Pt 2:
In April, a young man with an assault rifle marched into a Southern California synagogue, shouted anti-Semitic insanity and proved his heroic masculine bravery by murdering an unarmed 60-year-old woman. In early June, 12 miles from my own childhood home, some creep built a 10-foot-wide concrete swastika in his front yard.
Among the many disturbing things about my personal swastika memory is that I recall feeling less horrified and disgusted than intimidated. I knew exactly what a swastika signified. My grandfather flew bombing raids over Nazi Germany, and I grew up across the street from an elderly couple who’d survived the Holocaust.
But, perhaps because I was a straight white male from a nominally Christian household, I was more bothered by the word “kook,” surfer parlance for unskilled outsider — as in, me. At the time, the term “surf Nazi” often got applied to any surfer ferociously committed to the sport and territorial about his local waves. Viewed through that lens, I read the combination of swastika and “kook” like a skull-and-crossbones on a clubhouse door upon which I planned to knock loud and hard.
Surfing brought a ridiculous amount of joy to my life, still does. For 30 years, I’ve enjoyed the satori-like flow-state that comes with gliding on a pulse of wave energy, watching bottlenose dolphins silhouetted black by the setting sun as it melts red into the blue horizon. I’ve built my work schedule around being free whenever the draining tide and long-period swell line up with easterly wind. I’ve written a book about surfing, lived in the Surfer magazine house in Hawaii, binged on surf movies and chased waves in Iceland, the Galápagos, West Africa and elsewhere.
As a passionate student of surf culture and history, though, I’ve also seen a lot more swastikas. The first commercially made surfboards sold in California, in the 1930s, had swastikas burned into their tails and were marketed as the Swastika model by Pacific System Homes of Los Angeles. The 1959 edition of “Search for Surf,” a series of surf movies by Greg Noll, included Californian surfers in Nazi storm trooper uniforms riding Flexi-Flyers in a storm drain while friends held up a Third Reich flag. Ed Roth, the artist and custom-car visionary known as Big Daddy, sold plastic Nazi storm trooper helmets to surfers in the mid-1960s and told Time magazine, “That Hitler really did a helluva public relations job for me.”
Image
Miki Dora, in Malibu, in 1965.CreditRon Stoner/Surfer Magazine
In April, a young man with an assault rifle marched into a Southern California synagogue, shouted anti-Semitic insanity and proved his heroic masculine bravery by murdering an unarmed 60-year-old woman. In early June, 12 miles from my own childhood home, some creep built a 10-foot-wide concrete swastika in his front yard.
Among the many disturbing things about my personal swastika memory is that I recall feeling less horrified and disgusted than intimidated. I knew exactly what a swastika signified. My grandfather flew bombing raids over Nazi Germany, and I grew up across the street from an elderly couple who’d survived the Holocaust.
But, perhaps because I was a straight white male from a nominally Christian household, I was more bothered by the word “kook,” surfer parlance for unskilled outsider — as in, me. At the time, the term “surf Nazi” often got applied to any surfer ferociously committed to the sport and territorial about his local waves. Viewed through that lens, I read the combination of swastika and “kook” like a skull-and-crossbones on a clubhouse door upon which I planned to knock loud and hard.
Surfing brought a ridiculous amount of joy to my life, still does. For 30 years, I’ve enjoyed the satori-like flow-state that comes with gliding on a pulse of wave energy, watching bottlenose dolphins silhouetted black by the setting sun as it melts red into the blue horizon. I’ve built my work schedule around being free whenever the draining tide and long-period swell line up with easterly wind. I’ve written a book about surfing, lived in the Surfer magazine house in Hawaii, binged on surf movies and chased waves in Iceland, the Galápagos, West Africa and elsewhere.
As a passionate student of surf culture and history, though, I’ve also seen a lot more swastikas. The first commercially made surfboards sold in California, in the 1930s, had swastikas burned into their tails and were marketed as the Swastika model by Pacific System Homes of Los Angeles. The 1959 edition of “Search for Surf,” a series of surf movies by Greg Noll, included Californian surfers in Nazi storm trooper uniforms riding Flexi-Flyers in a storm drain while friends held up a Third Reich flag. Ed Roth, the artist and custom-car visionary known as Big Daddy, sold plastic Nazi storm trooper helmets to surfers in the mid-1960s and told Time magazine, “That Hitler really did a helluva public relations job for me.”
Image
Miki Dora, in Malibu, in 1965.CreditRon Stoner/Surfer Magazine
