Speaker 1: Pushkin Hey, Lost Hills listeners, it's Dana. I wanted to
Speaker 1: let you know that you can hear the entire new
Speaker 1: season of Lost Hill's ad free, along with other great
Speaker 1: binge listens by becoming a Pushkin Plus subscriber. Find Pushkin
Speaker 1: Plus on the Lost Hills Show page in Apple Podcasts
Speaker 1: or at pushkin dot fm slash Plus. It was the
Speaker 1: nineteen sixties, the surf media was just getting started, and
Speaker 1: Mickey Dora was it's darling.
Speaker 2: Although the phrase was not extant at the time, I
Speaker 2: think badass would do it. Yeah, not to be fucked
Speaker 2: with the reigning king as it were. I mean, he
Speaker 2: was acknowledged to be the best there was.
Speaker 1: This is Drew Campion. He started surfing in Malibu in
Speaker 1: the early sixties. He wrote for Surfer Magazine and later
Speaker 1: became the editor.
Speaker 2: So it was a conservative publication. And I had been
Speaker 2: living over the hill up and from Malibu in the
Speaker 2: San Fernando Valley and had been introduced to LSD and marijuana.
Speaker 2: I had tasted enough of each of them to have
Speaker 2: a bit of a wrinkle in my perception of the world,
Speaker 2: and so I brought that wrinkle to Surfer. I think
Speaker 2: and people seemed to respond to it.
Speaker 1: Right after he got hired, Drew got a plumb assignment
Speaker 1: to interview Mickey Dora. It was the fall of nineteen
Speaker 1: sixty nine. Mickey had made his reputation as an enigmatic misanthrope,
Speaker 1: a trickster. If you asked him to zig, he would zag.
Speaker 1: He was quote the angry young Man of surfing. One
Speaker 1: of the mags had printed a photo of him flipping
Speaker 1: off the camera. He was also quote mister Malibu, a
Speaker 1: singularly good surfer, singularly identified with the most iconic surf
Speaker 1: spot in the country. Mickey was hard to pin down.
Speaker 1: He rarely gave interviews. This would be a big get
Speaker 1: for the magazine.
Speaker 2: We're on the second floor. We could see down on
Speaker 2: the parking lot. Here comes Mickey and his van, you know,
Speaker 2: and somebody alerted everybody, Oh, Mickey's coming. So Mickey comes
Speaker 2: into the office and looks around, but there's too many
Speaker 2: people in the office, and he says, well, I don't
Speaker 2: really want to I really don't want to do an
Speaker 2: interview here. Can we go somewhere else? And I said, well,
Speaker 2: I live just down the road in San Clementy. We
Speaker 2: could meet there.
Speaker 1: Mickey agreed, Drew told him which exit, and they got
Speaker 1: in their separate cars. Mickey followed Drew on the freeway
Speaker 1: until they reached the exit. Drew got off, but Mickey
Speaker 1: didn't what the fuck?
Speaker 2: So I went straight ahead. At the bottom of the off,
Speaker 2: Ram got back on the freeway and basically chased him
Speaker 2: down the shore and said, Mickey, did you miss the exit?
Speaker 2: And he said, oh, yeah, well, and I had this
Speaker 2: distinct feeling that he hadn't really missed the exit, he
Speaker 2: just dodged the exit, like he dodged a lot of things.
Speaker 1: Finally, Drew got Mickey to his house and the interview
Speaker 1: could begin, but Mickey wasn't feeling it, so.
Speaker 2: He said, you know, whyn't you just give me the
Speaker 2: questions and I'll take him home. I'll do a proper job.
Speaker 2: I'll fill him out for you, and i'll get him
Speaker 2: right back to you. And we went back and forth
Speaker 2: in a little bit. Finally I agreed, he drove off
Speaker 2: with the questions.
Speaker 1: Micky wasn't going to trust some magazine writer with his image.
Speaker 1: His image was his most precious asset.
Speaker 2: So he went home and he started to riff on
Speaker 2: the answers You know, and I don't know. He could
Speaker 2: have smoked a bowl. I don't know.
