L.A. Man

by Joe Donnelly

  Oh, yeah.

  There’s a wonderful moment with the documentary. It was showing at the Museum of Modern Art. That was quite a moment. You’d really have to search around to find a negative associated with that.

  Right. Well…keep looking.

  [Laughing.] I think it’s great. I think being able to play with the band is really great. Being able to write, to still write, is really great. I didn’t want this [documentary] to be perceived as a wrap up and that’s it, and that puts you in that category on the shelf over there as opposed to an ongoing thing…an ongoing person.

  You’re not about to hang it up.

  No. I was hoping I had just hit my stride.

  The Birth of the Now

  Originally published as “The Ghosts of Dogtown,”

  LA Weekly, August 22, 2001

  Author’s note: G. Beato’s “The Lords of Dogtown,” written for Spin in 1999, had turned me on to the only-in-LA exploits of Skip Engblom, Jay Adams, Tony Alva, Craig Stecyk, and the other characters who comprised the subversive, mid-seventies, Z-Boys skateboard team. Beato’s account brimmed with high-stakes teen rebelliousness and the buzz of discovery. As the former editor of a couple magazines that had loosely adhered to an action-sports ethos, I was well aware of the ever-increasing influence skate culture was having in the world, particularly in music and art. And with Stacy Peralta’s Dogtown and Z-Boys documentary looming, it felt like a zeitgeist moment that I wanted in on. Laurie Ochoa, the visionary editor who guided the LA Weekly to its mid-Oughts pinnacle, bit on the pitch.

  I did a ton of research for this piece. The walls of my tiny office in a derelict Hollywood Boulevard motel were plastered with notes as I tried to conjure a story while being under the Z-boy spell. The result is a sometimes-overheated (and somewhat dated) account of the ragtag, skateboarding rascals who, it turns out, were among the most influential disruptors of our days.

  When Skip Engblom was a boy, he lived near a roller rink on Sunset Boulevard where roller-derby matches were still held. He claims he was making crude skateboards out of old roller skates back in 1956, when he was eight. It was a Los Angeles that is hard to imagine today. His mom worked at the Farmers Market on Fairfax, which also hosted class-AAA professional baseball. The Dodgers, straight out of Brooklyn, were playing daytime games at the Coliseum. Back then, you could ride a trolley to the Catalina terminal, and the only freeway in town, the Hollywood, was considered a blessing, not a blight.

  “It was a completely golden time in Los Angeles,” says Engblom. “There were still Red Cars running.”

  Although he spends mornings scouting waves, he looks and carries himself like a retired pro wrestler. Come to find out his dad actually was a pro who, according to Engblom, went on to become one of wrestling’s original carnival barkers, using now-familiar characters and storylines to promote the sport. Their house was a way station for midget wrestlers and guys like Haystack Calhoun, the giant who wore a chain around his neck with a horseshoe dangling from it. “I didn’t see anything strange about it,” Engblom says. “These were just the people who would show up.”

  Young Skipper, as he was known, used to ride his bike down to see his mother at work. One day he kept going, all the way down Santa Monica Boulevard to where the road meets the sand. There was a little stand there renting inflatable rafts and Skipper took one out into the water, where he saw a guy get up on a surfboard and ride a wave. “I completely flipped. It was probably the defining moment of my existence. I knew it was all I ever wanted to do,” says Engblom. “I needed to do that more than anything.” On weekends he’d ride his bike from Hollywood to the beach at 5:00 a.m., just to see the ocean.

  In 1958, the year Engblom’s mom finally gave in to her son’s beach imperative and moved the family to Ennis Place, behind Venice Circle, the ghost of Abbot Kinney was once again rising from the sand. After making his fortune in the tobacco business back east, New Jersey-born Kinney literally sailed the seven seas. The asthmatic insomniac settled in Southern California in 1880 after discovering that he could both breathe and sleep here. It wasn’t long before he started turning a marshy backwater south of Santa Monica into a seaside approximation of his beloved Venice, Italy.

