Surfing is believed to have originated in the Pacific Ocean sometime between 1500 B.C. and 400 A.D. Polynesian culture is filled with ancient legends and traditions related to surfing. Hawaiian history contains tales of surfing dating back to the early 1400s. Even the Hawaiian gods surfed. One goddess, Kelea, is said to have abdicated her throne in order to be able to surf. Everything from the choice of wood for a board to shaping the board and praying for surf was surrounded in ritual.

In spite of its heritage, there was a time not too long ago when the sport of surfing almost died off completely. Surfing, like many other Hawaiian traditions, had a difficult time surviving the collision with the western world that took place shortly after Hawaii’s first visit by Europeans in 1778.

In 1819, strict Calvinist missionaries had arrived in Hawaii and tried to change Hawaiian culture to suit their own religious beliefs. They wanted to do away with Hawaiian gods and Hawaiian practices. The missionaries considered surfing to be almost sinful. It was done for sheer enjoyment, and even worse, it was done while barely dressed. The Calvinists told the Hawaiians that time spent surfing could be better spent praying or working. Missionaries sent criers through the streets of the Hawaiian islands, admonishing the population to give up sports and recreation and to go to church instead.

The famous Hawaiian King Kamehameha was an avid surfer, but he had passed away just before the arrival of the missionaries. His wife, Kaahumanu, declared herself prime minister of the kingdom soon after Kamehameha’s death. She became a convert to Christianity and instigated a cultural revolution that did away with the traditional rules of Hawaiian society, known as kapu. These rules dictated behavior for almost every aspect of life. Hawaiian culture was essentially completely upended.

Since surfing was an integral part of Hawaiian culture, the “retooling” of Hawaiian religion and tradition claimed surfing as a casualty. All cultural and religious significance was suddenly removed from surfing. As a sport, it was generally frowned upon. Surfboards were made into seats and desks in schools.
In 1874, surfing enjoyed a short-lived revival when King David Kalakaua came into power. He encouraged the revival of many Hawaiian traditions, including Hawaiian song, the hula dance and surfing. After his death in 1891, the popularity of surfing once again ebbed.

The next ten years were a tumultuous time for Hawaiian society and politics. Kalakaua’s sister Liliuokalani took the throne for a short time, but she was ousted by American business concerns and the monarchy was abolished. The kingdom of Hawaii was replaced with a republic in 1894, but by 1898, all of Hawaii was annexed by the United States.

By 1900, the number of Hawaiians living in Hawaii had dropped to 40,000, as compared to an estimated 300,000 living in the islands in 1778. The Hawaiian economy was not doing well, either. These factors contributed to the continuing decline of surfing.

At this point, surfing was almost extinct. Only a handful of people in Hawaii surfed at all. One of the few people still surfing at this time was Duke Paoa Kahinu Makoe Hulikohoa Kahanamoku. Kahanamoku was a full-blooded Hawaiian and he loved the islands and its culture. He spoke Hawaiian. He especially liked water sports like surfing.

“I was a solid believer in this surfing bit,” said Kahanamoku, “a group of us, mostly Hawaiian boys, used to gather at a hau tree on Waikiki Beach and discuss boards, waves, the delights of surfing, and the latest thing in experiments. It was a poor man’s club, but it was made up of dedicated surfers.”

The production of pineapple and sugar crops increased around 1905, and so did Hawaii’s economy and tourist trade. Kahanamoku’s feats on his 10 foot, 70 lb. solid redwood surfboard were watched by tourists at new beach front hotels in Waikiki. Duke’s enthusiasm for surfing was breathing life back into the sport and it made other people want to try it.

Excerpted from the print edition of Barracuda Magazine issue #13.

Click here to get Ab Jenkins’ whole story plus some cool old racing photos in the print edition of Barracuda #11.