Speaker 1: Question what is your relationship with drugs? Answer? It is
Speaker 1: possible to find pleasure in hallucinatory fantasies. I'm quite sure
Speaker 1: of it, but I've made my peace with reality. Either
Speaker 1: one one way or the other is going to solve
Speaker 1: the acute overpopulation problem.
Speaker 2: The answers were let's say, free form. They really didn't
Speaker 2: address the subjects directly. They're more like a philosophical treatise,
Speaker 2: divided up in the question and answer for him.
Speaker 1: Question why do you think bombs were planted in your car? Answer?
Speaker 1: Probably to blow me to bits. By the way, there's
Speaker 1: no evidence that anyone ever planted bombs in Mickey's car.
Speaker 2: One of the words that Mickey was often associated with
Speaker 2: behaviorally was something called misdirection.
Speaker 1: Question what changes have you witnessed during the course of
Speaker 1: your surfing career? Answer? First of all, I have no career.
Speaker 1: I was here before and I'll be hereafter. We are
Speaker 1: all soon to undergo the sport's demise in the immediate future.
Speaker 2: So he would do that in conversation. He would do
Speaker 2: that in his kind of approach to surfing and being
Speaker 2: in a crowd, how to avoid people and how to
Speaker 2: encounter them selectively, How to keep people confused and not
Speaker 2: be direct about anything.
Speaker 1: Question why do you feel this fall is going to
Speaker 1: occur in the near future? Answer? The advent of professionalism
Speaker 1: to the sport will be the final blow. These few
Speaker 1: Wall Street flesh merchants desire to unify surfing only to
Speaker 1: extract the wealth. A surfer should think carefully before selling
Speaker 1: his being to these people. Since he's signing his own
Speaker 1: death warrant as a personal entity.
Speaker 2: Something about the word conundrum kind of comes into my mind.
Speaker 1: Mickey was a profit of doom, and he was especially
Speaker 1: gloomy about the idea of surfing becoming professionalized, organized, commercialized.
Speaker 1: He was against anything that took surfing away from its
Speaker 1: simple origins, from that moment when it was just him
Speaker 1: alone in a wave at Malibu.
Speaker 2: So we ran that in Surfer magazine.
Speaker 1: I'm Dana Goodyear and this is Lost Hills, Episode seven, Misdirection,
Speaker 1: nineteen sixty seven. The Malibu Invitational. A beautiful day and
Speaker 1: the waves are perfect, four to six feet and clean.
Speaker 1: It's the best day at Malibu in years. All the
Speaker 1: biggest names in surfing are there, including of course, Mickey Dora.
Speaker 1: This is from a contemporary report quote the cat crept in.
Speaker 1: Dressed in his original tattered and torn trench coat. He
Speaker 1: smiled from under a week's growth of beard. This was
Speaker 1: his Malibu unquote.
Speaker 3: And I had to sit in the judges stand and record.
Speaker 3: The judge would count to a number, you know, black
Speaker 3: eight points, you know, and I was writing it down.
Speaker 3: When it came to the finals. Mickey was quite the
Speaker 3: young showman.
Speaker 1: This is Linda Kai. She was a teenager, a member
Speaker 1: of the Malibu Surf Association working in the judges booth.
Speaker 1: Everyone was watching Mickey and then he did something totally unexpected.
Speaker 3: He did a little bit of a pull my pants
Speaker 3: down and here you go, judges, what do you think
Speaker 3: of that?
Speaker 1: Mickey was, as they called it back then, hanging ba
Speaker 1: for bare ass.
Speaker 3: I don't know. The moon came out. I think people
Speaker 3: were shocked. You know, there wasn't like a uterrae or
Speaker 3: you wouldn't get stuff like that. Now people would go nuts.
Speaker 3: But you know, what are you gonna do? Blow the
Speaker 3: air horn or the air gun or what? Did you
Speaker 3: think you can't just qualify him? Yeah? Well, I was
Speaker 3: like everybody else. I was pretty stunned, you know, being
Speaker 3: the complex character that he was. Not me knowing this
Speaker 3: but now I do. It was probably appropriate because he
Speaker 3: hated commercialism. Although he wanted to be seen.
