Positive Waves

Dorian "Doc" Paskowitz poses in San Diego.

It’s somehow appropriate that Dorian “Doc” Paskowitz, whose life was an endless summer of surfing along the California coast, passed away just as autumn loomed on the horizon.

A graduate of Stanford Medical School, Paskowitz never felt comfortable taking money from people in pain. “I will never enrich myself with the lives of sick people,” he said. After two failed marriages, he finally gave up practicing medicine.

The son of Russian Jewish immigrants, he went to Israel for a year and volunteered as a paratrooper for the Israeli army during the Suez Crisis in 1956 but was rejected. He taught surfing and was virtually responsible for creating the Tel Aviv beach scene.

 

Doc Paskowitz (center) is flanked by Israeli surfing legends
Shaul Ziner and Shamai "Topsi" Kanzapolski.

When he returned to the U.S., he focused on becoming a full-time professional surfer. In the Los Angeles Times obituary, Steve Chawkins wrote, “More than one California surfer has dreamed about following the waves in an old camper, picking up occasional jobs by day and generally blissing out at night.”

Doc Paskowitz maintained a metaphysical approach to surfing, stating, “A sea wave is like all other waves – an energy from an energy source: the stars, the sun. It breaks down and makes this hot and that cold…So in a way, that little wave has in it some of the wisdom of nature, of the universe, and then you capture it.” He believed, “Surfing recreates you.” One of his sons, Israel, noted, “He really, truly felt that a surfer was a better human being.”

After marrying his third wife, Juliette, Paskowitz embarked on the life of a transient bohemian. The couple eventually had eight sons and one daughter and roved the coastline in a succession of used 24-foot camper vans, By the time the brood grew to nine, the children made do with three cubic feet each of living space in the camper. Daughter Navah later recalled the experience as “like weird monkeys in a small monkey cage.” Newspaper features described the Paskowitzes as surfing’s answer to the singing Von Trapp family from “The Sound of Music” fame. Youngest son Joshua later joked, “We were born because Doc wanted to repopulate the world with Jews.”

The kids were all home-schooled in the camper by Doc and Juliette. The family patriarch believed that formal education institutions worldwide were unnecessary and a danger to young minds. He believed that learning and wisdom came from hands-on experience, from meeting and engaging everyday people. He taught his children to stand up when they shook someone’s hand. A devout Jew, he didn’t belong to a particular synagogue but prayed daily and observed every Friday night as Shabbat wherever the family camped.

Described as a health nut who advocated natural diets low in fat, accompanied by exercise, Paskowitz also instilled his personal philosophy of a healthy lifestyle on his children. According to Doc, health was not merely the absence of illness but a “supreme state of well-being,” which had to be worked for every day. The family’s daily regimen always began with a breakfast of what one offspring called multigrain “gruel,” and they were all expected to continually improve their surfing skills. A number of the children reached competitive levels, winning contests and earning paid endorsements.

 

Sole daughter Navah Paskowitz earned paid
endorsements of her own, briefly, as a model.

The 2007 documentary “Surfwise” depicted the senior Paskowitz as an eccentric and egocentric disciplinarian. In the film, the children described their father as an authoritarian who prevented them from the education they needed to deal with the real world. Doc insisted, “I’m not some kind of avant-garde, radical intellectual. I just wanted my kids around me, surfing with me, and education be damned!”

The clan, known as the “First Family of Surfing,” finally settled down, in a manner, when Doc founded a surfing camp in 1972 on Mission Beach in San Diego, where guests stayed alongside and surfed with family members. The Paskowitz family stuck together for more than two decades. Eldest son David was 28 when he struck out on his own. Doc personally viewed each departure of a child as an act of betrayal.

In August of 2007, Paskowitz founded the Surfing for Peace project with the amazing intention of delivering surfboards to the small Palestinian community of Gaza. Doc, who genuinely believed that surfing could help close the rift between Israel and Palestine, recalled, “To be able to go to your enemies and give something that makes them happy is a most fulfilling adventure.” The success of the surfboard deliveries gained international attention and launched a global community of surfers and supporters hoping to bridge cultural and political barriers.

