Speaker 1: Pushkin. Hey, Lost Tails listeners, it's Dana. I wanted to
Speaker 1: let you know that you can hear the entire new
Speaker 1: season of Lost Hills 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.
Speaker 2: So the board that we're going to look at is
Speaker 2: right over here that I'm going to take you over to,
Speaker 2: but it's from the American Ladder Company with the Los
Speaker 2: Angeles Ladder Company. We'll see in a moment.
Speaker 1: And I'm at the California Surf Museum in Oceanside with
Speaker 1: jim Kempton. He's the museum president. It's a small museum
Speaker 1: stuffed literally to the rafters withfboards. The collection includes the
Speaker 1: one hundred and ten pound redwood planks that were used
Speaker 1: in the early days by people like Mickey Door's Stepdad
Speaker 1: Guard Chapin, the fiberglass and foam longboards that became popular
Speaker 1: after World War Two, and the tiny light performance shortboards
Speaker 1: many pros used today. They even have the surfboard the
Speaker 1: professional surfer Bethany Hamilton was riding when she lost her
Speaker 1: arm to a shark attack when she was thirteen. It
Speaker 1: has a bite out of it. But right now I'm
Speaker 1: looking at one of the first commercially manufactured and mass
Speaker 1: produced surfboards in America, which came out in the nineteen thirties.
Speaker 1: It's a thing of beauty varnished redwood with a balsa
Speaker 1: wood stringer. It evokes an old woody station wagon crossed
Speaker 1: with a totem pole.
Speaker 2: And at the very bottom of those boards it was
Speaker 2: where they put the swastika.
Speaker 1: The first mass produced surfboards in America had swastikas on that.
Speaker 1: They were called, wait for it, swastika boards. That's right,
Speaker 1: America's original surf brand is associated with what is now
Speaker 1: a universal symbol of white supremacy and hate right there.
Speaker 1: And was it red or black or.
Speaker 2: It was it was painted, It was generally black. And
Speaker 2: just is that actually carved on them? So they were Yeah.
Speaker 1: Swastika boards were made in la by a company that
Speaker 1: built prefab homes and they were a huge hit.
Speaker 2: They made all kinds of wooden products like ladders, they
Speaker 2: and they made these surfboards and they put the swastkas
Speaker 2: on them for reasons unbeknown standing. One I think now.
Speaker 1: A flyer advertising the boards shows a muscular, fair haired
Speaker 1: man sliding down the face of a wave, a giant
Speaker 1: swastika in the background. Enjoy the thrill of a swastika
Speaker 1: is the slogan.
Speaker 2: The swastika has a very interesting story, both in surfing
Speaker 2: in outside of it. It's an incredibly iconic symbol, like
Speaker 2: the cross, or the crescent or so many others, and
Speaker 2: it wasn't until the Nazis adopted it that anything was
Speaker 2: thought of it. But as soon as Hitler actually invaded Poland,
Speaker 2: they stopped making them.
Speaker 1: In nineteen thirty eight, the board was renamed the Ykiki Model.
Speaker 1: Nineteen thirty eight was a momentous year for Hitler's campaign
Speaker 1: in Europe. It was the year of Anglis, the German
Speaker 1: Army's annexation of Austria and Krystal knocked a devastating pogrom
Speaker 1: against Jews in Germany, Austria and German occupied Czechoslovakia. The
Speaker 1: Ykiki model board didn't come with the swastika on it.
Speaker 1: I happened to think nineteen thirty eight is a little
Speaker 1: late to have dropped the swastika branding. All the way
Speaker 1: back in the nineteen twenties, Hitler had published main Komp
Speaker 1: with the swastika on the cover, describing it as a
Speaker 1: symbol of Aryan victory. But in California, swastika boards were
Speaker 1: in circulation for as long as the boards lasted, surfers
Speaker 1: didn't seem to be ashamed of them. They cherished them.
Speaker 1: Guard Chapin Mickey's stepdad, was into making his own surfboards,
Speaker 1: and when Micky got into surfing, Guard made one for him,
Speaker 1: shaving down an old swastika board. This would have been
Speaker 1: around nineteen fifty, when the atrocities committed by the Nazis
Speaker 1: under the sign of the swastika were well known to
Speaker 1: the entire world. The question was did surfers even care
Speaker 1: or did that symbol gain cachet in some of their minds.