Utah’s 100 square-mile Bonneville salt flats are an expansive wasteland that claimed the sanity and lives of many settlers during the 1800s. Creeping across the sparse, blinding whiteness of the flats at three miles per hour was a brutal, three-day ordeal for these early settlers. It was common for them to be driven mad by thirst or mirages. Being bogged down in the mud of the outlying areas of the flats caused the infamous Donner party to enter the Sierras too close to winter. They were left to freeze and starve to death in the mountains, ultimately resorting to cannibalism to survive. But the territory that was the bane of settlers was a boon for speedsters of the early 20th century.

Because it was a hotbed of bicycle and motorcycle racing, Salt Lake City was known as “the birthplace of speed” at the turn of the century. It was here that a young Mormon carpenter named David Abbot Jenkins was introduced to motorcycle racing. Known as “Ab,” he competed in 1/2 mile races on dirt tracks as well as in cross-country motorcycle races.

A highway was put in through the salt flats in 1925. A friend who had worked on designing the road asked Jenkins if he would be willing to race an automobile down the new highway against the train as a part of the highway’s inaugural celebration. Jenkins accepted the challenge. Jenkins beat the train by five minutes.

Jenkins was convinced that the area had enormous potential for racing. He set about championing Bonneville as the next great land speed track. However, the more established tracks were the preferred venues for most racers.

Jenkins was far from the stereotype of a reckless, speed-crazed thrill-seeker. He never considered himself to be a rough and tumble daredevil. In fact, he was very much a mannerly gentleman-sportsman who consciously avoided all things crude and vulgar.

Jenkins saw his races mainly as a test of his strength and fortitude, which he attributed to his dedication to restrained, modest Mormon living. “I owe the maintenance of my endurance ability to the observance of the Word of Wisdom of the Mormon Church,” said Jenkins, “which my good mother taught me as a boy. It proscribes the use of all forms of tobacco and liquor.”

His racing got the attention of the Pierce-Arrow automobile company, who invited him to come to their factory in Buffalo. Pierce-Arrow had developed a 12-cylinder engine, but couldn’t get it to out-perform their 8-cylinder. Jenkins was asked to see what he could do to improve its performance. After a few weeks of tinkering, he raised the output of the engine from 130 horsepower to 175 horsepower.

In 1932, Jenkins got the idea that running the powerful new 12-cylinder on the salt flats for a 24-hour endurance run would be perfect opportunity to show what both Bonneville and the engine were capable of. He told Pierce-Arrow officials that he would run the car 2,400 miles in the 24 hours. They laughed at him. Undaunted, he set off to test the 12-cylinder Pierce-Arrow in Utah with the car and six new tires as his only equipment.

The whole set-up very rough and simple, but it would do the trick. With the help of friends, a 10-mile circular course at Bonneville was marked off with stakes. The run was timed with stopwatches. There were no facilities or tents set up on the flats. A sheep wagon was towed onto the course to provide some shelter for the timers and crew. Pulling the fenders and windshield off the Pierce-Arrow, Jenkins simply smeared his face with grease to protect his skin from the sun, put on a pair of goggles, hopped into the car and raced onto the track.

As he raced, the timers signaled his speed to him with large signs. For amusement, Jenkins wrote notes back to his crew on a notepad anchored in the middle of his steering wheel and then threw the missives to them as he thundered by at over 100 mph.

He stopped to refuel every two hours, but he never left the driver’s seat of the car for 24 hours straight. When he finally got out of the car at the end of the run, he was stone deaf from the roar of the engine. Rather than running the 2,400 miles he had promised the Pierce-Arrow people, Jenkins had run 2,710! His average speed for the 24-hour period was 112.916 mph–very close to a new world’s record.

In 1933, Jenkins arranged for his second endurance run on the salt, the first one that would officially go on the record. With a somewhat expanded base camp, Jenkins set out on another endurance race with the same Pierce-Arrow. Shortly after the race started, a violent storm erupted with winds gusting up to 60 miles an hour. Tents were folded to prevent them from blowing away and officials ran to their cars for shelter, but Jenkins kept racing. The torrents of wind and rain did little to slow his speed.

After the last gas stop of the run, Jenkins took out a safety razor and shaved while circling the track at over 125 mph and with no windshield. When the race ended, he hopped out of the car, clean-shaven and presentable.