Speaker 1: Micky didn't like surf competitions. The whole idea of surfing
Speaker 1: going professional just bugged him. It was a threat. Didn't
Speaker 1: everybody already know who the rightful king of Malibu was.
Speaker 1: He didn't need pretenders to his throne. But he didn't
Speaker 1: set the contest out. He invalidated it and burnished his
Speaker 1: legend in the process, And fifty plus years later, the
Speaker 1: only thing anyone remembers about the nineteen sixty seven Malibu
Speaker 1: Invitational is Mickey's bear butt. There were so many Mickey tricks,
Speaker 1: so many things he's rumored to have done. Rumors he
Speaker 1: may well have started himself, stealing surfboards from the sets
Speaker 1: of the movies he worked on and reselling them, setting
Speaker 1: up an anti civil rights group at a UCLA protest
Speaker 1: in nineteen sixty five, calling up Surfer magazine pretending to
Speaker 1: be a rabbi, releasing three thousand moths into the projector
Speaker 1: at a screening of a Gregnole surf movie while wearing
Speaker 1: a Groucho Marx disguise, throwing his surf contest trophy in
Speaker 1: the trash at the Malibu Pit because he got third
Speaker 1: place when he thought he should have won. People say
Speaker 1: Gidget started the commercialization of surfing when the movie came
Speaker 1: out in nineteen fifty nine, and there's some truth to that,
Speaker 1: but ironically, the roots of the modern surf industry lie
Speaker 1: in the reaction to Gidget by surfers who are trying
Speaker 1: to counter the phony image of surfing portrayed in the
Speaker 1: Hollywood beach movies. These guys, these pure surfers, wanted to
Speaker 1: show the world that surfing was not some sacran tiney
Speaker 1: bopper romance that climaxes in a luau, but an epic
Speaker 1: male adventure around the world in search of waves. So
Speaker 1: they made documentary style surf movies and showed them in
Speaker 1: school gyms around the country.
Speaker 4: And one of those people is Severson, who in nineteen
Speaker 4: fifty nine decided to create a booklet to go with
Speaker 4: his latest movie, and that booklet became Surfer Magazine, which
Speaker 4: debuted in nineteen sixty.
Speaker 1: John Severson became a major figure in the dissemination of
Speaker 1: surf culture throughout the World surf historian Matt Warshaw that.
Speaker 4: To me, sort of when surf media takes a big
Speaker 4: sort of step forward. By nineteen sixty, you've got the
Speaker 4: beginnings of what would become the surf industry.
Speaker 1: Surfer magazine sold the surfing lifestyle literally with ads for
Speaker 1: boards and fins and reef booties and swim trunks. It
Speaker 1: became a vehicle for the nascent sport to present itself
Speaker 1: to the American public. The magazine loved Mickey the anti gidget.
Speaker 1: He was always good copy and in those early days
Speaker 1: there were just not that many surfers to choose from.
Speaker 1: Mickey likewise found Surfer Magazine to be a good medium
Speaker 1: for his message.
Speaker 4: It does kind of change everything. It certainly changed things
Speaker 4: for Mickey Dora because now he had a platform. It
Speaker 4: was just something that he could have a great time with.
Speaker 4: I think he just loved being sort of a provocateur
Speaker 4: right from the beginning, and things that he had been
Speaker 4: doing in the water was just sort of being aggressive
Speaker 4: and funny and he could now do in the pages
Speaker 4: of a magazine, and you know, and he played it
Speaker 4: to the hill.
Speaker 1: But there was an inherent conflict between Mickey Dora and
Speaker 1: the direction that surfing was going. This thing that had
Speaker 1: been in pursuit of bohemians and dropouts was being made
Speaker 1: over into a sport that was respectable and organized with rules.
Speaker 1: And it was happening right in the pages of Surfer magazine.