Speaker 1: I don't know if Mickey's swastika board had an actual
Speaker 1: swastika on It doesn't really matter though, Well, it didn't
Speaker 1: matter to Mickey because way way later Mickey would ride
Speaker 1: an up to date custom fiberglass board with a big
Speaker 1: old swastika on the underside. The existence of the swastika
Speaker 1: model boards is a kind of screen that surfers conduct
Speaker 1: behind Nazi symbols. They can say are part of surf history,
Speaker 1: but all that feels like a diversion from the real story,
Speaker 1: which is that America's shameful history of exclusion and racial
Speaker 1: policing continues to this day on beaches and in coastal
Speaker 1: communities in the country's most liberal state. Mickey Dora didn't
Speaker 1: invent this bigotry, but he made it a style. He
Speaker 1: is the California folk hero and avatar of youth culture
Speaker 1: that made hate cool. I'm Dana Goodyear and this is
Speaker 1: Lost Hills episode five, surf Nazi.
Speaker 3: My name is Dan Duwayne and I'm a writer and
Speaker 3: surfer living in San Francisco.
Speaker 1: And how did you get into the surfing.
Speaker 3: I had a cool uncle in southern California who was
Speaker 3: a great surfer, very dedicated surfer. So I kind of
Speaker 3: grew up wanting to be like my cool uncle. And
Speaker 3: I maybe also you know, getting tacit implicit reassurance from
Speaker 3: him that surfing could be mine if I wanted it
Speaker 3: to be.
Speaker 1: Deciding to pick up surfing should be the simplest thing
Speaker 1: in the world. You get a board, go to the beach,
Speaker 1: you mess around, you figure it out. In California, by law, anyway,
Speaker 1: all the beaches are free and open to the public.
Speaker 1: But it does doesn't always turn out to be so simple.
Speaker 1: It wasn't for Dan.
Speaker 3: I was really an outsider to the culture because I
Speaker 3: was a Berkeley kid, you know, I hadn't grown up
Speaker 3: in San Clementy or Malibu or San Diego. And when
Speaker 3: I started surfing a lot, like at age twenty one
Speaker 3: in Santa Cruz, the sort of you know, local hierarchy
Speaker 3: who gets to get a wave, who doesn't was more intense,
Speaker 3: and I was really an outsider, and I felt that
Speaker 3: pretty acutely, you know. I had to kind of fight
Speaker 3: my way in.
Speaker 1: Like happens to a lot of people who fall in
Speaker 1: love with surfing. Dan got a little obsessed. He wanted
Speaker 1: to learn about the history of the sport, specifically in California.
Speaker 1: He went down a rabbit hole of online photos, books,
Speaker 1: and early surf movies, and that led him straight to Mickey.
Speaker 3: You can't really immerse yourself in a self education project
Speaker 3: about surf culture without at some point bumping into stories
Speaker 3: of Mickey Dora in the early days of Malibu, and
Speaker 3: that the heart of it all was this guy, Mickey
Speaker 3: Dora was this incredibly beautiful surfer, I mean a beautiful man.
Speaker 3: So a very good looking guy, very very handsome guy,
Speaker 3: and to be honest, enviably handsome in a ways a
Speaker 3: lot of ways I wished I looked.
Speaker 4: You know.
Speaker 3: He had this beautiful, deep tan and this perfect kind
Speaker 3: of athletic build, and the way he surfed was just
Speaker 3: gorgeous and catlike. And he kind of emerges as really
Speaker 3: the central culture hero, I would say, of California surfing.
Speaker 3: And there were aspects of his identity that I never
Speaker 3: really totally loved to begin with. Like, he was a
Speaker 3: pretty wealthy kid, so he you know, he drove beautiful
Speaker 3: cars and wore beautiful clothes and had a kind of
Speaker 3: surly localism. He's credited by many with being the sort
Speaker 3: of originator of localism.
Speaker 1: This was what Dan encountered when he was first getting
Speaker 1: into surfing localism. Localism is a phenomenon throughout surfing. It's
Speaker 1: basically that some people, the self nominated locals, treat strangers
Speaker 1: with hostility because those people are likely to get in
Speaker 1: the way.