In the summer of that year, England’s best land speed racers, Cobb, Campbell and Sir George Eyston came to Bonneville. Their attendance turned the salt flats into the mecca for land speed that it remains to this day.

With the giants of speed competing, world speed records were set and broken several times over the passing days. When Cobb’s turn for an endurance run came up, Jenkins moved off the flats to allow him to race, but left all of his equipment for Cobb and his crew to use. At the one hour mark of his run, Cobb was on pace to clobber Jenkins’ record. His average for the first hour was 152.95 mph, compared to Jenkins’ 142.62 mph. He finished with a 24-hour average speed of 134.85 mph, beating Jenkins’ previous best of 127.229 mph.

Jenkins had helped another driver defeat his own record and was happy to do it. It was all in the spirit of friendly, sporting competition and helped to establish Bonneville. “Cobb is a great fellow,” said Jenkins, “and it was a pleasure to do everything in our power for him.”

In 1939, Jenkins brought a new car to the flats. It was the mammoth Mormon Meteor III. Built on a 142-inch wheelbase with specially-made 22-inch Firestone tires, it used the same Curtis 12-cylinder airplane engine from the Mormon Meteor II. The car was nearly 21 feet long and was once again engineered by Augie Dusenberg. It was designed to run with two airplane engines, although only one was ever installed. It generated 750 hp at 2,000 rpm and its top speed was 275 mph. It was estimated that it could run at 400 mph with front and rear supercharged engines installed. It had a 112 gallon gas tank and got three and a half miles to the gallon at 200 mph.

Shortly afterwards, a movement was begun to elect Jenkins as the mayor of Salt Lake City. Although he entered the mayoral race late, never spent a cent of his own money and never made a single speech, he won the election.

In 1940, the “Racing Mayor” made one of his most amazing runs at Bonneville. He had made many 24-hour runs solo, but Jenkins now opted to use a relief driver. (He was, after all, 57 years old!) His relief driver was Cliff Bergere, who had raced at Indy and was also a motion picture stunt driver.

On one lap of his run that year, Jenkins ran 189.086 mph. Over the 24-hour run, Jenkins drove 14 hours and Bergere drove for 10. When Bergere got out of the car after his shift, his hands were blistered from hanging on the steering wheel to keep the car on course. He told the Salt Lake Tribune, “I’ll take my hat off to Jenkins. Any man who can drive a car for six solid hours on this course at the speed that Ab got out of the machine is a marvel. I have never seen anything like it.”

The Mormon Meteor III broke 21 records that year. His average of 161.180 mph for a 24-hour run would not be broken for decades to come.

Jenkins was a breed of consummate sportsman-gentleman whose polite and honorable conduct today seems as rare and quaint as the open-cockpit Pierce-Arrow that he first raced at Bonneville.

He was extremely proud of having only been injured once during his many record runs. His endurance races at Bonneville put cars through exhaustive testing that helped to make production cars and tires safer for the everyday driver.

Over the period of his racing career, Ab Jenkins held and broke more records than any other person in the history of sports. His 24-hour record of a 161.180 mph average stood for 50 years, being beaten in 1990 and only by a team of eight drivers. Jenkins’ record for the 48-hour endurance run still stands to this day.

Excerpted from the print edition of Barracuda #11.

In 1961, while still in high school, he started creating the car of his dreams. Wasserman’s concept for his hot rod took design cues from two very famous hot rodders — Norm Grabowski and Tommy Ivo. Grabowski has been called “Father of the T-bucket” and is best known for his “Kookie” car, which was made out of the front half of a touring car with a severely shortened pickup bed on the back. The car was wildly famous, as it was featured on the TV series 77 Sunset Strip, and on the cover of many hot rod magazines of the day. “T.V. Tommy” Ivo’s T-bucket was built in the 1950s and had been on the cover of Hot Rod and Car Craft and had won Top Eliminator titles at early drag races in Southern California.