 

The Gaza Surf Club...Dorian Paskowitz: "God will surf with the Devil
if the waves are good."

A Brief History of Surfing From Captain Cook and Mark Twain to Gidget and Annette

In the ocean on the other side of the globe, surfing on wooden belly boards was, for centuries, a central part of ancient Polynesian culture. Surfing was probably first seen by Europeans on Tahiti in 1767, when British navigator Samuel Wallis and the crew of HMS Dolphin, a frigate used by the Royal Navy as a survey ship, visited the large island. The Europeans observed that the chief was the most skilled rider with the best board made from the best tree.

The first Polynesians who arrived on the Hawaiian islands in the 4^th century AD after an arduous voyage from Tahiti were by default exceptional seafarers who brought with them a deep love and knowledge of the ocean, accompanied by their custom of playing on the surf on belly boards. Near the end of the 18^th century, riding waves while reclined or standing on a long, hardwood board was perfected as an integral part of Hawaiian culture.

On Captain James Cook’s third, and ultimately fatal, Pacific voyage, his ships HMS Discovery and HMS Resolution brought him to what he dubbed the Sandwich Islands (modern Hawaii) in 1778. After a frustrating year searching in vain for a route from the North Pacific into the Atlantic, Cook returned to the island chain. At Kealakekua Bay on the Big Island, Captain Cook and four crewmen were stabbed to death by the inhabitants after an ill-advised attempt by the interlopers to abduct the islander’s chief to force the return of a stolen, small boat.

Lieutenant James King assumed command of the Discovery in 1779 and completed Cook’s journals, including two pages devoted to an eyewitness account of surfboard-riding by the locals on the Kona Coast, describing it as “a diversion most common…upon the Water, where there is a very great Sea, and surf breaking on the Shore. The men…lay themselves flat upon an oval piece of plank about their Size and breadth, they keep their legs close on top of it, and their Arms are us’d to guide the plank, they wait the time of the greatest Swell…and altogether push forward with their Arms to keep on its top, it sends them in with a most astonishing Velcoity, and the greatest art is to guide the plank so as always to keep it in a proper direction on top of the Swell…The above diversion is only intended as an amusement, not a tryal of skill…at least, they seem to feel a great pleasure in the motion which this Exercise gives.”

Less than a century after Captain Cook’s bloody demise, Mark Twain, as a correspondent for the California newspaper The Sacramento Union, visited Hawaii in 1866 (King Kamehameha the Great united all the islands in 1804 as the Hawaiian Islands), where he reported, “In one place we came upon a large company of naked natives, of both sexes and all ages, amusing themselves with the national pastime of surf-bathing.”

 

Mark Twain (fifth from the left) in Hawaii

Twain admitted, “I tried surf-bathing once, subsequently, but made a failure of it. I got the board placed right, and at the right moment, too, but missed the connection…The board struck the shore in three-quarters of a second, without any cargo, and I struck the bottom about the same time, with a couple of barrels in me. None but natives ever master the art of surf-bathing thoroughly.” Twain would also note, “I observed a bevy of nude, native young ladies bathing in the sea, and went and sat down on their clothes to keep them from being stolen.”

In July 1885, three teenage Hawaiian princes took a break from a boarding school in San Mateo in the San Francisco Bay area and sojourned to Santa Cruz, on the northern rim of Monterey Bay, bringing surfing to the U.S. mainland on the mouth of the San Lorenzo River, riding custom-made California redwood boards.

The three Hawaiian princes: brothers Jonas
 Kalanianaole, Edward Keliiahouni, and
David Kawananakoa

In 1907, George Freeth, the Oahu-born son of a part-Hawaiian mother and Irish father regarded as the “Father of Modern Surfing,” was invited to California by railroad magnate and land baron Henry Huntington (who gave his name to Huntington Beach) to demonstrate surfing as a publicity stunt. Freeth, whom Huntington had observed on a vacation in Hawaii, rode the waves near the Huntington Beach pier before traveling up and down the coast, demonstrating his skills as a surfer and as a lifeguard.

