rustyThis interview is excerpted from "In Trim: Rusty Miller," written by Paul Holmes and published in the June 2000 issue of Longboard magazine. Miller was 57.


We lived in a Mexican-American community. Right nearby was a ghetto area, but then just down the road was Cardiff, which was fairly well integrated, then Rancho Santa Fe which was very exclusive, then Solana Beach and Del Mar which were middle class. All us kids went to the same school, and it was a real mix of rich and poor and middle-class. Maybe a third of the kids were Mexican-American. It was pretty egalitarian but there was never any confusion in my mind in terms of knowing there were people who didn't have the opportunities we had. My father worked his ass off—he was feeding five kids. But he had a good job. I remember there were always other kids eating at our house too; surfers mostly. I love my Dad for everything he gave us all those years.


I was a Swami's guy, just a kid, but I'd take safaris with the older surfers down to Del Mar and Windansea, where my grandma lived, and that's how I got a connection down there. Buzzy Bent was the big star at Windansea. I met all the locals: Al Nelson, Mike Diffenderfer, Pat Curren, Carl Ekstrom—an amazing bunch of individuals. They showed me how to skin-dive and bodysurf. They'd stay on the beach after dark, light fires, play Tahitian music, drink red wine, eat great loaves of sourdough bread, listen to jazz. When I was 15 or 16 I thought I'd never get to be 21—it seemed such a long way off. I'd go along when the older guys went to the jazz club in Hermosa to see the Lighthouse All-Stars or George Shearing or Cal Tjader. I wasn't allowed to go enter the club because I was too young, so I'd have to sit outside. But I loved that music.

This wasn't too long after the war, and everything was still so cheap. Gas was 25 cents a gallon. There were military surplus stores everywhere; you could buy clothes and all kinds of gear for next to nothing. We'd drive up and down the coast, go to Trestles for a few days, camp out. Somebody always had a dollar, someone else had five, someone had Dad's car and you’d be off.


I saw Phil Edwards for the first time when I was 13, and he became my guru in terms of style, and how I wanted to surf. Phil would sometimes drive down to Swami's in his ’42 Ford. Inside the car you'd see his board, brilliantly polished, with a towel neatly folded on top, a clean bar of wax. He was always so meticulous, fastidious even, with his posture, the way he carried himself, that quirky way he held his head. He was such a huge influence on all of us.


I went for the first time when I was 18. I wrote Pat Curren asking if I could stay with him. Pat's a man of few words, and the letter he wrote back just said, "Sure, come on over." He met me at the airport and took me back to this Quonset hut at Sunset Beach where he and his wife Jeanine were living, along with Mike Hynson. Except Mike had been talking back to Pat and was in the process of getting kicked out. I arrived at a good time. Pat and Jeanine figured I'd be easier to deal with than Hynson. Jose and Mozelle Angel lived next door, and Bob Pike was staying with them. At night, they'd all come over with Henry Preece and a bunch of local Hawaiians and they'd drink and play music and cook turtle or whatever they'd caught diving that day.


I ended up surfing Waimea that first year. I kind of had to; I was living with Pat Curren. He wouldn't even bother surfing if Sunset was only six- or eight-feet—he didn't consider it to really be breaking at that size. And when he did go out at Waimea he'd only ride three or four waves, but he'd always get one really big one. He'd sit way outside and wait for the biggest wave right at the boil. Pat told me the safest and best wave is always the biggest one that breaks from way outside. Joey Cabell said the same thing about surfing Hanalei. You've got to be on that first slingshot or you won't make the wave.


That was taken on my second trip to Hawaii. People thought I got rich from that photo. I didn't—maybe just a few thousand dollars. But it made me feel rich in my heart. It still does. It's like my degree, my diploma. My resume, if you like, is "Rusty Miller, former U.S. Surfing Champion and the guy in the Hamm's Beer photo."

RUSTY AND MIKE DOYLE CREATE WAXMATE: THE ORIGINAL SUCCESSFUL SURF WAX


Early in the morning we'd go into our little factory there in Encinitas, across the street from Hansen Surfboards. We'd heat up the wax, pop out the bars out that had been poured into the molds the previous night, hand those off to our team of ladies who did the wrapping, then pour the new batch into the molds. By 10:00 AM we were done working, and the rest of the day we'd go surfing. Waxmate had what I think was the world's first answerphone. It was a mechanical device that, when the phone rang, would lift up the receiver and switch on a tape recorder. That's how we took orders when we were surfing. Sometimes the machine didn't work properly though, and the phone would get dropped to the floor and just stay there all day, off the hook.


I got a deal with a New York ad agency when I was US Champion. Best Foods had just introduced a new cold dye and they had a co-promotion with Wrangler jeans. This was right at the start of the hippie era—do your own thing, man. You got a pair of jeans and dye markers and colored them however you liked. They paid me $500 to do these demos at shopping centers all over the country. I'd fly first class to Buffalo, Birmingham, Atlanta, Houston, wherever, check into the Hilton, go to the mall, show a surf move, sign autographs and demonstrate the product. It was a crash course in American sociology—a reality check for a surfer like me! The product actually didn't work too well. But I still loved those guys on 52nd Street who did all that for me. It was a great experience.


I remember seeing Ken Kesey's psychedelic bus go by one day and thinking to myself, "What an amazing, exciting era we're living in." I love California because it truly is, like Timothy Leary used to say, the tip of the spaceship. There's always so much going on there. Some of the alternative stuff wasn't new to me. We'd seen people meditating in the gardens of the Self Realization Center at Swami's. As kids, when we were hungry, we'd sneak in there and steal carrots—I actually knew the Japanese family that did the farming for the Center's kitchen. But they were all just the nicest people. They wouldn't even yell at us to get out of the garden. You could tell they were different than most people. And then an older surfer I knew told us what was going on there and what meditation was all I about—that it wasn't like voodoo or anything. So that was already in my head.

After Kennedy got shot it was like a lot of our idealism went out the window. We started doing other things. Eventually I went to Maui, to Haleakala, and took acid. I read Henry David Thoreau's 

, and that was a huge influence. In fact, I ended up sort of creating my own version of Walden, living in a little hut on the river at Cannon's, on Kauai, near where the hippie camp used to be on land owned by Howard Taylor, Elizabeth Taylor's brother. I ate brown rice, had a little kerosene fridge and just lived there by myself. I ended up being friends with Howard Taylor and his family, and helped him build a house. It was a neat era for me personally. But it was a lonely time, too, with not many people around.

Kauai was wonderful but I never thought I could stay there. It was a rock in the middle of the ocean and Mainlanders were already coming in buying up all the foreshore land, and there was a lot of bitterness about that among the locals. It didn't feel right to me. The land wasn't ours to buy. And of course by then it had become just too crowded in California. Australia was calling. I moved in 1971, and I've been here ever since.


I never thought of surfing in terms of a career. It was just something we did. I mean, I was going to be a political science teacher. But I just got taken over by surfing.

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