Speaker 3: At the heart of surf culture, there is this inescapable problem,
Speaker 3: which is waves are a limited resource. There aren't an
Speaker 3: endless number of them, and good waves that break in
Speaker 3: the right place at a good spot on that rare
Speaker 3: day when the perfect swell and tide and wind all
Speaker 3: line up. I mean, there might be a lot, but
Speaker 3: there just is not an infinite number of them. So
Speaker 3: if you live near them, and you've built your whole
Speaker 3: kind of life and happiness around the good feeling they
Speaker 3: give you, and you've dedicated your childhood and you adolescence
Speaker 3: to it, and you've spent all this time and emotional
Speaker 3: energy fighting your way into the local pack and the
Speaker 3: hierarchy and all that, those waves are really precious. They're
Speaker 3: really important gems in your life. And to have some
Speaker 3: random st strangers just show up and paddle out and
Speaker 3: get in your way and take that wave that was
Speaker 3: going to be your set wave, it's not great. To
Speaker 3: have a thousand of them show up and do that
Speaker 3: is horrible. So that's kind of the fundamental driver I
Speaker 3: think of localism in surfing and of secrecy, right, don't
Speaker 3: tell anybody about the break, don't tell anybody where we're going.
Speaker 1: There have been many ugly instances of locals defending their
Speaker 1: turf with actual violence for decades in Pallas Verdes, down
Speaker 1: the coast from Malibu. The local Bay Boys harassed outsiders
Speaker 1: so badly throwing rocks at them from the cliffs above,
Speaker 1: mocking them with blackface, that victims sued in federal court.
Speaker 1: The case was dismissed, though a state court did ban
Speaker 1: twelve of the Bay Boys from the surf break for
Speaker 1: a year. Then, just a few months ago, in March
Speaker 1: of twenty twenty three, an appeals court judge offered an
Speaker 1: opinion suggesting that localism as it was practiced in palace
Speaker 1: Vera days is a violation of a state law known
Speaker 1: as the Coastal Act, which ensures equal access to the coast.
Speaker 1: So this is an issue that has not gone away.
Speaker 3: There used to be stories about, you know, guys would
Speaker 3: get out of the water and find their car tires
Speaker 3: slashed and surf wax rubbed all over the windshield. Or
Speaker 3: I think I remember hearing once a story about a
Speaker 3: horse's head cut off, or a cow's head or something
Speaker 3: cut off and put in their driver's seat. I did once,
Speaker 3: a long time ago, do a surf travel story about
Speaker 3: a remote, somewhat secret surf spot in far northern California
Speaker 3: that got me like actual death threats emailed to me,
Speaker 3: and it was sort of an amazing thing because I
Speaker 3: didn't say what the place was called, and I didn't
Speaker 3: say where. I put it in an eighty mile stretch
Speaker 3: of the northern California coast. That was as precise as
Speaker 3: I got. And I got and some guy up there
Speaker 3: went nuts and you know, said I'm coming for your family,
Speaker 3: and you know, I don't know it. It was upsetting
Speaker 3: for a while.
Speaker 1: That is extreme.
Speaker 3: It was pretty extreme.
Speaker 4: Yeah.
Speaker 1: Mickey Dora claimed that he invented localism and at Malibu
Speaker 1: he was famous for pushing people off waves.
Speaker 2: He glamorized the idea of being aggressive in pushing other
Speaker 2: people out of the way on a wave and the
Speaker 2: idea that the wave that I take off on belongs
Speaker 2: to me, and that became codified.
Speaker 1: This is Jim Kempton from the California Surf Museum. Again,
Speaker 1: Jim knew Mickey in his prime.
Speaker 2: And that created a sense that was bound to be
Speaker 2: a conflict. And so you wouldn't necessarily say that Mickey
Speaker 2: invented that or that he created the environment, but he
Speaker 2: definitely glamorized it, and he definitely popularized the idea of
Speaker 2: that and that whether they knew it or not that
Speaker 2: frickled down in every place there was.