 

George Freeth

By the time Frederick Kohner, a Jewish Austrian-born novelist and screenwriter, emigrated to Hollywood in 1936 after Nazis started excising Jewish names from German productions, surfing was already a minor youth movement, built on the foundation of a love of the beach, which challenged the immigrant’s Eastern European sensibilities. Frederick’s daughter, Kathy Kohner, was “looking for a way of life and a group of people to fit in with,” according to DVD Verdict reviewer Dawn Hunt. “Going to Malibu and hooking up with the local surf scene was the answer. She became…enamored with the people, what they were doing, and the new lingo (words like ‘Bitchin’!’ and ‘Cowabunga!’).”

 

Kathy Kohner was the inspiration for Gidget.

The details of this remarkable lifestyle fascinated the father, who empathized with his daughter’s desire to take part in the boys-only avocation. Kathy felt her experiences in the eternal summer of “sun, surf and California lifestyle…at their sparkliest” constituted a story that needed to be told. Over a six-week period, the elder Kohner wove his daughter’s recollections into the 1957 novel Gidget, the Little Girl with Big Ideas (“Gidget” is a portmanteau of “girl” and “midget”).

In a 2011 interview coinciding with the recent documentary “Accidental Icon: The Real Gidget Story,” directed by Brian Gillogly, 70-year-old Kathy Koehner recounted, “I got crazy about the boys. But I was 15 when I started surfing and the guys were all a little bit older than me, so it was pretty much hands off in terms of sexuality. But I had my first major teenage crush, and he becomes the character Moondoggie in my dad’s books.”

 

An older, wiser Kathy Kohner (2007) still loves the beach.

Frederick Kohner sold the movie rights to his book to Columbia Pictures for $50.000, giving five percent to daughter Kathy. The screenplay was credited to Gabrielle Upton, a pseudonym for Gillian Houghton, then the head writer for the daytime drama “The Secret Storm.”

Paul Wendkos directed "Gidget," "Gidget Goes
Hawaiian," and "Gidget Goes to Rome," while
James Darren was the only actor to play the same
role (Moondoggie) in all three films.

Filmed on the beach of Carrillo State Park (named for actor and conservationist Leo Carrillo, best known on TV and screen as the Cisco Kid’s stalwart sidekick, Pancho) at the foot of the Santa Monica Mountains, “Gidget” has been singled out as the major influence behind surfing in mainstream culture. The picture’s popularity led to a “Miss Gidget” contest, first won in 1959 by actress Barbara Bouchet, who became an unofficial “Bond Girl” for her role as Miss Moneypenny in the unofficial 007 spoof “Casino Rpyale” (1967).

 

"It's the absolute ultimate!" Seventeen-year-old Gidget (played by 17-year-old
Sandra Dee) is initiated by Moondoggie (James Darren) as the gang's mascot
while world-weary surf bum The Big Kahuna (Cliff Robertson) looks on. On the
left are Tom Laughlin (best known as the hero of the "Billy Jack" films) as Lover
Boy and Doug McClure (cowhand Trampas on "The Virginian") as Waikiki.

“The Gidget movie came out in 1959,” Kathy Kohner said, “and I truly believe it was the start of the billion dollar surf industry. Everybody wanted to go to Malibu and get a surfboard and do this thing pople didn’t know about.” She noted, “The character is pretty tenacious and is open and honest.”

 

Kathy Kohner said, "Surf culture is now very different from what it used to be.
It's commercial. Back then, it was so way off dead center. Now they sell everything
and have contests. Back then it was just a group of guys who wanted to surf."

As for being considered an icon, Kathy noted, “It’s interesting for me, it never really hits my ego, it’s not in my head. My dad is the one who wrote this great story. I really want to keep my dad’s work alive. It’s such a wonderful story for young girls.”

 

Future two-time Oscar winner Sally Field was TV's incarnation of "Gidget."

“Gidget” and its two immediate sequels, “Gidget Goes Hawaiian” (1961), starring Deborah Walley, and “Gidget Goes to Rome” (1963), starring Cindy Carol, along with the 1960 spring break comedy-drama “Where the Boys Are” and the 1961 Elvis Presley romantic comedy “Blue Hawaii,” inspired the mid-1960s flood of beach party films from American International Pictures (AIP) – “Beach Party,” “Muscle Beach Party,” “Bikini Beach,” “Pajama Party,” “Beach Blanket Bingo” – most of them starring over-aged "teenagers" Annette Funicello and Frankie Avalon.