Although he had never even changed a spark plug when he started the project, Wasserman decided he wanted to build a car from scratch, rather than taking someone else’s car apart and modifying it. At a local gas station, he noticed a hot rod like the one he wanted to build. It was owned by one of the guys who worked there, George Boehme. Wasserman introduced himself and asked about the car. He got all the information and tips he could from Boehme and the two became fast friends.

His Model T hot rod was finished in November of 1963. He completely hand-built, painted, upholstered and pinstriped the car himself. The frame was built with all hand-made cross-members. It was powered by 1963 fuel-injected Corvette 327, fresh out of the crate. The engine was connected to a Chevy 4-speed transmission. The body featured original 1915 Model T cowl lights (with the original wicks in them) and wings for the motor meter, which Wasserman had picked up at the very first Pomona swap meet in 1961.

Wasserman and his pal George Boehme nicknamed their similar cars The Insult and The Outrage. They showed them together at the L.A. Roadster show and cruised many cities in Southern California together. “I drove the hell out of that car,” says Wasserman, who even ran it as a daily driver for a month.

Wasserman (left) and his friend George Boehme (right) with their twin Ts, The Insult and The Outrage in 1968. They had struck up a life-long friendship b.s.-ing about hot rods.

Eventually, Wasserman was engaged to be married. Since his fiancee had children, owning a two-seater hot rod didn’t seem too practical. Plus, he continued to build hot rods and collect classic cars, so he was running short on garage space. He decided to put The Insult up for sale. He took it to swap meets with a “for sale” sign on it. He found it tough to sell the car back then because most people were interested in ‘32 roadsters. But, he eventually traded the car out for work on the building that housed his company.

Wasserman would build two more hot rods over the years — a highly modified ‘34 three-window coupe and a red ‘34 roadster which he calls his “very favorite car in the entire world.” He also bought an immaculate, stock ‘34 Deluxe Tudor sedan with 26,000 miles on it, a ‘65 Malibu SS and his daily driver is a ‘65 Chevelle two-door wagon.

Despite the fact that he had built and owned so many other cool cars, he missed The Insult like a long-lost child. “The car was gone and it drove me crazy,” says Wasserman, “I had nightmares about it. I regret the day I ever sold that car. I had to have it back.”

After years of being out of his possession, Wasserman saw The Insult at a Throttlers picnic–and it was for sale! It had been modified to some extent. Its silver, blue and green flames had been painted with yellow and red flames and some more pinstriping had been done on it. Almost 60 lbs. of polished brass and stainless steel had been added. But it was still The Insult, the first hot rod he had ever built.

Unfortunately, Wasserman and the new owner could not agree on a price. The Insult wound up being sold to someone else and Wasserman had no idea of its whereabouts. Amazingly, two years later, he saw the car at another picnic, sitting under a tree. He waited by the car until the owner showed up. Wasserman explained the history of the car and said he wanted to buy the car back. The owner took his information and said if he ever wanted to sell it, he’d give him a call.

In 1996, the owner called Wasserman and sold The Insult back to him. On his way to bring The Insult back home, something seemed wrong with the car and Wasserman chose to take surface streets instead of the freeway. He didn’t get more than a few blocks when a front wheel bearing seized up and the car had to be brought the rest of the way home on a flatbed. Wasserman insists that the car would have flipped over and killed him if the bearing had locked up at freeway speed. “Now the car is right where it belongs,” he says, “In my little garage.”

Although Wasserman jokingly calls his obsession with cars “a serious sickness,” it can’t be all bad. His love for hot rods made him many life-long friends and helped him start his own business in a roundabout way. While in college, Wasserman saw guys making money doing flaming and striping on cars in parking lots and simply thought that would be a “really neat way to make money.”

He started doing lettering on race cars for extra cash. Then he got some office space from a friend for $30 a month and opened his own sign painting business. Someone came in and asked if he did silkscreen printing for t-shirts. “Sure,” he replied confidently. He took half of the man’s money as a down payment on the job, despite the fact that he didn’t actually know the first thing about screen printing. He figured out what he needed to know about silkscreening from a clerk at the art supply store where he went to buy the screens for the job. The order was filled and Wasserman was on his way to opening his own screen printing business.

