wipeout' and…especially…Jack Nitzsche’s classic ‘The Lonely Surfer’. Sigh! A dude’s gotta have dreams, right?

Cowabunga, dudes and dudettes!

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Resources (to pursue):

There are a number of excellent books available on the Golden Age of California surfing, which is roughly considered to be the 1950s and 60s (the ‘era of the longboard’). One of the most interesting is a biography of California surfboard shaper Dale Velzy, whose name was almost synonymous with the California longboard and the early 50s California surfing scene. The title of that 256-page, large format, hardcover book by Paul Holmes is ‘Dale Velzy is Hawk’ (his nickname) and it is still in print ($30) after a special publishing run was made some 10 years ago (one is a collector edition with leather bindings, currently priced at $125; the other, for $30, is a regular hardbound edition). The book is beautifully and profusely illustrated with a great many photos (more than 280), illustrations and depictions of the California surfing scenes of the 50s and 60s that Velzy’s activities helped bring into prominence. Particularly recommended to anyone who wishes a better understanding of what it was really like, surfing on the California Pacific Coast in that seminal, post-war era, with the balsa and/or fiberglass-covered foam-cored long surfboards that predominated before the later ‘short-board’ age. [Check AMAZON, or GOOGLE the book’s title/author for availability.]

I highly recommend 'Dale Velzy is Hawk' to any one of you who, like me, was caught up in that fabulous youth scene of the 60s!

For some examples of acknowledged 'all-time' classic surf songs, try these: WIPEOUT, PIPELINE, SURFIN' USA, and MISERLOU, LITTLE SURFER GIRL. One last fav of mine (and many others of that era) was a psychological refuge from the angst of the turbulent 'teen years': 'IN MY ROOM' also by the Beach Boys.