 

Frankie Avalon and Annette Funicello "surf" in front of Hollywood's
reliable rear-projection screen.

Many of the movies were made at Paradise Cove in Malibu, and to meet the release schedule, most of them were filmed during winter, when hardly anyone wanted to go in the water, much less run on a beach in a swimsuit. One of the unique aspects of the AIP beach films was the absence of parents or adult authority figures. The carefree, fun-loving kids (few, if any of the actors were actually teenagers) were free to live on their own terms and do whatever they wanted. Director William Asher, who made the lion’s share of these pictures, said, “The key to these pictures is lots of flesh but no sex. It’s all good clean fun. No hearts are broken and virginity prevails.”

Meanwhile, Back at the Camper

Speaking of sex, the late Doc Paskowitz, who would’ve made Gidget blush, insisted, “F***ing, to me, is the word of God.” As a young man in his mid-30, he was teaching surfing in Israel when he met a Jewish girl who taught him the art of cunnilingus, “and that changed my life.” He realized, “My life as a husband had been very poor…my lack of knowledge of sex was the thing that had made it so.” Inspired by that epiphany, Paskowitz “decided to take a trip around the world, making a study of the psychosexual development of women.” His intention was to make love to 100 women “consecutively” and ask them questions as part of his “male deficit test, “and everyone gets a score.” Juliette, whom he would marry, was the end of his search, as he remembered, “I was just appalled at (her) high score.” In the documentary “Surfwise,” daughter Navah, now a suburban mother, mentioned unpleasant memories of the siblings, bedded down “like puppies” in the cramped camper, overhearing their parents’ loud nightly lovemaking.

 

David Paskowitz: "I think we would be a family right now
if there wasn't a militant hand on the whole thing."

The overwhelmingly acclaimed “Surfwise” is a moving, funny, sad, provocative portrait of a complex and conflicted family, sometimes alienated by emotional rifts but always bonded by love. Along with Doc and Juliette, all nine children, in their 30s and 40s, were interviewed in the documentary, co-produced by son Jonathan Paskowitz, revealing and sharing ambivalent feelings about their unique upbringing.  They express frustration over their struggle to find a niche in the outside world, they describe anger over being robbed of schooling, they remember physical abuse, and yet they recall, with nostalgic affection, their life as part of the tribe.

 

Jonathan, Joshua, Doc, and David Paskowitz

The documentary ends on an emotional high note as the entire family puts their differences and misgivings aside to reunite for Thanksgiving after a decade of conflicts and rifts, joining in a ritual circle as the mother, Juliette, tearfully says, “We’ll be able to hold hands, close the circle.” Despite second thoughts, Israel Paskowitz noted he was there for his father, “who I love and respect and don’t understand,” while another son observed, “Even a flawed family that sticks together is better than no family at all.”

Dorian “Doc” Paskowitz died on November 10, 2014, age 93, survived by wife Juliette, their eight sons and daughter, 24 grandchildren, one great-grandchild, and two daughters from a previous marriage. "I don't care about being a great doctor or a rich person or a celebrity," Doc once said, "I just wanted to be a good husband and a good father, thus a good man."

Dorian and Juliette Paskowitz

In June 2010, Variety reported that Sean Penn, who portrayed the chronically stoned surfer Spicoli nearly three decades earlier in “Fast Times at Ridgemont High” (pictured below) planned to produce and star in a movie about Doc Paskowitz. There was still talk of the upcoming project in 2012, but no word since.

The Wild Life of the Pump House Gang

If Doc Paskowitz personified the metaphysical philosophy of surfing as a means to an end, then Jack Macpherson was the poster boy for the hedonistic lifestyle of surfing as an end to a means. Like Paskowitz, Macpherson, who existed in, as well, an endless summer, passed away just before the onset of fall, on November 16, 2007, age 69. A former mailman and a bartender at London’s West End in La Jolla, California, he was a local legend who, according to his obituary in the Los Angeles Times, carved “a permanent niche in the history of Southern California beach culture.”