Speaker 1: Localism isn't always racist, but often the factors that make
Speaker 1: you an insider or an outsider break cleanly across racial lines.
Speaker 1: Do you live by the coast, did you go to
Speaker 1: school with the people in the water. Did you grow
Speaker 1: up on this beach? Or are you not from around
Speaker 1: here on the beach? In Malibu, Mickey was always spoiling
Speaker 1: for a fight as he patrolled the waves he thought
Speaker 1: belonged to him. He used the symbols and the signs
Speaker 1: and the language of the most destructive hate group in
Speaker 1: modern history. Mickey, in spite of being an immigrant himself
Speaker 1: and having a dad with a heavy accent, leaned hard
Speaker 1: into surf break xenophobia. In a piece he wrote for
Speaker 1: Surfer Magazine in nineteen sixty seven, he described Malibu as
Speaker 1: a place taken over by quote kooks of all colors, fags, finkx,
Speaker 1: and a thousand other social deviations unquote. In a nineteen
Speaker 1: ninety eight interview in Surfer's Journal, Nat Young, a famous
Speaker 1: Australian surfer of the day who knew Mickey well, said quote,
Speaker 1: He's a supreme racist, always has been. When I was younger.
Speaker 1: I believed it was all just in mirth, that he
Speaker 1: was just jivant at all. But no, he believes absolutely
Speaker 1: in white supremacy end quote. At some point Mickey started
Speaker 1: showing up to the beach in an s S leather
Speaker 1: trench coat. That's the uniform of the Nazi racial elite
Speaker 1: who controlled the concentration camps. And when Mickey described his
Speaker 1: efforts to control the wave at Malibu, he didn't hold back.
Speaker 1: This is from a nineteen sixty three interview titled The
Speaker 1: Angry young Man of Surfing, which ran in Surfguide.
Speaker 5: Quote.
Speaker 1: These guys take off in front of me, and they're
Speaker 1: scared to death. They know I'm behind them, but they
Speaker 1: never know what I'll do next. They run up and
Speaker 1: put their feet on the nose, and I give them
Speaker 1: a little nudge in the tailblock. They start to corkscrew.
Speaker 1: It never fails. I messerschmidt them, I dogfight them, I
Speaker 1: go behind and below them, and they're so out of
Speaker 1: control they simply crack up. Unquote. This calls for some unpacking.
Speaker 1: To Mickey, wave enforcement was a military operation, a dog
Speaker 1: fight out of World War Two, only he puts himself
Speaker 1: on the side of the nazis. A mezser Schmidt is
Speaker 1: a German fighter plane, one that was built using slave
Speaker 1: labor in concentration camps. That's what Mickey imagines who surfboard
Speaker 1: to be. So let's talk about swastikas. Yeah, this is
Speaker 1: the writer Dan Dwayne Again. I asked him when he
Speaker 1: first remembers seeing Nazi imagery associated with surfing.
Speaker 3: I must have been twenty one years old. Let's say
Speaker 3: one day I was at a break in Santa Cruz
Speaker 3: called Pleasure Point right in town, beautiful Beautiful Point break,
Speaker 3: and there was a swastika spray painted on a sea
Speaker 3: wall where I was about to walk down to the beach.
Speaker 3: You know, I think it said something like kooks go home.
Speaker 3: At the time, I read it as Wow, there's like
Speaker 3: some hardcore nasty locals around here who don't want me,
Speaker 3: people like me.
Speaker 2: To paddle out.
Speaker 3: But it was sort of later over the years that
Speaker 3: I started to see more swastika imagery in surf culture
Speaker 3: that I kept sort of thinking back to and remembering
Speaker 3: that swastika that I'd seen and wondering how to make
Speaker 3: sense of it and what did it mean.
Speaker 1: Surf culture has been a wash in Nazi symbols from
Speaker 1: the moment it went mainstream. Swastikas, iron crosses, SS uniforms,
Speaker 1: they're all over the place in American surf history. In
Speaker 1: the late fifties and early sixties, a five part surf
Speaker 1: documentary called Search for Surf came out. Search for Surf
Speaker 1: includes a segment shot at Wind and Sea Beach down
Speaker 1: the coast from Malibu in La Joya. In nineteen fifty nine,
Speaker 1: the year the Gidget movie came out, young men in
Speaker 1: Nazi uniforms ride to Boggins down a storm drain to
Speaker 1: the beach. They're greeted by a cheering crowd of shirtless
Speaker 1: teenagers waving swastika flags. The scene is absurd, but that
Speaker 1: doesn't make it any less appalling. The movie was directed
Speaker 1: by Greg Nol, a big wave surfer who was also
Speaker 1: a good friend of Mickey's.