  Kinney hoped his Ocean Park Pier, a grand amusement park thrusting hundreds of feet into the surf, would be the main attraction of his resort, and for decades it was a smashing success. Following a devastating fire in 1924, it was rebuilt bigger and better with fireproof concrete and steel. But the Great Depression, World War II, and television eventually dimmed the luster of Kinney’s dream. By the time the Engbloms moved to the beach, the pier was all but closing down. CBS tried to revive it with ten million dollars and visions of a nautical theme park to rival Disneyland, and for a brief stretch, the new Pacific Ocean Park, or POP, would outperform the Magic Kingdom.

  It didn’t last. One of the problems with POP that nobody could solve was that visitors had to negotiate its environs to gain access to its pleasures. Those environs were falling on increasingly hard times as the money along the beach gravitated north and south, and Santa Monica began an urban-renewal project that turned buildings to rubble. After a while, braving the winos and broken glass proved more than the park’s clientele could stomach.

  POP closed down for good on October 6, 1967. For six more years, it would crumble into the waves, a fitting symbol of the no-man’s-land between Venice and Santa Monica that generations of skate rats would come to revere as Dogtown.

  Strolling the well-heeled wonderland that is Santa Monica’s Main Street today, it’s hard to imagine how neglected the area was back then. Main Street itself was a wasteland of vacant storefronts. Enterprises that were open for business included the Vixen Theater, a gentlemen’s club not known for upscale talent, and the Pink Elephant, a transvestite bar. There was Synanon, a drug rehab place up toward Pico whose patients were dubbed “the eggplant people” because they were made to shave their heads and wear dark clothes. Across the street from the venerable Star Liquor, popular in the day because it sold Thunderbird wine, was Sunrise Mission—what was called an insane asylum back then. Go down the wrong street and you were in gang territory marked by vato graffiti.

  Until it was torn down in 1973, Pacific Ocean Park’s monolithic failure loomed over everything. It was picked over by Hollywood vultures, who used it as the set for They Shoot Horses, Don’t They? and The Fugitive and just about every cop show from Dragnet to The Mod Squad. Underneath the pier, hippies, homos, drug addicts, surfers, and hustlers sought sanctuary. Cops from either side, Santa Monica to the north and Venice to the south, were loath to claim jurisdiction.

  In some ways, the neglect was benign.

  “Back then we were like a depressed ghetto,” says Skip Engblom. “Main Street had all these junk shops, Sunrise Mission, winos, hookers, junkies. I enjoyed it immensely because you weren’t bothered much. You could roam freely, pursue your own interests, and that was a great thing.”

  Others felt the same way, and in the mid-sixties, the area had become a bohemian hotbed that could have shamed Greenwich Village. Setting up shop on the side streets were the Chambers Brothers, Tim Buckley, the Doors, Canned Heat, and Spirit, to name just a few of the musicians. Photographers William Wegman and John Baldessari had studios off Bay Street, behind what would become the Zephyr surf shop, future birthplace of the Z-Boys skate team.

  The lowbrow art of the booming modified-car scene competed with the lingering legacy of former resident artists David Alfaro Siqueiros and Stanton MacDonald-Wright, a founder of the synchronism movement in the early 1900s who went on to administer the WPA in the thirties. Muralists Dana Woolfe and Wayne Holwick, whose portrait of Anna on the wall of a house at Neilson and Hart still stubbornly defies urban renewal and acid rain, were igniting a public-art movement. “Wewere exposed to art and culture continuously,” says Engblom.

  Another local surfer named Craig R. Stecyk III was as attun
ed to these variant cultural influences as anybody. His father had been in the Army Signal Corps (he was one of the first to document the aftermath of Hiroshima), and Stecyk had access to photo equipment not readily available to most young people then. Early on, he became enthralled with legendary beach-life photographers like Peter Gowland and Joe Quigg.

  Like many rooted in the urban beach culture of that area, Stecyk’s father was into custom cars. For a while, he was in business with George Barris, who customized some of the most celebrated lowriders of the forties and fifties. Through his father, Stecyk met and became friends with outlaw car artists Ed “Big Daddy” Roth and Von Dutch, and later with Roth’s art director and eventual founder of Zap Comix, Robert Williams.

