Pat Sparkuhl considers surfing's influence on his appreciation for the Arts and relates an incident that occurred after being caught surfing U.S. Marine-controlled Trestles Beach. Recorded in Laguna Beach, California.
Transcript
0:13 Q: How did surfing influence your interest in the Arts?
0:15 PS: the personalization of style; the independence; thesurfing as a creative adventure. It's a self-motivating creative adventure, and as a rhythm, it becomes momentum, and the momentum becomes a contagion. Because if you're turned on.it's called stoke. If you're stoked, you get other people stoked. And we used to do that a lot. We would get each other stoked. We would do crazy antics to try to motivate the surf, like, in Dana Point, at the Gazebo, if there was no surf.uh, at that time there was no harbor and it was a favorite place to go surfing, uh, we would throw an old surfboard off from the Gazebo, and sacrifice for surf.
1:09 I remember my brother, Ted, driving his '51 Plymouth, uh Red Bomb he called it, at Doheney. And another guy, LeRoyoh, I forget his last name. He had a LaSalle, an old sedan. And this was in 1963, '62. It was very early on. And both the cars got stuck in the sand and the tide started coming up, and we had to.
1:37 This was all a surfing trip. The surfing trips that we took were just amazing. Uh, getting up at two in the morning and driving up to Rincon, hoping to find surf. Um, sometimes we, walking to the [Hollister?] Ranch, we would park at Gaviota, walk four or five miles, hoping that there was some good surf at the Ranch.
2:02 There were many of those experiences that were. Talking about the early morning dawn patrol activity, uh, going to Mexico! I had a, a Morris Minor convertible, that we would put our surfboards in the back and drive all the way down to San Miguel, because we had a friend who had a trailer down at the San Miguel trailer park. And San Miguel was a great place to surf. So we would go there and play in Ensenada and then come back.
2:33 We were just we were so free in terms of what we were able to do and as I combined that freedom that I had in terms of choice later on, with the experiences of who I am as an individual, as a person. I felt that I needed to talk about the issues that I saw around the world that uh, of people that are not as privileged as I am, and so I always wanted to make a statement about something, so consequently my career in art has been pretty much about making statements about social issues.
3:12 SURFING U.S. MARINE-CONTROLLED TRESTLES
3:15 When I was writing for Wardy [Wardy Surfboards Laguna Beach], Wardy was a wonderful guy and he would give me surfboards, and I used to surf The Trestle a lot. The Trestle was, at that time, you hopped a fence and you paddled through the, through the lagoon, and you got to the beach, and you hoped there weren't any Marines around, and you jumped out into the water to start surfing. Well, I had, had one board confiscated, um, and I had to go in to get it back, and they had a kind of notation the Pat Sparkuhl has been busted, and I had to go get it because it was not my board, it was Wardy's board.
3:55 Well, I went back again, some time later, and I got my boardI got busted again. When I was in the jeep, I was holding this long surfboard, probably about a nine-nine or a nine-ten, and it was on my lap and I was sitting in the back of the jeep and we were driving to a trailer where they were going to document what they had just done in terms of picking me up, and we were driving under the railroad tracks and the tail-block of the surfboard hit one of the pilings and swung around and hit the [laughing] hit the driver in the back of the head, and he turned around and he I thought he was going to pull his pistol and shoot me. II was so apologetic! I was begging for forgiveness, I I did not mean to do that! I didn't do it on purpose! But anyway, they were very angry at me.
4:55 And then, I had to get my mother to take me to get the board, because this time, before I was able to get the surfboard, I had to go down to San Diego [laughs] this is crazy! I had to go to San Diego and go to a federal building, because they wanted to create a database on people that they suspected as being spies [laugh] 19cuz I was surfing at The Trestle. This is how ridiculous and how reactionary it was at the time.
5:29 END
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