Speaker 4: When John Severson and others started to push this thing
Speaker 4: called the United States Surfing Association, whose mission was to
Speaker 4: clean up the sport and have contests, and a lot
Speaker 4: of people just thought, men, get out of here, let
Speaker 4: us just surf. Dora certainly felt that way.
Speaker 1: Mickey nominated himself to be the spokesman for surfing's rebel spirit,
Speaker 1: it's dark side. A decade after Gidget, it was clear
Speaker 1: there was money to be made in surfing, but how
Speaker 1: to do it without working too hard.
Speaker 5: What our generation wanted to do is figure out how
Speaker 5: you could make a living at it and still keep surfing.
Speaker 1: This is Jim Kempton, the president of the California Surf Museum.
Speaker 5: The result of the sixties was nobody wanted to work
Speaker 5: nine to five, nobody wanted to wear a suit and tie.
Speaker 5: Everybody wanted to.
Speaker 2: Live their own.
Speaker 5: Life and be cool, and at the same time, nobody
Speaker 5: wanted to be poor and so you know the trick.
Speaker 5: How do you do that? And the answer was, you
Speaker 5: figure out how to make the surfing industry work for you.
Speaker 5: And so for me, that was discovering that when I
Speaker 5: was going to school in Europe, I went to graduate
Speaker 5: school in England, and realizing that there was this huge
Speaker 5: market for anything related to California and surfing.
Speaker 1: Jim remembers the exact day he figured it out. He'd
Speaker 1: taken the train into London wearing a Hawaiian shirt he
Speaker 1: bought at a thrift store back in California. After spending
Speaker 1: the day in the city, he was hurrying back to
Speaker 1: the train station to catch the last train home.
Speaker 5: Rushing down you know, Sloan Square to get to Victoria,
Speaker 5: and this guy stops me and says, I'll give you
Speaker 5: fifty quid for that shirt. And I guess, you know,
Speaker 5: I made that look and he said, I'll give you
Speaker 5: fifty pounds sterling. I said, now, I know how much
Speaker 5: money it is, but what do you want my shirt for?
Speaker 5: He said, you're from California, aren't you, And I said yeah.
Speaker 5: I said you're a surfer, aren't you, And I said, yeah,
Speaker 5: I want that shirt. So you know I'm calculating, God,
Speaker 5: that's like three months in beerits, you know, for their shirt.
Speaker 5: But I'm thinking, God, I got to catch the train.
Speaker 5: I haven't got time to go find try to find
Speaker 5: a shirt. So I said, I gotta go. And the
Speaker 5: guy took the fifty pound note out of his wallet
Speaker 5: and he held it up and he said, I want
Speaker 5: that shirt. Take it off right now. And I rode
Speaker 5: home on that train for three and a half hours
Speaker 5: with their shirt on, and a couple of things became
Speaker 5: really clear to me at that stage. This thing about
Speaker 5: surfing is way bigger than I realized. Right, This wasn't
Speaker 5: just this little band of us that were living in
Speaker 5: France and living in Hawaii and living at Noose Ahead,
Speaker 5: you know, in Australia. This was something everybody knew about.
Speaker 5: They knew about us, they liked it, they were dying
Speaker 5: for it, right. And then I went back after I
Speaker 5: graduated and went to every thrift store from Santa Barbara
Speaker 5: to San Diego and bought every single Hawaiian shirt for
Speaker 5: fifty cents apiece, put him in a giant container and
Speaker 5: shipped him to Europe. And for the next five years,
Speaker 5: that's what I did. That's all I had to do
Speaker 5: to make a living.
Speaker 1: Jim's peers were doing the same thing, figuring out how
Speaker 1: to capitalize on the global surfing craze, how to export
Speaker 1: California surf products to the rest of the world. It
Speaker 1: was a team effort.