 

Jack "Mac" Macpherson

The son of a Navy surgeon, Macpherson witnessed the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor in 1941. When the family returned to the mainland, Jack and his sister grew up in La Jolla, and the family later moved near the local Windansea Beach, where the best surfing conditions on the California coast prevailed. His sister’s boyfriend taught Jack to surf at the age of 11.

To his parents’ disappointment, Jack hung out at the beach with a number of surfers, including a character who would become Macpherson’s fast friend and co-conspirator, Bob Rakestraw, who earned the nickname “Meda” after a word he used instead of profanity, “Mee-dah!” When Jack, nicknamed “Mac” by fellow surfers, and Bob would burst upon the scene, they were welcomed with shouts of “Here comes Mac and Meda, they’re a walking destruction company!”

In the 1960s, Macpherson and Rakestraw, who were older than the young surfers who hung out at the sewage pump house at Windansea, enlisted their buddies, acquaintances, and hangers-on in a freewheeling organization called the Mac Meda Destruction Company, described as a “beer-for-demolition crew.” In 1990, Macpherson told the Los Angeles Times, “It was a goof, a joke, and it just got out of hand.”

Author Tom Wolfe’s classic piece of New Journalism, “The Pump House Gang,” which became the title story in the writer’s 1968 book, didn’t mention Macpherson by name but gave the Mac Meda Destruction Company widespread attention. Wolfe described them as chanting, “’Ooooo-eeee-Mee-dah!’ They chant this chant, Mee-dah, in a real fakey deep voice, and it really bugs people. They don’t know what hell it is. It is the cry of the Mac Meda Destruction Company…an underground society that started in La Jolla three years ago. Nobody can remember exactly how; they have arguments about it. Anyhow, it is mainly something to bug people with and organize huge beer orgies with.”

Drunk on wine and parked near tennis courts in La Jolla, Macpherson and Rakestraw once lit a quarter-stick of dynamite in their car’s front seat, then played dead on the pavement as tennis players ran up to the smoldering heap.

 

The police break up a typical Mac Meda Destruction Company kegger at
Windansea Beach. Macpherson recalled, "Back then, the cops hated us so much
that you could get arrested for walking down the street in a Mac Meda shirt."

The Mac Meda Destruction Company became notorious throughout Southern California. Macpherson merchandised T-shirts adorned with “Mac Meda Destruction Company” and designed a logo of a mushroom cloud for bumper stickers, one of which decorated NASA’s Galileo spacecraft launched in 1990 to orbit Jupiter. The imaginary company had a fake president, Albert, a gorilla at the San Diego Zoo, dubbed “Albert Mac Meda,” and listed in the La Jolla phonebook. “The police always wanted to find Albert,” a longtime friend noted.

Mac Meda’s penchant for destroying things reached its apex when land in Sorrento Valley was being cleared for construction of Interstate 5 through San Diego. According to Macpherson, 10 to 20 of the group “would go out with sledgehammers, axes and football helmets and wreck an old house…Once we did five houses in one day…After we finished with the wall, everyone would climb onto the roof and get the whole house swaying back and forth…the whole thing would be moving until it caved in with all of us on top of it.”

Onetime girlfriend Jamie Nay recalled, “His motto was boogie ‘til you puke.” Regardless of the copious flow of beer and other potables, Macpherson was revered as a natural athlete. He was a competition cyclist and was adept in volleyball, diving, skiing, and, oh yes, surfing.

Jack Macpherson died of liver and kidney failure. In his honor, a traditional Hawaiian-style paddle-out memorial was held at Windansea Beach. Jack’s son, John Macpherson, said, “He definitely killed a few beers in his time. He lived the old school, ‘50s surfer life, the kegger parties that never really ended.”

 

A traditional paddle-out ceremony is depicted on the series "Hawaii Five-O."

Drawing the Line in "Big Wednesday"

If one motion picture about surfing could be singled out as the perfect balance of Doc Paskowitz’ zen-geist and Mac Macpherson’s zoo-ology, it’s 1978’s “Big Wednesday,” a coming-of-age saga about the tumultuous lives of three board buddies as they mature from the carefree, raucous keggers and bar brawls of the early 1960s into the loss of innocence ushered in by the Vietnam War in the late ‘60s and beyond.