Speaker 6: Greg famously talked about all of the stuff that surfers
Speaker 6: did in the fifties, especially it was designed with nothing
Speaker 6: more than to piss people off.
Speaker 1: Surf historian Matt Warshaw, So.
Speaker 7: He said, well, you know, you'd paint a swastik on
Speaker 7: your car and would piss people off. So you'd paint
Speaker 7: two swastikas on the car, one on each side, and
Speaker 7: for him that was on the same level as going
Speaker 7: to school as he did in a trench coat with
Speaker 7: each pocket filled with rotten fish. He would just sit
Speaker 7: there until someone said, what does that smell? And it
Speaker 7: was just him trying to piss people off. It was
Speaker 7: kids from fourteen to eighteen, mostly doing anything they could
Speaker 7: to get a rise out of the squares.
Speaker 1: Then there's the craze in the nineteen sixties where southern
Speaker 1: California surfers were wearing Nazi stormtrooper helmets while surfing. I
Speaker 1: don't think they were worried about concussions. I don't really
Speaker 1: know what they were doing. I do know that it's
Speaker 1: hard for the surf community to explain, so they end
Speaker 1: up saying a bunch of different things, none of which
Speaker 1: makes sense. It was to piss off the older general,
Speaker 1: to be a rebel.
Speaker 4: I saw it, but I didn't really realize the ramifications
Speaker 4: of it.
Speaker 2: You know, when you're a kid, it's.
Speaker 4: Just part of their kind of having an attitude, you know, rebel.
Speaker 1: Or something, and you know it was a celebration of
Speaker 1: the victory over the Nazis.
Speaker 8: The people from the war came home with these emblems
Speaker 8: and drawings and stuff, and they brought it home as
Speaker 8: souvenirs from having fought in.
Speaker 9: World War Two.
Speaker 1: It was a cool ancient symbol.
Speaker 6: I do know that, Like, that's an ancient symbol, you
Speaker 6: know that started in Egypt, and you know the American
Speaker 6: Indians used it widely, you know, and they called it
Speaker 6: the tumbling logs.
Speaker 1: You know, they didn't know what they were doing.
Speaker 2: There's an enormous ignorance of any of the of the
Speaker 2: actual representations that those are what they stand for.
Speaker 1: But Mickey was supposedly so smart and so worldly, he
Speaker 1: definitely knew the implications of a swastika. Anti Semitism was
Speaker 1: a style, and Mickey helped set the trend. He was
Speaker 1: the guy surfer magazine called Mister Malibu, Everyone's idol, and
Speaker 1: he was wearing an SS leather trench coat on the beach.
Speaker 1: What was Mickey up to with his SS leather trench
Speaker 1: coat and his swastikas?
Speaker 2: So I think they were attention getters.
Speaker 1: Surf Museum president Jim Kempton.
Speaker 2: Mickey was almost always in costume. Truly, it was rare
Speaker 2: for Mickey not to be like rock stars are why
Speaker 2: do rock stars wear you know, sequins and fringe and
Speaker 2: leather pants because they're rock stars, right, It's to indicate
Speaker 2: to other people that I am not just a regular guy,
Speaker 2: I'm someone.
Speaker 1: Well into the eighties, agrosurfers called themselves surf Nazis, and yes,
Speaker 1: these symbols have also been used by other rebellious cultures,
Speaker 1: biker gangs, British punk rockers. When it comes to surf culture,
Speaker 1: what everyone, even Kathy Kohner Zuckerman, will tell you is no,
Speaker 1: it isn't what you think. No one who loves surfing
Speaker 1: wants all the Nazi references to mean anything. One thing
Speaker 1: you hear a lot from swastika apologists is that it
Speaker 1: was a different time. It was it was a time
Speaker 1: that was much closer to the horrors of the Holocaust.