In 1967, a fine art printing shop out-sourced some of the printing for a Robert Rauschenberg print to Wasserman. Later, he worked on two runs of prints by Roy Lichtenstein. From 1970 through 1975, he closed up his own shop and went to work for the company that had out-sourced him the Rauschenberg jobs. For those five years, Wasserman printed blue chip art, including works by Andy Warhol and Frank Stella. One Stella job, Double Gray Scramble, consisted of 150 colors. It took three years to proof and seven months to print. Wasserman had come a long way from bluffing his way through his first t-shirt printing job.

In 1976, he reopened Wasserman Screen Printing in Santa Monica. Since that time, he has done fine art printing for everyone from the likes of uptown artists Ed Ruscha and Patrick Nagel to lowbrow kingpins Ed Roth and Robert Williams.

Just as being around cars originally led Wasserman to open his fine art printing business, his art printing is leading back to being around cars. He has plans to divide the shop of Wasserman Screen Printing in half. He wants to make part of it into a garage where he will do traditional automotive upholstery, flaming and pinstriping.

When asked if this new business venture is basically an excuse to buy a lift, Wasserman frankly replies, “Yes.”

Today, Wasserman belongs to the “Old Timers” car club. There’s no president, no treasurer and no dues. “It’s just the same old guys sitting around a parking lot telling the same lies they’ve been telling for years,” says Wasserman. “I work on cars because I like it. I make art for other people during the day. When I come home, I make these cars for myself. I’m not a mechanic. I only know my own cars and that’s all I’m really interested in.”

The Insult, back in Wasserman’s garage, 40 years after he started building it.

From the print edition of Barracuda #11.

On the Polyneisan island of Hivaoa, Heyerdahl had an experience that would change the course of his life. While exploring an inland valley, he happened upon two colossal stone statues. The stone men were ten feet tall and carved out of red stone. He was fascinated, wondering who had placed them there and how they had done it.

The natives knew little about the statues, claiming that they were already present when their ancestors arrived on the island and drove the previous inhabitants into the mountains. Someone on the island showed Heyerdahl a book containing pictures of similar statues. However, the statues in the book were in South America. Could there have been a connection between South America and Polynesia?

Heyerdahl then learned that folklore from all across Polynesia tells of a man named Tiki, who led fair-skinned, red-haired people to the islands from the direction of South America.

But this kind of migration was not possible. The leading authorities on Polynesian anthropology at the time said that the balsa rafts of the South American Indians were not seaworthy enough to travel away from the coast. They also agreed that the Indians did not have the navigating ability to make long ocean voyages. So, Polynesia could only have been populated from Asia.

Heyerdahl sat thinking about how the legend of Tiki contradicted the anthropological authorities on Polynesia. Then he looked at a small pineapple he was holding. Heyerdahl’s university studies on botany had taught him that the pineapple was a South American plant which could not have traveled thousands of miles across the ocean without the aid of man. It was well-documented that pineapples existed in the Marquesas long before the islands were visited by Europeans. (Other plants, like the papaya and the sweet potato were also South American plants that were cultivated there long before Europeans arrived.)

Heyerdahl wanted to study primitive peoples. “The unsolved mysteries of the South Seas had fascinated me. There must be a rational solution of them, and I had made my objective the identification of the legendary hero Tiki.”

He began researching the migration of the Polynesian people. He turned up several dozen theories on where the Polynesian people had come from, but all of them dismissed the possibility of a wave of migration from South America. It was widely held that the balsa rafts of the South American Indians would absorb water and sink after a short time at sea. All the experts were in agreement that only a hulled boat could make a journey from South America to Polynesia.

Then Heyerdahl uncovered another connection between South America and Polynesia. When Pizarro came to Peru in 1527, he found people among the Incas who were tall and light-skinned, with beards and fair, reddish hair.

They claimed to be descendants of the Viracochas, a race of sun-worshippers who had lived in the area before the Incas took over. The Viracochas were also supposed to have been the creators of large stone men and stepped pyramids found near Tiahuanaco in Peru. (These same types of structures appeared on Easter Island and the Polynesian islands closest to South America.)

