George Snyder, writing under the name Patrick Morgan, produced his 10-book hardboiled surf-pulp Operation Hang Ten series between 1969 and 1973. Surfer-playboy-spy Bill Cartwright is the Hang Ten headliner. None of the books were reviewed in newspapers or magazines but pop-culture enthusiast Joe Kenney, on his website Glorious Trash, had this to say about the Snyder, Cartwright, and the series in ...
"Pulps and Pot: Surfing Problems," by Patrick McNulty (above), ran on SURFER's editorial page in the September 1967 issue. McNulty was SURFER's editor from 1965 until 1968 when he was replaced by Drew Kampion. * * * The changing problems facing the sport of surfing are reflected in mail crossing the editor's desk. A few years ago, the letters mostly were concerned with erasing the "gremmie" imag...
"Quiet Triumph: the Remarkable Journey of Pam Burridge," by DC Green, ran in the Summer 1998 issue of Deep magazine. This version has been slightly shortened and edited. * * * Consider this: at the time of writing, Pam Burridge and Trudy Todd were the sixth- and third-highest rated surfers, respectively, on the ASP world tour. Yet Trudy only began surfing in 1990, when Pam had already been on th...
Scott Hulet's profile on Donald Takayama ran in the Summer 1993 issue of Longboard magazine. The version below has been shortened and slightly edited. * * * Donald Takayama, aka “Fuzzy,” “Bird’s-nest,” and, naturally, “DT,” led what was probably the most idyllic childhood a surfer could possibly envision. Surrounded by the High Council of Hawaiian Watermen, the beachboys, Donald was schooled in ...
California surfers Mike Purpus and Angie Reno were both in their mid-20s prime in 1974, when Playgirl magazine came calling. Both had star turns in Five Summer Stories. Purpus had just won the Malibu AAAA contest and was second runner-up in the Smirnoff. Reno was regarded among the most fearless North Shore surfers, and would later stunt-surf in Big Wednesday. Playgirl launched in 1973, according ...
The 1958 Makaha International Surfing Championships program was edited and produced by OB and Dick Patterson, both of whom were members of the event-sponsoring Waikiki Surf Club. Thanks to David Beaver for donating this program to Encyclopedia of Surfing. * * * [Thanks to David Beaver for donating this program to Encyclopedia of Surfing] ...
William Finnegan's "Black Sea Blues" ran in the August 15, 1999, issue of the New Yorker * * * I could have been the first man to surf the Black Sea. I got off a bus in a coastal village somewhere in northern Turkey, and there it was: brown and misty and full of mediocre, blown-out waves, dribbling in from the general direction of Odessa. This was 1970. I was a hippie surf punk from California d...
The Surfie-Rocker Wars, as named by the Sydney press, were a series of scrapes between the local middle-class suburban kids, most of whom either surfed or were in surf lifesaving clubs (Surfies), and working-class day-trippers from a few miles inland (Rockers). Nobody was killed or badly injured in the Surfie-Rocker Wars. But the fighting, on occasion, took place in broad daylight, on popular beac...
Iowa-born Eugene Burdick (1918-1965) was an Oxford-educated Rhodes scholar teaching political theory at UC Berkeley in 1956 when The Ninth Wave, his noir-tinged first novel, was published. Burdick’s other fiction and nonfiction books include The Ugly American, a best-seller from 1958, and 1962’s Cold War thriller Fail-Safe; both were made into movies. In this excerpt, we meet budding psychopath an...
Phil Jarratt's profile on Terry Fitzgerald ran in the Spring 2000 issue of Surfer's Journal. This version has been slightly edited and shortened. * * * Coledale, 1960. A collection of miner’s cottages hung like a string of imitation pearls around the neck of a coal-rich cliff that falls away to the sea. Dominating the village on the south coast of New South Wales is the Coledale Hospital, a bung...