Speaker 1: Writer Dan Dwayne.
Speaker 3: There has been this argument that the early swastikas didn't
Speaker 3: mean fascist sympathy, that they were just you know, symbols
Speaker 3: of rebellion, that they were just, you know, whatever the
Speaker 3: enemy is wearing, that's what I want to wear because
Speaker 3: then I'm like a bad dude.
Speaker 4: Or that.
Speaker 3: In the early movies with the you know, with the
Speaker 3: Gestapo uniforms, or whatever it was, the SS uniforms that
Speaker 3: it's a form of prank and play and culture play.
Speaker 3: And I'm not ready to say that that's one hundred
Speaker 3: percent wrong. I'm just not ready to say that it's
Speaker 3: one hundred percent right either. There's just too much in
Speaker 3: the air at the time. It's too close in historical
Speaker 3: time to you know, that movie is made in the
Speaker 3: fifties with Auschwitz, what is it, you know, ten years before.
Speaker 3: I mean, Auschwitz is more recent to that movie than
Speaker 3: nine to eleven is to us. It's it's not you know,
Speaker 3: it's not ancient history.
Speaker 1: For Dan. It's a quick slide from the nastiness Mickey
Speaker 1: Dora put into the world to the nastiness that still
Speaker 1: exists in certain pockets of surf culture.
Speaker 3: So now we've got like a rich kid in fancy
Speaker 3: sunglasses and fancy clothes and a fancy sports car, passing
Speaker 3: bad checks and putting swastikas on his bored and being
Speaker 3: a jerk to outsiders because they don't know how to surf,
Speaker 3: and spewing all this vile stuff. I don't know, it
Speaker 3: just kind of started to turn, you know, green and
Speaker 3: gross inside and feel to me like there's something wrong
Speaker 3: with this, like this is this guy?
Speaker 4: I don't know?
Speaker 3: Why? Is this creep? Our big culture hero?
Speaker 1: In public, Mickey was slippery about his identity, even as
Speaker 1: he wore the iron cross and the SS trench and
Speaker 1: rode the swastikaboard. He referred to himself as a quote
Speaker 1: wandering Rabbi. One of his closest friends at the end
Speaker 1: of his life told me he had always assumed Mickey
Speaker 1: was part Jewish on his Hungarian side. It's possible the
Speaker 1: name Dora does come up in a couple of Holocaust
Speaker 1: memorial records from Budapest, Rush, but Mickey's half sister, Pauline,
Speaker 1: who didn't want to be interviewed, wrote in an email
Speaker 1: that she had never heard that the family was Jewish.
Speaker 1: I suppose I wanted it to be true because it
Speaker 1: would give a different texture to some of Mickey's behavior.
Speaker 1: Miklos Dora, Mickey's father, worked for the baron a Rothschild
Speaker 1: starting in the mid sixties. The Rothschilds are one of
Speaker 1: the oldest Jewish families in Europe, the first unconverted Jews
Speaker 1: to be inducted into the House of Lords. They're also
Speaker 1: at the center of just about every antisemitic conspiracy theory
Speaker 1: you can think of in some corners of the Internet.
Speaker 1: They're responsible for World War two and nine to eleven.
Speaker 1: Mickey loved this connection to the aristocracy. When he had
Speaker 1: the chance, he stole some letterhead from the baron's desk
Speaker 1: and gleefully used it to conduct his correspondence. Micky also
Speaker 1: embraced the idea that he had a Romani background, calling
Speaker 1: himself the Gipsy Cavalier. Like the Jews, the Roma were
Speaker 1: considered quote racially inferior and murdered by the Nazis. But
Speaker 1: when he had his own surfboard line, the cat made
Speaker 1: by Greg Knowle of cute teen Nazis on the Beach Fame,
Speaker 1: Mickey dressed up in his SS leather trench and sported
Speaker 1: a monogrammed iron cross for the advertising campaign. Was the
Speaker 1: Nazi stick? Just mockery of dumb surfers for their ignorance
Speaker 1: by someone who conceivably might have been Jewish or Romani,
Speaker 1: someone who, if he had grown up in Hungary and
Speaker 1: not Los Angeles, might have suffered at the hands of
Speaker 1: the Nazis. How complicated a mind game was Mickey playing
Speaker 1: ic is cool?
