KFMB-TV, channel 8, is San Diego's longtime CBS affiliate. Tune into CBS Evening News and you'd see (depending on the decade) Walter Cronkite or Dan Rather or Katie Couric. Watch the local news and you'd very quickly see reporter Harold Keen, the Bronx-born "Dean of San Diego Journalists." The footage here consists of Keen interviewing three notable local surfers, Mike Diffenderfer, Mike Hynson, a...
You Should Have Been Here an Hour Ago, Phil Edwards's 180-page autobiography, came out in the summer of 1967. A lot of things were lined up in the book's favor. It was published by powerhouse Harper & Row, home to Mark Twain, Agatha Christie, and Harper Lee, among others, and Endless Summer had just introduced the non-surfing world to "the amazing Phil Edwards." The book was co-authored by Sports ...
"Ballet on a Surfboard," Tony Pratt's review of Midget Farrelly's 1965 book This Surfing Life (released two years later in America as The Surfing Life) ran in the February 21, 1965, edition of the Sydney Sun-Herald. This version has been slightly edited. * * * We have underestimated the surfboard rider. He is a modern mystic, a perfectionist, a striver for the impossible. His ultimate goal—the p...
This Surfing Life, Midget Farrelly's first book coauthored with Craig McGregor, was published in Australia in 1965, and republished two years later in America, as The Surfing Life. The excerpt below has been slightly edited. * * * I suppose my first ride on a surfboard, if you could call it that, happened when I was about nine. I was living with my parents at North Bondi at the time. I had an un...
Frank Frazetta, the pompadoured New Yorker artist whose obsessively detailed paintings of shredded axe-wielding barbarians and their Playboyesque women made him the once and forever Michelangelo of fantasy art, did his best-known work in the 1960s and '70s, and died in 2010 at age 82. Even if you don't know the name, you've seen Frazetta's art, or people and works influenced by his art—the Ring mo...
The Little Annie Fanny cartoon strip, written and created by Mad magazine editor and cofounder Harvey Kurtzman, was a Playboy staple from 1962 to 1988. "The Surfers" was illustrated by Will Elder, Frank Frazetta, and Jack Davis, and ran in the July 1965 issue. Some history of the strip from the frazettagirls.com website: "In order to secure the job, Frazetta had to try out for Kurtzman & Elder to...
Rose Apadoca Jones' article on Shane Dorian ran in the April 30, 1998, issue of the Los Angeles Times. This version has been slightly edited. * * * Abandon all preconceptions of what constitutes surfer style. Versace lambskin boot-cut pants and an ankle-length Gucci peacoat might fit better on a Manhattan boulevard than a Hawaiian beach. But to pro surfer Shane Dorian, the designer togs are as c...
In 2017, not long after I posted a History of Surfing chapter titled “Surf Fashion, Lightly Salted,” Davis Jones interviewed me for a short SURFER Magazine feature. This version has been slightly edited. * * * JONES: In Justin Housman’s 2015 piece on surf fashion, he writes that, really, fashion can’t ever be wrong. He uses a Kanye West quote: “I believe everyone is a fashion insider because it ...
This uncredited article was written by Rio surfer and photojournalist Tito Rosemberg, along with Johnny Hansen, and was published in the January 1968 issue of SURFER. * * * What happens when a carioca takes vira vaca at Baixio? If you’ve ever been to Rio—the meaning is simple: a local Copacabana Beach surfer has taken a wipeout (literally translated to "rolling the cow") at Baixio, a break note...
Tito Rosemberg is best known as a hardcore Land Rover-loving surf adventurer. He has visited over 100 countries, lived and worked in many of them, and surfed throughout. Before all that, however, Rosemberg was one of Brazil's original hardcore carioca surfers, spending his days on the beach at Arpoador, and his nights in the homes, clubs and restaurants of nearby Ipanema and Copacabana, at a time ...