“Big Wednesday” stands out as a seminal motion picture experience in my life. I had recently moved to San Diego from outstate Minnesota, and I would be the first to express no personal sea siren’s call to surf, much less a desire for a beach residence (I remained, for 12 years, an inlander), but there was something about the film’s innate exaltation of the Southern California lifestyle and its exhortation of friendships, “come hell or high water,” that made me want so much to be a Californian. But I digress…

 

Gary Busey, Patti D'Arbanville, William Katt,
Lee Purcell, Jan-Michael Vincent in "Big Wednesday"

The three friends – self-destructive alcoholic Matt Johnson, levelheaded helmsman Jack Barlow, and the aptly nicknamed Leroy “The Masochist” - who surf, drink, fight, celebrate, and mourn together, are portrayed by Jan-Michael Vincent, William Katt, and Gary Busey, all tapped for giving the performances of their careers. The threesome possessed rudimentary surfing skills – already distancing them from countless actors who preceded them, laughably pretending to surf in studios in front of rear-projection screens – and were seamlessly intercut onscreen with professional surfing champion “stand-ins,” including J Riddle, Peter Townend, Ian Cairns, Billy Hamilton, Bruce Raymond, and Jackie Dunn, while director John Milius recruited a crew of the world’s top surfing photographers.

 

Chicagoan Sally (Patti D'Arbanville) is a newcomer to the California
scene: "It's different here...Back home, being young was just something
you do until you grow up. Out here, it's everything."

The screenplay – which alternately juggles such heady musings as, “Who knows where the wind comes from? Is it the breath of God?” with the down-to-earth lament of growing up, “I just surf ‘cause it’s good to go out and ride with your friends” – was written by Milius and Dennis Aaberg (who also plays the pharmaceutical dealer called Slick), based on their personal surfing experiences in Malibu and on a fictionalized memoir Aaberg wrote in 1974 for Surfer Magazine.

Bear (Sam Melville): "That's when you need a friend, when you're wrong.
When you're right, you don't need nothin'...Growin' up's tough, isn't it, kid?"

Drifting in and out of the story is the mystical presence of Bear (played by Sam Melville, best known for his role as Officer Danko on the ‘70s cop series “The Rookies”), a bearded, oceanside guru who knows “where the waves come from and why.” When he isn’t warning youngsters that “nobody surfs forever,” he handcrafts surfboards on the pier and solemnly predicts, “There’ll be a swell so big and strong it’ll wipe clean everything that went before it…That’s the day they can draw the line.”

 

Bear: "Jack, your friends are the most important thing you've got. Have a drink."
Jack (William Katt): "What're we drinking to?"
Bear: "Only to your friends, to your friends come hell or high water."

“Big Wednesday” was unceremoniously yanked from theaters after taking in a meager $4.5 million at the box office, on a budget of $11 million. In a 1979 interview with Roger Ebert to promote his costarring role in “Butch and Sundance: The Early Days,” actor William Katt, in Ebert’s words, remembered “Big Wednesday” “with regret.” Katt said, “It was a movie about the passage of time, and how each of these characters grew, or didn’t grow. And it was about the feeling of the seasons and their relationship with the sea…a really sensitive, intelligent movie. But the studio didn’t know how to sell it. So they decided to punch up the fight scenes, make them more violent…take the cheap approach. The result was that hardly anyone saw the movie.”

“Big Wednesday” steadily found new life on video, a turnaround that was honored in 1998 by a showing at the Newport Film Festival and a 20^th anniversary cast and crew reunion, while the Los Angeles Times hailed the film as “one of the very few to really capture the surfing life.” Surfer magazine noted that “Big Wednesday” “makes you proud to be a surfer.” More recently, Jason Borte, a professional surfing champion and founder of the Jason Borte Surf School in Virginia Beach, Virginia, proclaimed, “Hollywood got it right.”

 

"We drew the line."

The Last Word

The documentary “Surfwise” closes with these words by Doc Paskowitz: "It's easier to die when you have lived, than it is to die when you haven't. So I say to all young people, go make memories, beautiful memories. Because when the time comes to go, you won't go alone."