“The medium is the message.” Marshall McLuhan couldn’t have found Surf City if you dropped him off on the corner of Pacific Coast Highway and Main, but his soon-to-be-famous 1964 dictum fit the sport like a glove during American surfing's boom years. As the surfer image filtered out across the cultural landscape, it shapeshifted from menace to sportsman to bohemian to fashion plate to object of ridicule—and as McLuhan predicted, form was determined less by the thing itself and more by the out...
Chapter 4:
Ten-Year Boom
- Gidget the All-Powerful /
- The Rebel Next Door /
- Hobie vs Velzy vs the IRS /
- Better Surfing Through Chemistry /
- Summer on the Inside /
- Surf Fashion, Lightly Salted /
- Surfing the Newsstand /
- Process of Elimination /
- Oil City Showdown /
- The Jazz Stylings of Phil Edwards /
- Technicolor Surf Boom /
- Heroes and Villains /
- Blackball Blues /
- Dick Dale, Destroyer of Amps /
- Surfing in Five-Part Harmony /
- Tokyo to Tel Aviv /
- Flight of the Larrikin /
- Bob Evans Means Business /
- Midget Wins It All /
- But Will it Play in New York? /
- Houses of the Holy /
- We Own the Sidewalks /
- Beautiful from any Angle /
- Duke's Big Contest /
- Can You Handle the Penetrator? /
- Girls, Don't Panic! /
- David Nuuhiwa Walks on Water /
- An Invincible Summer /