Speaker 9: It's a Tudor house in the middle of.
Speaker 1: Southern California subdivision Land.
Speaker 9: I see an old mustard yellow VW van that looks
Speaker 9: like it's in mint condition.
Speaker 1: Hi, I'm Dana. Thank you for letting us come over.
Speaker 1: I'm in Riverside, California, at the home of a guy
Speaker 1: I've been told new Mickey better than just about anyone else.
Speaker 4: I am Rick Peterson.
Speaker 1: What do you do for work?
Speaker 4: Uh? Nothing, I'm retired your painter. I thought, yeah, I
Speaker 4: was a professional artist for like three decades, and you know,
Speaker 4: has shows all over over Europe and here, and you know,
Speaker 4: but it got too nasty only about twenty years ago.
Speaker 4: I pretty much burned out on it.
Speaker 1: Rick met Mickey at Malibu in the late fifties or
Speaker 1: early sixties. Mickey was about thirteen years older, but they
Speaker 1: shared a worldview. They were the athletes the beach, talking
Speaker 1: about art and fine wine.
Speaker 4: He was my best male friend, just if nothing else,
Speaker 4: I mean, long term. My god, I never knew anybody
Speaker 4: that long.
Speaker 1: Rick is a bit of a recluse, and he says
Speaker 1: he's very reluctant to give an interview about Mickey. It
Speaker 1: feels disloyal. He keeps looking up at the sky, cringing,
Speaker 1: almost apologizing to Mickey for talking about him without his permission.
Speaker 4: My interest in doing this really is for you know,
Speaker 4: posterities such as it may be, for whatever we do,
Speaker 4: to round him out, you know, and eliminate the bullshit,
Speaker 4: you know, and who he really was. He was a
Speaker 4: very nice, decent person. Loved animals, you know, love nice things,
Speaker 4: lived very simply, but had great appreciation for the finer things.
Speaker 1: Rick says he wants to set the record straight because
Speaker 1: he knows that Micky, he has a reputation.
Speaker 4: Well, there's stories about that, you know. I don't know
Speaker 4: if I need to go into that. You know, there's
Speaker 4: enough enough of less, you know, legendary stuff so called.
Speaker 4: You know that somebody else might have a take on.
Speaker 4: But he had, he had, he had, he had ways
Speaker 4: of dealing with the crowd. This put it that way.
Speaker 9: Do you think some of the sort of bad Mickey
Speaker 9: stories are untrue or exaggerated?
Speaker 4: Yes?
Speaker 1: Absolutely, you know, And why do you think that happened?
Speaker 4: Like what, people are stupid? I have no idea. That's
Speaker 4: their problem, not mine.
Speaker 9: Do you think Mickey played into that sort of myth
Speaker 9: of the dark Prince No No.
Speaker 1: Rix made it clear that he wants to avoid controversial topics,
Speaker 1: but I have to ask him about Mickey's bigotry. One
Speaker 1: of the things that's confusing about him from an outsider,
Speaker 1: you know, someone who I never knew him, obviously, I
Speaker 1: never you know, but a lot of people say, oh,
Speaker 1: he was bigoted against Jewish people and black people.
Speaker 9: And then a lot of other people say, no, no, no,
Speaker 9: you don't understand at all.
Speaker 1: He wasn't. Do you have any insight that you can
Speaker 1: share with us about that?
Speaker 4: No, no, no, no, no, no, no, he wasn't. I mean, there
Speaker 4: are things that passed at one time that wouldn't pass now.
Speaker 4: Not necessarily applied to Mickey, but just generally, you know,
Speaker 4: and now they have this woke thing, and I mean,
Speaker 4: my god, you know, you open your mouth and you've
Speaker 4: got fifty people in front of your house with pish
Speaker 4: force and horses.
Speaker 9: I mean, I know that certain symbols, like the swastika
Speaker 9: is kind of part of surf culture in certain ways.
Speaker 4: Swastika is an ancient symbol from the Orient. He also
Speaker 4: in Buddha's in the American Indians. That's a great design.