Speaker 5: So everyone wanted everyone else to be successful. I mean,
Speaker 5: that's kind of how the surf industry evolved in the
Speaker 5: surf world was all about cooperation. It was all about
Speaker 5: rooting for the other guys because if they could make
Speaker 5: it admant there was a market out there for you
Speaker 5: to exploit as well. Some people were showing movies, some
Speaker 5: people were selling Hawaiian shirts, some people were selling dope,
Speaker 5: some people were selling surfboards, some people were you were
Speaker 5: trying to figure out how to make clothes and so
Speaker 5: or wetsuits or whatever it might be. So everybody at
Speaker 5: that time we were kind of willing that industry into
Speaker 5: existence so that we could continue to do what we
Speaker 5: love doing and make a living in the real world.
Speaker 1: If you've ever gone anywhere in the world and seen
Speaker 1: people's eyes light up when they hear the word California,
Speaker 1: this is why. This is when the world became obsessed
Speaker 1: with California youth culture. Specifically the surfers. Mickey he started
Speaker 1: hawking boards branded with his nickname the Cat.
Speaker 6: Hey, there another California Gold sneak peek. You are bidding
Speaker 6: on one of the most collected surfboards of its era,
Speaker 6: of any era.
Speaker 1: This clip is from a vintage surfboard auction that was
Speaker 1: held in twenty twenty.
Speaker 6: Every serious collector has at least one of these beauties
Speaker 6: for you. This year we offer a rare to cat
Speaker 6: color workup all original nine foot eight inches nineteen sixty
Speaker 6: six to Cat model Greg Nole Mickeydora slot bottom with
Speaker 6: green and orange mind melt splash on bottom and deck.
Speaker 6: The sport has the original slip.
Speaker 1: The Cat boards, which were manufactured by Mickey's friend Greg Knowle,
Speaker 1: are still very coveted. That nineteen sixty six board sold
Speaker 1: for seventeen thousand dollars.
Speaker 7: You have to ride the wave and the way it's breaking.
Speaker 7: You know, you can't go left on a right in
Speaker 7: a way that goes to the right. And so he
Speaker 7: could make a rep by bitching about Paradise lost, but
Speaker 7: it's not as if he didn't at times profit from it.
Speaker 1: This is journalist David Renson again. He wrote the Mickey
Speaker 1: Dora biography all for a few perfect waves.
Speaker 7: I mean, it's very complex and how he was trapped
Speaker 7: by his own celebrity in his own story, and he
Speaker 7: couldn't appear to be selling out, so when he did
Speaker 7: sell out, he mocked people. Look at all the ads
Speaker 7: for the Cat surfboard with Greg Knowle. It's a classic.
Speaker 1: Ads for the Cat boards appeared all over the surf magazines.
Speaker 1: There's one where a square jawed cartoon American pilot says
Speaker 1: Da Cat is the greatest threat to our pure white,
Speaker 1: virgin sport. Now it's up to the CIA to crush him.
Speaker 1: There's a black puma wearing a crown and the promise
Speaker 1: that quote de cat will have its revenge someday. There's
Speaker 1: another one where Mickey says, quote, as you are obviously aware,
Speaker 1: most all of my ads are being constantly sabotaged, twisted, censored,
Speaker 1: and the dialogue rearranged. Da Cat has barely five lives left.
Speaker 1: The power mafia that is now controlling the sport is
Speaker 1: on my back as never before. This possibly could be
Speaker 1: the end. In one of the most famous and controversial ads,
Speaker 1: he creates a Da Cat's theory of evolution. It starts
Speaker 1: with a knuckle dragging kook and culminates with the quote
Speaker 1: peak of perfection, Homo sapiens Mickey Dora, It's easy.
Speaker 6: To understand and why this is one of the most
Speaker 6: collected sixties era longboard models, complete with stinging, sarcastic ad campaigns.
Speaker 1: In that twenty twenty Surfboard auction, Mickey's ad campaign is
Speaker 1: one of the board's biggest selling points.
Speaker 6: He also promoted his signature Greg Nole surfboards to cat
Speaker 6: model with full page Surf magazine ads in sixty six
Speaker 6: and sixty seven, including one with Dora crucified on a
Speaker 6: cross made of two surfboards. Dora's acts struck a nerve
Speaker 6: with magazine readers, many writing letters to the editor in praise,
Speaker 6: while others described him as a sick and ignorant person
Speaker 6: who should be banned from the beach.
