Hey All, Pointing out the smallness of 1970s world tour surfing won’t raise any untrimmed eyebrows over at the Society of American Historians. Smallness is a cornerstone of the WCT origin story. To demonstrate growth, the tour will invariably harken back upon its kitchen-table origins, the tiny but hardcore cluster of spectators at the early events, the blue-collar paychecks. (Eddie Aikau, 1975’s...
Hey All, Localism was already a thing in 1972—you might even say it was the thing, in terms of the sport jumping all over a new trend—but for most of us it was still a rumor, a bit of sidewalk graffiti, a lustily shouted “GO HOME, KOOK!” after a drop-in by a non-local surfer. Of course, we’d been tribal for 20-plus years by that point. “Locals Only” blew up not just for its perfect four-syllable ...
Hey All, Deep in the weeds here at Encyclopedia of Surfing HQ, spit-shining every page before gently, carefully moving it to the new platform. We’re still a few weeks out, and I’m adding an extra few days at least to account for all the time where I’m side-tracked looking at posts I haven’t seen for years, some of which go back to 2013. A few things have stuck out. Mostly, and I’ve come back to t...
Hey All, Dane Kealoha of Hawaii has died at age 64, after a long fight with cancer that nobody outside of family and friends knew anything about. Social media jumped the gun, as usual. Last weekend, before I'd even replied to the first of many texts from many people alerting me that Dane had passed, I got an email from son Kelai Kealoha saying that "Dad is very sick" but not gone. Dane hung in th...
Hey All, My wife and her two sisters used to get dropped off at their grandparents’ house, and sometimes for lunch the girls were treated to Jello Surprise in which, through some midcentury kitchen magic, pieces of fruit and mini-marshmallow were suspended in the Jello like tiny sea creatures. So far so good. In her declining years, however, Grandma Mildred became, let’s say, a bit more freestyle...
Hey All, Have a look at this somber little 1963 TV news clip of Mike Diffenderfer, Mike Hynson, and Bill Caster being interviewed about a just-announced project to create Tourmaline Surfing Park, in San Diego. The first breath of onshore wind has just come up, but the surf looks great. That's Pacific Beach Point in the background, and in my desultory two semesters at San Diego State, when I was d...
Hey All, Never read reviews before experiencing the thing itself, the book or movie or tour or whatever. Everyone knows this, but I did it anyway, read the damn review, and that's how I learned Python Lee Jackson did the soundtrack for a one-hour 1966 Aussie surf doc called The Surfing Years before I actually watched The Surfing Years. "Python Lee Jackson has supplied suitably twangy music" is wh...
Hey All, If the only thing you remember about Bondi surf legend Bluey Mayes, as described in a recent Joint, is a flame-haired barrel-chested pug screaming “Outta me fuckin’ way, ya goose!” whvuile riding a 16-foot toothpick through the lineup like Major TJ Kong rodeo-nuking the Russians—understandable, that is the Bluey money shot for sure. But between the part on Mayes’ EOS page where a friend...
Hey All, Happy Memorial Day and a big thanks to the military-affiliated among you who wrote in after last week’s Sunday Joint to comment on the unlikely but often very compatible ways in which service and surfing can together exist in a person’s life. I’ve always had a blind spot here. I watched Patton and Apocalypse Now and Stripes, Cliffs-Noted my way through All Quiet on the Western Front, and...
Hey All, Remember that thing you did in high school where you’d siphon a half-inch from every bottle in your parents’ liquor cabinet, add orange juice, mix, and look out, world, here comes the party posse? Did you have a name for that drink? In mid-’70s Manhattan Beach it was a Suicide. Here in Seattle, during the ’80s, according to my wife, it was called a Graveyard—and for day drinking during ...