SUNDAY JOINT, 6-15-2025: "BY JOVE, THAT BALD-HEADED FELLOW. IT'S ME!"

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 White Desert step-up board. But today, I admit to you again, as I first did 10 years ago and once more in 2023, that the Egyptian-sandboard origin story is unconditionally false. The facts were not properly checked. I blew it. 

Of course, I don't especially mind being wrong. I always try to get it right, but surf history covers a lot of ground, and I've been running my little plow hither and yon upon these salt-crusted fields at breakneck speed for nigh on four decades now, so yes I've produced a few, more than a few, mostly small, let's call them counterfactuals. Which like I say, I'm not too bothered when it happens, always glad to acknowledge and fix—and in fact sometimes I am happy to be proven wrong, today being the most prime of prime examples, because my latest boner is about to produce a small geyser of good cheer.

Remember Sir John Betjeman, the British poet laureate from last week's Joint? The rotund and smiling golf-lover who very much enjoyed the waves and the shore but (so I claimed) "did not himself surf?" 

Wrong again. Betjeman surfed!

He hitched his bathing costume up around his navel and surfed, was filmed doing so, and afterward went so far as to declare: "I don't know anything so exciting as getting a perfect surf. Timing one's shoot off from the waves, riding along on the crest and coming far in shore." Commenting himself on the film clip, as he skims along in the general direction of the Red Lion tavern, Betjeman gives us our first and best Oxford English surf claim: "By Jove, that bald-headed fellow. It's me!"

Let's now swing our attention down to England's favorite Commonwealth nation (sorry Canada). It was an open secret among Aussie surfers in the late 1960s and early '70s that world champion Phyllis O'Donell and national champ Josette Lagardere were an item. The amazing thing about "Philly and Joey," Alicia King's wonderful new piece on the two women, recently published in Surfing World, is that the gay angle is at best secondary, well behind the main theme, which is enduring friendship. Lagardere, Florida-born but raised in Southern California, met O'Donell during the 1966 World Championships in San Diego. They spent a year together in LA County, then moved in with Phyllis' parents in Queensland, and later rented a flat at Rainbow Bay, next door to a young Michael Peterson. The romance didn't last, but the friendship did, and in fact deepened over the years. It was Josette who time and again over the decades helped lift Phyllis from an assortment of mental and physical troughs, and Josette who did the caretaking during the finals years of Phyllis' life. O'Donell, in turn, was a kind of potty-mouthed larrikin pixie in Josette's life. I read something once, long ago, that the best way to gauge a relationship is by the amount of time you spend laughing together, and by that measure Phyllis and Josette, over 57-some years, were way over on the sharpened far edge of the happy-healthy scale. "There's more to love than sex," Lagardere told King. "We were best friends before and after our relationship." O'Donell died at the end of 2024. Josette, along with Steph Gilmore, Pauline Menczer and others, all helped scatter her ashes at Kirra. The highlight of my work week was imagining the two women fighting over who got to wear the favorite striped sweater, which as best I can tell came into the relationship from Phyllis' side (left, 1965), and was still in rotation by the time Josette wore it to Bells in 1970 (right). 

Let's go out on another high note. The feel-good moment from the 1966 World Championships, in San Diego, for my money anyway, is the photo below of finalist Mimi Munro (blue-white bikini) and what I for years assumed was a pair of San Diego beach bunnies. Some years back I learned that the girl in the middle is Kathy LaCroix, and not too long ago found out the girl on the left is Renee Eisler, and together they formed the dazzling women's squad of the East Coast Team for the San Diego event. All from Florida. Mimi, just 14, took third in the contest. Kathy, 18, got 7th. Renee, the matron at 19, got 9th. Munro was the flashiest surfer of the group, or any other group, basically—"head and shoulders above the rest," Gary Propper once said, "people came out in droves to see her"—and her praises have been sung here and elsewhere over the years. I didn't have much luck recently gathering information on LaCroix, but posted her page anyway and hope that more photos and details emerge. 

Eisler's EOS page went up this week, and it took way too long but that's all three women now present and accounted for on the site. Renee, furthermore, sat down for an interview in 2017 with historian Steve Estes, and you can find a slightly edited version here.

Eisler, Munro, and LaCroix all more or less scattered not long after the San Diego contest—none were on the scene when the boards went short a year later; for a long time Mimi quit surfing altogether—but Renee scattered the furthest, steaming around the world on an accredited 14-week Semester at Sea jaunt, then moving to Hawaii to finish college, then joining the Peace Corps to continue her travels. She talks about some of those experiences here, but is more freewheeling in her conversation with Estes. Where Mimi Munro has always come off as tough and straightforward and no-nonsense, Renee seems, I'm not sure how to put it—more Southern, I guess. Sweeter. Almost courtly. I very much enjoyed this exchange from her interview:

Some people I've talked to say that, if you're from around here, you go to California or Hawaii and the surfers there think, 'Oh, people from Florida can't surf,' so then you kind of surprise them. Was that true for you?

Yes. For all of us.

Did you actually hear people say those kinds of things out loud?

No. I never heard it myself. But when I visited California, I found surfers there to be more rude than we were here. They apparently didn't have any training from their parents about manners.

Then again, you get the sense that Renee in her own manner was as tough and no-bullshit as Mimi, and a dedicated free-spirit in the bargain. She never married, as far as I know, but she tells Estes that she got engaged not long after moving to Honolulu in the early '70s. That's Renee, below left, with best friend Linda Barron in the middle and Renee's husband-to-be on the right. Estes asked about her fiancé.

He was a surfer?

Mmmmm. But he was also a musician, so he was busy every night in Waikiki, and I was required to go, which I got very bored with.

He was native Hawaiian?

Chinese-Korean and Hawaiian

Did your parents have anything to say about the fact that you were planning to get married to a Chinese-Korean guy?

No, they didn't dare. But my mother warned me that being tied to a musician, and that whole entertainment business, was a difficult life. And luckily I found out, before it was too late.

So you got sick of going to all his gigs?

Yeah.

Renee broke it off, flew back to the Mainland, signed up for the Peace Corps, and shipped out to Brazil to teach elementary school deep in the interior of Rio Grande do Norte. I like the idea that Eisler was never going to find the kind of adventure she was looking for while backstage at the Honolulu bars and nightclubs. But I also like the idea that her parents, and the south in general, did not get a say in where she lived or who she dated.

The more you think about it, the more you realize that we paid too much attention to David and Nat that week in San Diego.

Thanks for reading, and see you next week!

Matt

[Photo grid, clockwise from top left: John Betjeman; Josette Lagardere, Santa Cruz, photo by Ron Stoner; Phyllis O'Donell in 1964; Renee Eisler surfing in 1966; Eisler in black MIT sweatshirt, Mimi Munro at bottom of frame; sandboarding in California, early 1960s. John Betjeman bellyboarding in Cornwall. O'Donell and Lagardere. Eisler, Kathy LaCroix, and Mimi Munroe, San Diego, 1966, photo by Stoner. Eisler nose-riding. Eisler in San Diego. Eisler and Linda Barron in Hawaii, 1972. Big thanks to Mat Arney for the John Betjeman link, and to Matt O'Brien for the Morro Castle tip.]