Speaker 1: Apparently, the ad that showed Mickey wearing a Nazi iron
Speaker 1: cross was not as offensive as his joke that he
Speaker 1: was the Martyred Savior of surfing. But the ads worked, and.
Speaker 4: They're so good and so funny and so kind of,
Speaker 4: you know, middle finger to the surf establishment that you
Speaker 4: forget he's trying to sell surfboards, writer Matt If you
Speaker 4: just know him from that and from watching him in
Speaker 4: a few clips at Malibu or Sunset Beach, it's hard
Speaker 4: not to say this was the greatest surfer of all time,
Speaker 4: not just for the way he rode ways, but for
Speaker 4: the way he represents the sport. The rebelliousness and the
Speaker 4: anti establishment vibe he's putting out seems deserved. It's going
Speaker 4: toward nonsurfers and it's going to the surf establishment. It's funny.
Speaker 4: He's really bright, and he's just putting the best possible
Speaker 4: face on kind of trolling all these people that you
Speaker 4: would want to troll in the world. All of us
Speaker 4: do as surfers, even if we don't act out on it.
Speaker 4: He did it.
Speaker 1: Micky wasn't going to stop at selling a few thousand surfboards,
Speaker 1: though his sense of the possible was expanding. This was
Speaker 1: a man with expensive taste. Mickey's girlfriend Diane talked about
Speaker 1: how they used to dress up and crash Hollywood parties,
Speaker 1: then steal the credit cards of unsuspecting guests, but then
Speaker 1: Micky asked her to steal airline tickets. That was a
Speaker 1: line she wouldn't cross. Author David Renson.
Speaker 7: Again, if you don't want to work, and you don't
Speaker 7: have any money, and you want to put food on
Speaker 7: the table, and you can't steal from the supermarket too
Speaker 7: many times, or can't go to a Hollywood party and
Speaker 7: have your girlfriend Diane, you know, rifle through the pocketbooks
Speaker 7: and the the you know. Eventually you got to do
Speaker 7: stuff to make money. And I think as time went on,
Speaker 7: the scams got worse because you want to travel, so
Speaker 7: there somebody steals a ticket in printing machine, you know,
Speaker 7: and then they make some phony airline tickets. There's a
Speaker 7: prevailing ethos in the serf world and other worlds where
Speaker 7: artists feel they're getting ripped off by the man. Make
Speaker 7: you want it to be who he wanted to be,
Speaker 7: and he was willing to pay the price. But in
Speaker 7: order to be who he wanted to be, he had
Speaker 7: to be able to slip in and out of society.
Speaker 7: He had to put on a tuxedo, go to a party,
Speaker 7: rip some money off. He wanted the finer things.
Speaker 1: Specifically, he wanted a zebra rug, a new haircut, some
Speaker 1: items from Bullock's department store. Those checks bounced at PC
Speaker 1: lou An Antique store at the Mandarin Hotel on Connaught
Speaker 1: Road in Hong Kong. Mickey wanted a carved gilt panel
Speaker 1: from the Qing dynasty and an embroidered tiger scroll. But
Speaker 1: when the manager at PC Lou wrote to ask why
Speaker 1: he had stopped payment on the check, he responded on
Speaker 1: Quantas Air stationery that PanAm had lost his luggage. It
Speaker 1: will take a few weeks to straighten out my claim,
Speaker 1: he wrote to the manager. You must understand that I
Speaker 1: not only lost the wood carvings, but a great deal
Speaker 1: of expensive jewelry. So sorry for the embarrassment. Some of
Speaker 1: these things would come back to haunt Mickey, but for
Speaker 1: now he seemed able to sideslip any serious trouble. That's
Speaker 1: not to say the cops weren't getting suspicious. In the
Speaker 1: fall of nineteen sixty six, Mickey was arrested and taken
Speaker 1: to the Malibu station of the Los Angeles Sheriff's Department.
