SUNDAY JOINT, 4-13-2025: RAISE A G&T TO PEDRO MARTINS DE LIMA

Hey All,

Three people got back to me about Kathy LaCroix, mysterious star of last week's Joint. Rusty Miller checked in from Byron Bay, just minutes after the Joint posted, to say that he and Kathy "had some surfs together somewhere, sometime," and that she was "an amazing and intriguing person" and "a beautiful spirit." A lovely memory, if low on detail. Fair enough, Rusty and Kathy met at the 1966 world titles, we are now 60 years down the road, and if "beautiful spirit" is how somebody describes you after all those decades, sweet, you've kicked a goal. 

Tom Ellis of North Florida brought the same feeling but went longer:

I was at Fletcher High School when Kathy moved to Jax Beach. Her arrival created a serious disturbance in the force. I remember watching the hallways part for her between classes, and I also remember her showing up for morning surfs at the Poles, mostly keeping to herself, and ripping. Deep tan, blond hair, freckled nose, gorgeous, super-talented—she was intimidating to younger guys like me. Her father was at Mayport Naval Station, which probably explains why Kathy seemed to disappear not long after arriving. My surfing buddies who got to know her quickly lost touch, probably because her stay was short. But none of us had ever seen anything like her.

The third and final reply came from Mitch Kaufmann, another lifelong North Florida surfer. Mitch filled in two big missing pieces of biography. Kathy and her family arrived in Jax Beach in 1965, from San Diego. And she died some years ago, of cancer, while living in Hawaii.

It is probably the case that, except in movies and books, mysteries as a rule do not resolve the way we'd like them to. I'll keep an eye out for more info on LaCroix, and update her EOS page. Beautiful spirits always welcome here.

There is very little in the way of mystery surrounding Pedro Martins de Lima of Portugal, who seemingly did not fritter or waste a minute of his 92 years (1930–2023), and swanned through the decades with an open mind, a bottomless curiousity, and surpassing good health. Longtime surf-media polymath João Valente asked me if I liked a gin and tonic before dinner. If we're not drinking Manhattans? Sure! "Then you would like Pedro, and he would like you," Valente said. Martins de Lima was not the first person to surf in his home country, but he was first in the nation to do it with the kind of repetition and compulsion that goes into what we would later call (and I will always and forever wish we had a better word) the "lifestyle," and his honorific as the Father of Portuguese Surfing is fully deserved. 

Before he was the father of anything, Pedro was a happy high-born son of privilege, and I always enjoying peering in from the cheap seats to what this looks like. Here in America, of course, it's not hard to imagine what it meant to be beach kid from a wealthy California family during the postwar years—new car on your 16th birthday, massive walnut-paneled TV set in the family lounge, portable hi-fi player in your room surrounded by 78s and 45s, mostly Louis Jordan, Les Paul, and Hank Williams, since it's my fantasy rich kid.

Wealth in Portugal was different, and we won't go too deep in the weeds, but stables and horses were often involved, and there at the beginning of Pedro Martins de Lima's long and varied history in sport we find him in jodhpurs, holding a riding crop. Sailing in summer, skiing in winter, the boy was both cultured and rough-and-tumble, short but fierce, swimming, diving, skiing, boxing, rugby. All wonderful (the boxing, not so much), but for some reason I am mostly attracted to the idea that Martins de Lima's photo albums are loaded with shots of him astride a 1,200-pound flying projectile of expensive horseflesh. I had some rich friends as a kid, but the only horses we saw were beneath the chap-clad haunches of Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid.

Martins de Lima learned about wave-riding at age 15, while living with his family in the Azores during the last year of World War II. He saw a newsreel of Duke Kahanamoku surfing in Waikiki, and knew right away that was his next new thing. Twelve years passed before Martins de Lima began riding a full-size board, but back in Lisbon after the war, he started bodysurfing, then got a bellyboard, then eventually was paddling around the lineup on a giant Blake-style hollow, all the while extolling the pleasure and virtue of riding waves.

Surfing would remain at the top of Martins de Lima's hierarchy of games and athletics. "Of all the sports I have practiced, and I have practiced almost all of them," he would later say, "surfing was the most important. It is an activity of freedom and improvisation." No argument here.

But the real lesson of Martins de Lima, I think, is not that he put that kind of premium on surfing—it is the way surfing was of a piece with the rest of his life. He read Jules Verne books as a child the way American kids read DC Comics, and I'll take a flyer here and say that, thanks to Les Voyages Extraordinaires, Pedro wanted to be an adventurer more than a conquering hero. The idea that you get out there and explore—not just places and sports, but art, culture, all of it—never left him. My second-favorite image of Martins de Lima is him playing double-bass at the Hot Club in Lisbon (above), a popular jazz nightspot that Pedro cofounded, because if you have the money and want to jam and there are no other jazz clubs in the entire country—no other jazz clubs in all of Europe, in fact—why not start your own?

My life-experience tally sheet is half the length, or less, of Pedro Martins de Lima's. He was a well-groomed, jazzy, socialite Captain Nemo. My default is to stay home and do what I usually do. I will try the new thing, yes—if someone else talks it up, makes the plan, books the tickets. Even with my more limited adventuring, though, I know what Martins de Lima no doubt knew: that surfing only gets better, more beautiful, more prized, when you regularly venture out of the lineup and off the beach. Less so in your teens and 20s, maybe. But in the long run, the joy you find in riding waves is contingent on how you blend and re-blend it with everything else, including much of what you overlooked or ignored in your teens and 20s.

Martins de Lima is right about surfing, there is great improv to be found in wind, swell, tide, turn, trim, cutback. But when you bring jazz and dressage and Jules Verne into play as well, another other things—it doesn't have to be rich-guy stuff, those are just the examples at hand—then you are into some Tower of Power "Knock Yourself Out" 4D-level improv.

The less boxes left unchecked the better, in other words.

Thanks for reading, and see you next week!

Matt

[Photo grid, clockwise from top left: Pedro Martins de Lima platform diving in the '50s; at a surf function in the '00s; detail from a 2016 Hot Club LP cover; surfing Biarritz in '65; riding and jumping in the '70s; Pedro (center) and friends on the beach at Lisbon in 1969. Young Pedro and the catch of the day. Martins de Lima surfing in Portugal during the late 1960s. With a ski club in the late 1940s (Pedro top row, far right). Playing double-bass with the house band at Hot Club in 1956. Martins de Lima and grandson, early 1990s. With his wife in 2016.]