  When Stecyk wasn’t surfing himself or shooting the locals braving the POP breaks, he was honing his spray paint and airbrushing skills. Having grown up between rival Chicano gangs, he quickly learned to decipher graffiti and appreciate what could be done with spray paint. He started tagging the walls around Dogtown with his own iconography, perhaps most famously his POP cross and “rat bones” figure. Later Stecyk would be recognized as a seminal graffiti artist. Back then, though, he was a prototypical tagger, an urban art guerrilla whose pranks confused outsiders and delighted peers. In one infamous antiwar stunt, he “rescued” the Independence Day beach crowd from a dummy bomb he had painted to look Soviet and then buried in the sand at low tide the night before.

  Meanwhile, local boy Larry Stevenson started Makaha, one of the first dedicated skateboard companies, on Colorado Avenue and Twenty-Sixth Street, and also launched Surf Guide magazine. Stecyk became one of his sponsored skateboarders. Famous surfboard shaper Bob Simmons had a factory on Olympic. Vans would start a seedling shoe company in the neighborhood. Garage-shop surfboard shaping was a thriving cottage industry. You’d take your latest innovation out to the Cove, on the south side of the POP pier. If you looked good, you might have a sale. “It was kind of like stock-car racing,” says Engblom. “Win on Sundays, sell on Mondays.”

  In those days, Stecyk’s girlfriend back then lived in Stanton MacDonald Wright’s studio. “You can imagine how crossed my metaphors were,” says Stecyk. “I sort of had the high-culture and low-culture influences, although I didn’t know what it meant. I just knew what I liked.”

  He had something else, too: an innate sense of the churn of history and culture. “A tremendous sense of propriety, or maybe even stewardship, came with having grown up with all this,” he says.

  Skip Engblom was eighteen when he met sixteen-year-old Craig Stecyk at the 1966 Pismo Beach Clam Festival.

  “He came crawling out of this Volkswagen van that eight other people had crawled out of before him. They had all slept overnight there,” recalls Engblom. “We started talking and walked up the street to get breakfast. I thought I’d lead him in there and do a dine and dash. Next thing you know, he and I are both on the street. We both dined and dashed simultaneously. We looked at each other and laughed and we became friends.”

  Around the same time, a Culver City kid named Jeff Ho was apprenticing at Roberts Surfboards in Playa del Rey under the tutelage of Bob Milner. Milner was a bit of a local legend himself.

  “He was a crazy motherfucker. He used to ride his motorcycle up the hill outside the shop. In those days, dirt-bike riding was hill climbing. He had a crazy-ass view on life,” says Ho. “He taught me how to build boards, to shape, glass, sand, repair, resin. The whole enchilada.”

  Pretty soon, the shortboard revolution was under way, and Ho was on the front lines, as both a shaper and a surfer. The surfing establishment, though, was late in catching on. Ho would take his boards—prototypes of today’s bullet boards—to sanctioned contests and meet with either puzzlement or prejudice.

  “These guys couldn’t comprehend it, whacking the lips and doing S-turns,” says Ho, talking from Hawaii, where he lives on the North Shore of Oahu. Once, in frustration, he entered the Santa Monica Open and almost won riding a shortboard plank fresh out of the mold. “I’m laughing the whole time. I shaped the board with a claw hammer on the beach. That’s when I decided contests were a joke.”

  Ho found a more receptive audience at the pier, where his high-performance boards proved useful for dodging the pilings and other Pacific Ocean Park wreckage. He earned a reputation as an iconoclast both in and out of the water. “I was into doing my own things and making my own boards and selling them to people on the beach and to some shops. I was a kid. I was like eighteen years old,” says Ho. “To me, making a couple hundred bucks was a big thing.”

  While Ho had heard of Stecyk and Engblom, they had yet to meet, at least in person. They did, however, share the pages of Surfer magazine in 1968. Ho was captured in the center spread slashing a Hawaiian fatty, while Stecyk and Engblom published photos and a story about local surfers such as Mickey Dora and Johnny Fain titled, in typically cryptic Stecyk fashion, “The Crackerjack Conspiracy.”

  In some ways, that story was a swan song for the postwar generation’s optimism and good cheer, the last innocent days of the sixties, the days before Robert Kennedy was shot in front of Los Angeles and the Doors replaced the Beach Boys as the soundtrack to the California Dream.