Speaker 1: The charge against him grand theft was dismissed, but he
Speaker 1: was definitely on the cops radar. At the station, Mickey
Speaker 1: had been booked under the name Mikil spring Chapin. He
Speaker 1: gave his occupation as occasional salesman for Greg Nole Surfboards.
Speaker 1: The answer to who to notify in case of illness
Speaker 1: was no one, but that was about to change. Linda Kai,
Speaker 1: who witnessed Mickey Dora's iconic mooning of the judges at Malibu,
Speaker 1: was and as a surfer girl.
Speaker 3: Okay, well, I started in North Hollywood, California, and my
Speaker 3: neighbor across the street was twelve years old. And every
Speaker 3: morning I'd see him drive away and his Cadillac convertible
Speaker 3: with this huge thing sticking out of the back. I
Speaker 3: thought it was some kind of a ski, a water ski,
Speaker 3: you know, I didn't know what surfing was. He showed
Speaker 3: it to me and he says, next weekend, I'm going
Speaker 3: to bring you down. And I said, okay. And this
Speaker 3: was in February, in the wintertime, and in February, Malibu's
Speaker 3: back then there was nothing, you know, there's no waves.
Speaker 3: It was cold, you know, we don't have wetsuits then.
Speaker 3: And I went with them and he put me out
Speaker 3: on her twelve foot long board and pushed me into
Speaker 3: a very tiny one foot wave and I loved it.
Speaker 3: I said, this is the greatest thing ever.
Speaker 1: Linda started surfing in nineteen sixty two, and she was hooked.
Speaker 3: I got involved in the Malibu Surfing Association, and then
Speaker 3: I was also reading a lot of surfer magazines, and
Speaker 3: I was noticing that there were characters in these things,
Speaker 3: you know, and some of them were like famous for
Speaker 3: I mean famous, like there it was at Malibu, you know,
Speaker 3: there was characters that I knew.
Speaker 1: And is that how you found out about Mickey with
Speaker 1: the magazine?
Speaker 3: Yes, well that was kind of a start. I've seen
Speaker 3: him on the beach, but I didn't put two and
Speaker 3: two together until we start talking at the meetings in
Speaker 3: Malibu meetings, and then there was contests, and then you
Speaker 3: start to see more of the guys.
Speaker 1: Linda was pretty hardcore. After high school, she got a
Speaker 1: VW van and lived out of it at the beach.
Speaker 1: She surfed all the time. In the winter of nineteen
Speaker 1: seventy one, she was surfing at State Beach in Santa
Speaker 1: Monica when she met Mickey Dora for real for the
Speaker 1: first time.
Speaker 3: I happened to come out of the ocean after a surf,
Speaker 3: and he happened to be out there too, and I
Speaker 3: was getting in my van sitting watching and he comes
Speaker 3: out of the water and he walked up to my
Speaker 3: van and you know, kind of pulls his wetsuit down
Speaker 3: over his shoulders, you know, and all this tan and
Speaker 3: this beauty and glistening and goes. Oh, he says, so
Speaker 3: should go out sometimes, have something to eat, have to dinner. Oh.
Speaker 3: I almost fell off the seat.
Speaker 1: Linda was starstruck. She's been fascinated with Mickey for years,
Speaker 1: nursing a crush that was fueled by everything she read
Speaker 1: about him in the surf magazines and frequent sightings at
Speaker 1: the beach. She was twenty two, he was thirty seven.
Speaker 1: She was totally smitten. So your relationship starts and you're
Speaker 1: living in your van at the beach and he's living.
Speaker 3: In this little apartment in Brentwood.
Speaker 1: And you're kind of stopping by and parking your van
Speaker 1: out front.
Speaker 3: Sometimes gives me the key, and what are you seeing there?
Speaker 3: It was like the Cosba in Morocco. There was stuff
Speaker 3: from everywhere. There was tiger skins on the floor, there
Speaker 3: was big kind of bells, and he had tapestries hanging
Speaker 3: from the ceilings and bear skin rugs on the bed
Speaker 3: and everything was just like from somewhere else. And he
Speaker 3: didn't go to Pier one.