The Viracochas had been attacked and massacred on an island in Lake Titicaca. The leader of their race escaped with some companions into the Pacific on balsa rafts. The leader’s name was Kon-Tici.

Heyerdahl was convinced that the chief-god Kon-Tici who left Peru was the same chief-god Tiki who came to Polynesia from the east and became a legend in Polynesian culture.

His research and theories were recorded in a manuscript called Polynesia and America; A Study of Prehistoric Relations. He took up residence in New York City and tried to get the scientific community in the U.S. to consider the paper, but no one was interested in reading theories that spanned several scientific disciplines. Scientists and scholars argued that he should either specialize in America or Polynesia, not both. One scientist told him, “You can’t treat ethnographic problems as a sort of detective mystery… The task of science is investigation pure and simple. Not to try to prove this or that.”

“It’s easier to get people interested in an expedition than in an unread manuscript,” he reasoned. He would put an end, once and for all, to the argument that Indians could not have reached Polynesia. He would do it by building a balsa raft just like the ones used by Indians in Peru and sailing it almost 5,000 miles to Polynesia.

The possibility of life-threatening circumstances on the expedition was real. Once the raft set sail, the crew really would be completely on their own until they reached land. Although they would have a radio on board, it would be of no use to them in an emergency. It would have been impossible for them to be rescued two or three thousand miles into the Pacific by either boat or airplane, assuming they could even be found. This was, after all, in the days before helicopters and global positioning systems.

The raft was ready to be christened on April 27th, 1947, scheduled to set sail the next day. The dock was thick with dignitaries, journalists and citizens. Weary of all the nay saying and public scrutiny, Heyerdahl later joked, “One thing was quite clear to all of us&emdash;that if the raft went to pieces outside the bay we would paddle to Polynesia, each of us on a log, rather than dare come back there again.”

The raft was christened Kon-Tiki and sported a sail painted with a likeness of the legendary chief-god, based on stone statues of him at Tiahuanaco. The raft was towed into the Humboldt current and set loose.

Excerpted from the feature article in the print edition of Barracuda #10. Get the whole story of Thor Heyerdahl’s adventures, plus a two-page interview with Heyerdahl himself!

His columns appeared in the Chicago Tribune and were syndicated in 800 papers nationwide. A hard-working and prodigious writer, he delivered five columns a week throughout most of his 33 year career. He was given almost every journalistic award there was, including a 1972 Pulitzer Prize for commentary, the Ernie Pyle Memorial Award, the National Headliner Award, the Heywood Broun Award of the American Newspaper Guild, and the first H.L. Mencken Award presented by the Baltimore Sun. And he was as tough and gritty as the city he wrote about.

Royko considered joining the military. “A couple of my friends went in the Army,” he said, “One went to Europe, drank a lot of beer and met a lot of lovely ladies. Another got as far as Japan.” So, Royko joined the Air Force, was trained as a radio operator and sent to Korea, but eventually, he wound up back near Chicago.

His first break in journalism came when, in order to avoid becoming a military policeman, he convinced an officer to let him work for the base newspaper. “It struck me that any goof could write a newspaper story,” he later recalled.

He lied his way into running the entire paper by saying that he had been a cub reporter for the Chicago Daily News before joining the service. Two weeks later, he was joined at the paper by another serviceman who had been a reporter for UPI. One morning, the man said to Royko, “Don’t con me. You never worked for a newspaper, did you?”

He admitted that the whole thing was a sham, but assigned himself a column anyway.

Royko moved into the private sector and interviewed for a position at the Chicago Daily News, but refused a job offer after looking around the paper and feeling intimidated by the stature of their writers. When Royko returned a year and a half later for another interview, the editor wasn’t interested anymore. The rest of Chicago’s daily papers passed on him because of his lack of college education.

He was eventually hired a few years later by the Daily News to pen lightweight stories at night. During the day, he supplemented his income by selling tombstones over the phone. His articles finally caught the attention of the paper’s editor, who asked Royko what kind of a column he really wanted to do.