  “Nero fiddled while Rome burned. We surfed while America went down the tubes,” says Engblom. “Robert Kennedy, before he got assassinated that day, I walked out of my apartment on Venice Boulevard, and he waved at me and my mom, and he was dead a couple hours later… Any sense that good things were going to follow pretty much died at that moment.”

  The draft hung over Engblom, Stecyk, and Ho like an onshore fog.

  “All three of us were in the same boat because of the Vietnam War. I was 1-A from fucking day one. Any day, I’m thinking, I’m fucking gone,” recalls Ho. “That whole thing you saw in Big Wednesday, I went through that. I was part of that. I had friends that went to Canada.”

  “I grew up in Venice around black people, Mexicans, and Asians,” says Engblom. “The idea that I was going to go over and shoot Asians was totally repugnant to me. I didn’t see these guys storming the beaches of Santa Monica.”

  Stecyk tried for student deferments. Ho fudged his physicals. Engblom hopped a ship in the merchant marines, staying out at sea as much as possible between 1968 and 1970. “I spent the war riding luxury liners,” he says. When his ship finally docked, he came back to the beach with some money, but was “essentially unemployable.”

  The artist and the impresario finally met the shaper on a weird winter day in 1970. It had been raining constantly for about a week, and the whole area was practically underwater.

  Eventually the storm gave way to a blustery, ornery sunshine. Stecyk and Engblom went down to the beach to check on the surf. They parked in a flooded lot while the tail end of the storm blew through. When they could finally see out of Engblom’s old Cadillac, they realized they had parked next to the 1948 Chevy truck, the classic surfer’s get-around, in which Jeff Ho lived. Stecyk told Engblom he should talk to Ho about going into business for real.

  “These two guys walk up to me and say, ‘Hey you, you’re Jeff Ho.’ And I’m like, ‘Yeah, what the fuck do you want?’” says Ho.

  They proposed starting up a factory to manufacture surfboards. It sounded good to Ho, who was in love with a white girl from high school whose parents didn’t like his Chinese-American ethnicity or his surfing lifestyle.

  “Her parents hated me. They thought I was a lowlife. My motivation was to make some money to buy some land on the big island and marry this chick.”

  They took advantage of their contacts and Ho’s clients and started pumping out boards. Ho shaped new designs. Stecyk experimented with airbrushing techniques. They had imagination and a do-it-yourself attitude. Sometimes stunning progress was made.

  “[Stecyk] invented the airbrushed surfboard. That was his invention,” says Engblom. “I don’t care what anybody is telling you, he was maki
ng airbrushed surfboards a year or two before anybody was putting them on the market.”

  They worked hard and played hard. They took surf trips. Stecyk sent pictures of them and their boards to Surfer magazine.

  “It was a fucking really good time,” says Ho. “The outlook was that everything could blow up tomorrow, so everything we did, we just did. The goal was to make money to do more projects.”

  Soon their production spilled over into another factory. It became clear they needed their own shop to keep up. Meanwhile, the girl for whom Ho was hording money in order to, “buy her a left-point break on the big island,” left him for a more family-approved paramour. “She started dating some other guy who was actually going to college or something,” says Ho. “Instead of buying the land, I bought the shop.”

  Jeff Ho’s Surfboards and Zephyr Productions would occupy the southeast corner of Bay and Main streets in Santa Monica, across the street from Sunrise Mission and next to Star Liquor. It was the heart of what they would dub Dogtown.

  ◆◆◆

  Several years before Ho’s shop opened, a seven-year-old, blond-haired little grom paddled up to an older dude who was ripping the POP pier and said, “Oh man, that was a really good ride. Who are you?”

  “I’m Jeff Ho,” the guy answered.

  “You make surfboards, don’t you?”

  “I do.”

  “I wish I could have one of your boards.”

  “Maybe you will. Maybe you will.”

  In time, Jay Adams was riding one of Ho’s boards as part of the Zephyr shop’s junior surf team. In a prescient move, by the early seventies Ho and Engblom were sponsoring not only a men’s surf team but also a junior division that would keep the next wave of top talent in the pipeline. Adams was one of the youngest members of a team that also included Tony Alva, Stacy Peralta, Nathan Pratt, Bob Biniak, Wentzle Ruml, Shogo Kubo, Jim Muir, and others.