Interesting hearing these stories being part of the next generation of little surfer kids that paddled out at the Cliffs in the late 60s in my teens…and not being part of the ‘local’ crowd or knowing anyone out in the water got rocks thrown at me from the top of the cliff by people who hadn’t ever met me or surfed with me. And repeatedly had slashed tires and slashed seats on my bicycle along with having a cut chain hanging with no bicycle and board trailer attached a couple of times that I had to rebuild.
Come on, guys, it wasn’t about how well you surfed or how polite you were about not dropping in. Localism is tribalism which is kill the ‘outsider’ which has always been a really ugly part of our species history. Isn’t that what racism is, what hate the longhaired hippies was, what intolerance of anything different is? The ‘other’ is the enemy who will take what you have and that cannot be allowed. By accident of birth the Cliffs were private property!
If my parents hadn’t divorced I would have been Class of ’72 at PLHS having been born in OB…and been part of that legacy. But instead I ended up in MB with my granny still in OB so I did get to surf the Cliffs even with the harassment. And guess what? I was part of the ‘Middle Mission’ local surfer crew who harassed outsiders! Clairemont? Outahere! El Cajon? Take off! Santee surfers? Go HOME! And believe me it got especially bad at South Mission Jetty on big days. Not something I’m proud of.
And then there was the Surfer Motel/PB Surf Shop crowd at PB Drive, and the Crystal Pier guys who ran your ass over, and the Law Street gang that slashed car tires and broke off side mirrors. And of course we can’t forget the PB Point boyz where they also threw rocks at you from above and had punch-outs in the water just like Sunset Cliffs.
And like you, Ken Coffey, I followed my surfing into other places in 1987 and in other ways the last 34 years, and rarely got back to San Diego except to bury a couple of relatives. And the last one died in 2001 and I didn’t recognize the place. It was…overwhelming being there. There isn’t any reason for me to make the 2,000 mile trip again since those that I grew up with are completely scattered and gone because MB was taken over by the neighborhood destroyers aka ‘developers’ and all the lower income families were priced out. Belmont Park turned into a freaking mall even though Evans’ will specifically stated it was to be kept ‘for the children of San Diego to enjoy’ then his family broke it in favor of profits… Even Mission Beach School is no more! Guess there aren’t enough kids living in MB to justify one any longer.
But I saw skinheads with swastika tattoos out in the water in a couple places those two weeks I was cleaning up after my last auntie, and got stink-eyed more than once. Along with actually being told that Southside OB Pier was a local-only zone by some dude and that I needed to paddle in…until I threw a vertical lip bash on my mid-80s Seal Ding Repair shaped & glassed twinfin between the pilings and paddled back out. Then they started talking to me a bit…and realized that they remembered my shop on Sunset Cliffs when they were kids. I fixed their daddy’s boards. Funny how that works, eh?
But we can look back at those huge crowds of 12 other surfers on a good day rather fondly, can’t we? In some ways it’s all still there…somewhere…at least in our memories those days haven’t ended. I have a picture on my wall of me in a stand-up tube at Rockslide in 1982 taken by the Sonshine Surf Shop photo guy, lipping two feet right over my head, that makes me smile every time I look at it. I was doing their ding repair and happened to be out that day. This is what we take with us when we go, amazing memories. Ain’t it grand to have a picture or two on the wall?
sealintheSelkirks
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