“When he asked me that question,” said Royko, “it just sort of clicked together. I said I’d like to be a local columnist.

“I said I’d use satire. There’s a lot of things people have never been told. Straight reporting doesn’t tell it. I felt nobody had ever really described what a City Council meeting was like, what aldermen were like, what a County Board meeting was like.”

By 1964, he was a full-time columnist. He developed a reputation for targeting bigots and crooked politicians while sticking up for the “little guy.” He held Chicago’s self-serving politicians in particularly high disdain and wrote about them frequently: “It’s true that Burke has long been considered the smartest of all aldermen — as well as the best dressed and having the most sleek hairstyles. But it is all relative. Being the smartest alderman in Chicago’s City Council is something like being the tallest midget in the circus.”

His loathe of beaurocracy led him to become an authority on the workings of Chicago’s political machine: “This town was built by great men who demanded that drunkards and harlots be arrested while charging them rent until the cops arrived.”

He became a thorn in the side of local politicians and was accurately described as the “nemesis” of Chicago Mayor Richard Daley. In 1971, Royko wrote a simply-spoken, but scathing depiction of Daley’s political machine called Boss, during a time when Daley was more cautiously feared than revered.

When Royko reflected on Daley at the time of his death, ironically, he could have been talking about himself: “In some ways, he was this town at its best — strong, hard-driving, working feverishly, pushing, building, driven by ambitions so big they seemed Texas-boastful.

“In other ways, he was this city at its worst — arrogant, crude, conniving, ruthless, suspicious, intolerant.

“He wasn’t graceful, suave, witty, or smooth. But, then, this is not Paris or San Francisco.

“He was raucous, sentimental, hot-tempered, practical, simple, devious, big, and powerful. This is, after all, Chicago.”

Maybe the reason Royko understood Daley so well is that they were cut from the same cloth. Both were neighborhood kids who were proud of their blue-collar roots and values. Neither was erudite, but you always knew exactly what they meant. 

Excerpted from the print edition of Barracuda Magazine issue #04.

In the summer of 1947, after leaving the service, Robichaud and some of his friends were receiving a $20 a week stipend from the government. They decided to live bohemian-style on the beach at San Onofre for the summer.

Dan’s cohorts that lost summer included a guy nicknamed “Burrhead,” Glen Fisher, a fellow named Kenny (who had lost his leg in World War II, but surfed anyway) and the then-unknown James Arness, who would go on to star as Marshall Dillon on TV’s Gunsmoke.

“We had a ball,” says Dan, “We stayed and surfed. We lived off the beans in the fields above San Onofre and the lobsters from our pot. Whitey Harrison would go by in a boat and give us fish and abalone. We didn’t have much money, but we lived and we scrounged and we really enjoyed our days. We surfed, we drank cheap wine and played ukuleles all night. Cheap wine and ukuleles–that’s all we needed.”

Dan (right) with Duke Kahanamoku (left) in Hawaii.

They would collect discarded soda bottles for extra money and every time one of them went into town, they would pick up some junk tires from behind a gas station, which they burned for warmth. “When we’d come in from surfing, we’d throw one of those tires on the fire,” says Dan, “They’d burn black and smoky. They’d turn your legs black and it wouldn’t come off. We called it ‘getting vulcanized.’

“Arness had this big overcoat,” says Dan, “He would get out of the water and put that thing on. He just lived in it. It was like a tent!” Dan says he ran into Arness some 25 years later, and he told Dan that for all of his success and the money he’d made, their summer at San Onofre was the best time of his life.

“When you go surfing, every day’s some kind of adventure. You’re involved with nature and the weather. It just feels good to be out there on the beach,” says Dan. “It’s like a religion. You become dedicated. It becomes a way of life.”

After that summer, Dan moved to Long Beach and became a fireman. But surfing still influenced every aspect of his life. It affected where he lived and where he wanted to live. One of the reasons Dan became a fireman was because he would have every other day off and could surf during the week, when most people were at work.

Dan today, with one of his ukes.

Excerpted from Barracuda issue #09.