Hey All, Three-quarters of all North Shore WCT winners between 1975 and 1980, men and women, rode Tom Parrish-shaped boards, and that might be lowballing it. Parrish was of course the apex craftsman at Lightning Bolt—"The Man with the Red-Hot Planer." He was also a friendly, upbeat, one-man corrective to all that wizardy shaper-guru hoodoo we got stuck with in the '60s and '70s. If you somehow ma...
Hey All, Last week's look at the 1977 Stubbies was meant to be a two-parter, but halfway through I changed my mind and tried to squeeze everything into on probably-too-long Joint—and now I'm U-turning again to add a few more thoughts on the Stubbies, and pro surfing contests in general. Underlining the not-so-groundbreaking yet frequently ignored point that great contests only happen in great wa...
Hey All, The last thing to get cut from a recent Joint featuring Phyllis O'Donell was her quote about the '74 Australian Titles, held at Burleigh Heads. O'Donell was 37, the other competitors were almost without exception in their teens or early 20s. "They kept holding the event back," O'Donell later recalled, "waiting for the surf to improve." Sitting around that morning, all we did was eat, ea...
Hey All, Wallace Dickson of Largo, Florida, a Gulf Coast bedroom community 25 miles west of Tampa that over the past few years has been attracting supercharged weather events like there's a bullseye on the City Hall lawn, sent me an amazing photo of pre-fame Ted Cassidy. If you are a current or soon-to-be pensioner and loved TV sitcoms as a kid, like me, you know Cassidy as Lurch, the gigantic sh...
Hey All, I have never pretended to love all my EOS children equally. The "people" entries are the Dick Smothers part of the site; I like them best, always have. Attention is paid to the others (surf breaks, equipment, events, etc.) but they must work harder, and not always to successful ends, for what I give freely and easily to the people pages. Canoe surfing, for example. The section in James...
Hey All, Sly Stone and Brian Wilson were born just a few weeks apart, and departed in similar one-two fashion, earlier this month, at age 82. For boomer-age music lovers, it felt like a death in the family. The double blow in fact made the loss feel greater than the sum of the two parts—never mind the fact that both beat long odds to even reach seniority. Unless you're Paul McCartney, it is just ...
Hey All, The most-wrong moment in Encyclopedia of Surfing, ever, so far anyway, was the print version intro line for the "sandboarding" entry, and here you go: "Ancient Egyptians used planks made of pottery or wood to slide down sand dunes." My inner Dune-child still believes that archeologists will someday send word from Cairo that they have at last found clay fragments from what is clearly a Wh...
Hey All, A Sunday Joint will usually march off to quietly but proudly fall in with its EOS comrades. Another citizen-soldier in the Phalanx of Joints. But some will U-turn back to me, asking—nay, demanding—for an extension or coda or add-on of some kind. I will then bang a postscript into the next Joint. Or I will save a few up and fasten them together into a Rauschenberg-like Sunday Joint Combin...
Hey All, Filmmaker Jack McCoy died last week, at 76, after a few years of declining health. Just two days earlier he'd wrapped up a 13-city tour, showing his classic 2004 film Blue Horizon to packed houses from Perth to Nambour. Carl "Tinker" West, founder of Challenger Eastern Surfboards and Bruce Springsteen's original manager, also died last week, age 89. Derek Rielly and I shared a few thou...
Hey All, Beach culture connoisseur Murray Walding of Noosa reached out after last week's shock-doc Sunday Joint to remind me that former Aussie "It" girl and recent Joint headliner Tanya Binning had a cameo in Mondo Cane, the mother of all mondos, as a young teen lifesaver—very young, just 15—giving a mouth-to-mouth resuscitation demo to an "unconscious" man laying on the beach. (Click here, scro...