Hey All, The Waikiki Shell, located just off the famous west-facing slope of Diamond Head, is a beautiful mid-sized performance venue; a smaller, more casual version of the Hollywood Bowl, with seating for 2,400 and a broad skirt of lawn for 6,000 more. Elvis played the Shell. Dylan, Sinatra, the New York Philharmonic, the Beach Boys, the Righteous Brothers, all played there. When your tour hit H...
Hey All, If George Orwell's 1984 was assigned to my 10th-grade English class, and it probably was, I have no memory of it. I knew how to get Bs with near-zero effort and would have skated past Orwell like I did everything else at the time apart from surfing, basketball, and rending my Unity Surfboards T-shirt over whatever girl was ignoring me that month. I already knew that to describe somethi...
Hey All, Last week's Joint featuring Fred Van Dyke, surfing's emotionally-charged one-man Tortured Poets Department, reminded me how much I enjoyed writing those 10,000-word XXL features for Surfer's Journal in the 1990s and 2000s—back before social media threw our attention span in the woodchipper. Van Dyke's TSJ profile in particular was a joy to write, mostly thanks to Fred himself but also be...
Hey All, Three-quarters of all North Shore WCT winners between 1975 and 1980, men and women, rode Tom Parrish-shaped boards, and that might be lowballing it. Parrish was of course the apex craftsman at Lightning Bolt—"The Man with the Red-Hot Planer." He was also a friendly, upbeat, one-man corrective to all that wizardy shaper-guru hoodoo we got stuck with in the '60s and '70s. If you somehow ma...
Hey All, Last week's look at the 1977 Stubbies was meant to be a two-parter, but halfway through I changed my mind and tried to squeeze everything into on probably-too-long Joint—and now I'm U-turning again to add a few more thoughts on the Stubbies, and pro surfing contests in general. Underlining the not-so-groundbreaking yet frequently ignored point that great contests only happen in great wa...
Hey All, The last thing to get cut from a recent Joint featuring Phyllis O'Donell was her quote about the '74 Australian Titles, held at Burleigh Heads. O'Donell was 37, the other competitors were almost without exception in their teens or early 20s. "They kept holding the event back," O'Donell later recalled, "waiting for the surf to improve." Sitting around that morning, all we did was eat, ea...
Hey All, Wallace Dickson of Largo, Florida, a Gulf Coast bedroom community 25 miles west of Tampa that over the past few years has been attracting supercharged weather events like there's a bullseye on the City Hall lawn, sent me an amazing photo of pre-fame Ted Cassidy. If you are a current or soon-to-be pensioner and loved TV sitcoms as a kid, like me, you know Cassidy as Lurch, the gigantic sh...
Hey All, I have never pretended to love all my EOS children equally. The "people" entries are the Dick Smothers part of the site; I like them best, always have. Attention is paid to the others (surf breaks, equipment, events, etc.) but they must work harder, and not always to successful ends, for what I give freely and easily to the people pages. Canoe surfing, for example. The section in James...
Hey All, Sly Stone and Brian Wilson were born just a few weeks apart, and departed in similar one-two fashion, earlier this month, at age 82. For boomer-age music lovers, it felt like a death in the family. The double blow in fact made the loss feel greater than the sum of the two parts—never mind the fact that both beat long odds to even reach seniority. Unless you're Paul McCartney, it is just ...
Hey All, The most-wrong moment in Encyclopedia of Surfing, ever, so far anyway, was the print version intro line for the "sandboarding" entry, and here you go: "Ancient Egyptians used planks made of pottery or wood to slide down sand dunes." My inner Dune-child still believes that archeologists will someday send word from Cairo that they have at last found clay fragments from what is clearly a Wh...