SUNDAY JOINT, 4-6-2025: SEARCHING FOR KATHY LACROIX

Hey All,

If I've learned anything from the first two Knives Out movies (next one due in Fall), it is that I prefer my detective mysteries with a twist of dry humor, and Daniel Craig is the Chubby Checker of dry sleuthing.

If I've learned anything else from the first two Knives Out movies (both excellent but the sequel is funnier) it is that mystery begets mystery, which brings us to the business at hand: today's Joint was supposed to open with Where is Kathy LaCroix?, but that begs the obvious follow-up, Who is Kathy LaCroix?, and I apologize in advance because I cannot Benoit Blanc these questions for you in a satisfying way as I know almost about nothing of LaCroix, her life and surfing career, and have no idea where she is.

I am in fact hoping that someone reading this can help fill in the blanks.

Kathy's EOS page is up but incomplete. She was a Florida regularfooter from Jacksonville who was both fortunate and cursed to come of age as a surfer in the mid-1960s, along with Mimi Munro. Fortunate, in that Munro meant there was another young female on the scene (Renee Eissler was there as well) to help diffuse the fug of surf-world testosterone. Cursed, in that Mimi was and remains a surfing savant, an ambition-killer, she will smile and outsurf you 98 days out of a 100. LaCroix, Munro, and Eissler together made up the East Coast women's team to the '66 World Surfing Championships, in San Diego. LaCroix finished 7th, just missing the finals, but had a spotlight moment, kind of, after catching the eye of Sports Illustrated writer Bob Ottum. Read Ottum's coverage of the event here, it is by and large a fun piece written by a man who does not surf himself but clearly appreciates the sport and its cool boho-jock practitioners (Ottum would go on to co-author Phil Edwards' biography, You Should Have Been Here an Hour Ago). As with all things 1966, though, that interest and appreciation did not much extend to women surfers, so make what you will of the fact that Ottum ends his SI contest report thus:

By Sunday afternoon it was over. Nat Young, the charger, had his champion's trophy. Joyce Hoffman had hers. And Kathy LaCroix, of Jacksonville, Fla., a member of the U.S. East Coast team, had the right words for the whole week. Swinging her hair around and flashing a smile that could stun a man across 40 feet of ocean, she said, "Like, I mean, isn't this really nice? I mean, oh God, they're all so nice to us here in San Diego and they are taking care of us and all. I mean, I think they have finally realized that surfers are people."

Anyway, back to the matter before us. I've been all over newspapers.com and Facebook, sent messages to the Florida Surf Museum and elsewhere, and have so far come up empty on LaCroix. She moved to Maui at some point, I think in the early 1970s. A real estate agent name Kathy LaCroix was working the Palm Beach area in the early 1980s. But that's all I've got. I don't know if her name is still LaCroix, or even if she's still alive.

Renee Eissler is still with us, and judging from this short video, is wonderful! I'll get Renee's EOS page up soon. 

Mimi Munro, best guess, is out there giving three-hour surf lessons to her great-grandchildren.

If you know anything about Kathy, get back to me, thanks!

Matt

PS: Nat Young is remembered for having crushed the field in that '66 event. But here is a fun bit of trivia to impress the other wrinklies at your next AARP-sponsored surf resort vacation. There were six pre-WCT championship events, from 1964 to 1972. Five used the single-contest format. Just one—1966—featured a three-round format, with surfers' final score being an aggregate from all three events. If the '66 championships had been like every other world contest from that era, meaning just one event, David Nuuhiwa would have cashed in what every American surfer from Point Dume to Block Island to Queens Surf regarded as a surf-world promissory note and won the title. 

PPS: And he'd have done so in memorable fashion, too, after a semifinal noseride that Bob Ottum reported as lasting 8.3 seconds ("a lanky, boneless lad named David Nuuhiwa moved out on the nose, arched his back and raised his arms and stood there like a fluid, copper-plated statue"), but might have been 8.6 seconds (as reported in the AP wire story), or might have been 10.1 seconds (as SURFER wrote a few weeks later). We were all showing up at the beach with stopwatches in the 1960s—or they were just making the numbers up. I agree, they were making the numbers up. Incredible noseride, though.

PPPS: Because of the AP story, tens of thousands of people knew about David's long-distance noseride just hours after it happened. But as far as I can tell, nobody filmed or photographed it—except for SURFER Magazine ace Ron Stoner, who took the shots you see above. Or did he? Thirty years ago I interviewed Paulette Martinson, Ron's girlfriend in 1966, and this kind, caring, professional middle-aged woman, who did nothing but treat Stoner well during both the good and very, very bad times, remembered going to the '66 world championships with Ron. "I went to all the contests with him. I helped carry his equipment. There was that famous sequence of David Nuuhiwa, and I actually pulled the trigger on some of those." By "trigger" I assume she means Ron had some kind of cord-connected device to his motordrive. "Nobody knows that. [But] David was going across that wave, I was there, and Ron let me pull the trigger on those shots." Sounds far-fetched, but everything else Paulette said that day rang true, and I see no reason why she'd try and sneak that one past me. Another mystery. 

[Photo grid, clockwise from top left: Kathy LaCroix at the 1966 world championships, photo by George Long; Daniel Craig as Benoit Blanc in Knives Out: Glass Onion; LaCroix surfing in Florida; LaCroix, right, and Renee Eissler, photo by Ron Stoner; vintage Ocean Beach postcard; Chubby Checker doing the Twist. LaCroix in 1966. LaCroix losing her board at the '66 championships, photo by George Long. Nat Young and David Nuuhiwa at the 1966 world championships, photo by LeRoy Grannis. Nuuhiwa noseride sequence by Ron Stoner? Or Paulette Martinson?]