Speaker 1: It was a display of worldliness, and Linda was impressed.
Speaker 3: In his bedroom clicked across the top of the ceiling
Speaker 3: where all these little white things dangling, and he said, Linda,
Speaker 3: do you know what those are? And I said, I
Speaker 3: have no idea. They were tickets. Now, back in those days,
Speaker 3: airline tickets came in like a carbon copied layer of
Speaker 3: maybe before pieces, depending on where you went. So he
Speaker 3: had probably thirty of them taped up going up to
Speaker 3: one of his lamps in the ceiling, and I was like, wow,
Speaker 3: this is interesting. You know, everything in there was interesting.
Speaker 1: Did he seem like a wealthy guy to you?
Speaker 3: After I saw the tickets and the way he was living,
Speaker 3: and I thought there must be some way to do
Speaker 3: this because he wasn't working, you know. I mean he
Speaker 3: was at the beach all the time and not working
Speaker 3: and be able to travel. And I was like, okay,
Speaker 3: you know, must have some money to do all this.
Speaker 1: Mickey implied that he was independently wealthy with investments to
Speaker 1: look after. He was always talking about the price of
Speaker 1: gold and.
Speaker 3: Everything had to stop because he had to listen to
Speaker 3: reports when the stock market came on the radio, and
Speaker 3: he used to get the Myers Letter all the time.
Speaker 3: The Myers was like he was a financial genius of
Speaker 3: what to do with stocks and things like that. But
Speaker 3: there everything went on hold. When when when the financial
Speaker 3: market came on the radio?
Speaker 1: When did you have your first inkling that he was
Speaker 1: running some scams in California.
Speaker 3: I don't know about if he was running them or not,
Speaker 3: but he was quite interested. He had a book called
Speaker 3: Credit Cardsmanship, and I had to flick through that. And
Speaker 3: then he had one called Fake, which was a Hungarian
Speaker 3: artist who did perfect replicas of the great artists and
Speaker 3: sold the mess the deal. And Mickey was quite interested
Speaker 3: in this, you know, he liked the way there was
Speaker 3: a twist, you know of things.
Speaker 1: Linda was skinny, and Mickey taught her how to collect benefits.
Speaker 1: From this date, she went to the welfare office with
Speaker 1: dirt smudged on her face and pretended to be strung
Speaker 1: out on LSD. She came away with food stamps and
Speaker 1: a check for twenty five dollars. She liked a twist too.
Speaker 1: Linda and Mickey had a connection. They both lived to surf,
Speaker 1: and they both had an appetite for risk. What was
Speaker 1: your love for Mickey?
Speaker 3: Like deep big. You said to look at him, and
Speaker 3: we were.
Speaker 1: Like, oh, so it's chemical.
Speaker 3: It was just like a yeah, it's pretty heavy and dumb.
Speaker 3: It was scary too, you know. It was like jumping
Speaker 3: off of a mountain and not knowing what's underneath.
Speaker 1: Next time on Lost Hills.
Speaker 3: Well, we're gonna knock on the door. I see this
Speaker 3: car drive up and I'm like, who the hell's up?
Speaker 3: You know, and I see this blonde comountains dawn. I said, Mickey,
Speaker 3: don's here. He goes what he had a rifle, of course,
Speaker 3: and he had it behind the door. He picks it
Speaker 3: up and just get rid of them, he said, get
Speaker 3: them out of here.
Speaker 1: That's next in episode eight aka Fugitive. Lost Hills is
Speaker 1: written and reported by Me Dana Goodyear. It's created by
Speaker 1: me and Benadere and produced by Western Sound and Pushkin Industries.
Speaker 1: Subscribe to Pushkin Plus and you can binge the entire
Speaker 1: season right now ad free. Find Pushkin Plus on the
Speaker 1: Lost Hills show page in Apple Podcasts, or at pushkin
Speaker 1: dot fm, slash plus