Speaker 1: But after the nineteen thirties, he doesn't have the same.
Speaker 4: Mean at Allmore surfers adopted a lot of things iron
Speaker 4: crosses and you.
Speaker 1: Know, yeah, a lot of fascist symbols.
Speaker 4: Yeah. I don't give any cretis to any of that stuff.
Speaker 1: Yeah, but Mickey was into it. He wore that stuff.
Speaker 4: Well. I think he put a swasteak on a board
Speaker 4: one time just to kiss somebody off. It should be
Speaker 4: a little contrary, you know, raise a few wife brows
Speaker 4: at Malibu. Oh, look at the you know, yeah, you know.
Speaker 1: After we talk outside for a while, Rick shows me
Speaker 1: around the inside of his house, which is filled with
Speaker 1: Mickey memorabilia, one of Mickey's fake rolex'es, a passport he
Speaker 1: had made for his dog, Scooter Boy. It's basically a
Speaker 1: private Mickey museum, curated by one of Mickey's biggest fanboys.
Speaker 1: Just as I'm about to leave, he offers to show
Speaker 1: me his yellow nineteen seventy two VW van It's kept
Speaker 1: under an awning at the backside of the house. It's
Speaker 1: in great condition, obviously a possession. Rick is really proud
Speaker 1: of Vanity plate are volksy.
Speaker 4: It's gotta be waxed. I gotta wax it.
Speaker 5: This is awesome.
Speaker 4: Actually can't get in from here, and.
Speaker 1: For some reason I peek through the back window. There's
Speaker 1: a surfboard in there.
Speaker 4: That's a catboard dupe. I had a friend that made
Speaker 4: surfboards and he copied copied one for me.
Speaker 1: It's a copy of the kind of board making made
Speaker 1: with Greg Nole, a de cat board. It's bright yellow
Speaker 1: and it's got bubble writing on it that says Eadie Amine,
Speaker 1: as in the brutal Dictator of Uganda. Okay, that's weird,
Speaker 1: but not as weird as what else I see on
Speaker 1: the board, an ancient symbol from the Orient. You've got
Speaker 1: a splastic on your board too.
Speaker 4: Number number of things. That's my ida mean, you know, uh,
Speaker 4: you know, I just want that on there.
Speaker 10: No, may not see doctor Strange love man through my thora.
Speaker 4: Because we were all get generous. What can I say?
Speaker 4: And I social demetted anarchists.
Speaker 1: This is the first time I've seen in person a
Speaker 1: surfboard with a swastika on it. It's a board that's
Speaker 1: a knockoff of Mickey's brand, the Cat. So it's an
Speaker 1: homage to the Dark Prince of Malibu by a friend
Speaker 1: of Mickey's who's denied the entire premise of my questions
Speaker 1: about Mickey's beliefs when it came to white supremacy and fascism.
Speaker 1: He wasn't going to help me make sense of the contradictions.
Speaker 1: But in a way, seeing this board does there's no
Speaker 1: nuance here, no getting it or not getting it. I
Speaker 1: get it. Seeing a swastika on a surfboard feels absolutely terrible.
Speaker 1: This is the layer of the Mickey Dora onion where
Speaker 1: I just want to cry.
Speaker 5: In the next.
Speaker 1: Episode of Lost Hills, Mickey has a secret life.
Speaker 8: It was on Gretna Green in Brentwood and there was
Speaker 8: a row of before little one bedroom apartments.
Speaker 5: Ours was in the back.
Speaker 8: It had a garage where he could keep all the
Speaker 8: boards and cars, you know, his antique cars. And of
Speaker 8: course I was always warned never ever to let anybody
Speaker 8: know where he lived, so our whole relationship was super
Speaker 8: super secret.
Speaker 5: What was behind all that secrecy probably afraid that somebody
Speaker 5: was going to come and steal stuff that he probably
Speaker 5: already stole. And other words, a thief is always suspicious
Speaker 5: that someone's going to come and steal from them.
Speaker 1: That's next in episode six, Fuck the World. Lost Hills
Speaker 1: is written and reported by me Dana Goodyear. It's created
Speaker 1: by me and Benadere and produced by Western Sound and
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