Miki Dora

By: David Rensin | Chris Rohloff and Pat Darrin | April 01, 2009 | Non Fiction

The Secret Chapter of a Lost Generation.

If the waves were good at Malibu, but it was too crowded, some people knew they could have a similar experience just a few miles south at Topanga Beach,” Jim Fitzpatrick told me a few years ago as I was in the process of interviewing more than 300 people on five continents to write the oral/narrative biography All For A Few Perfect Waves: The Audacious Life and Legend of Rebel Surfer Miki Dora, which was published in April of 2008.

Fitzpatrick, a skateboarding prodigy then known as “The Kid,” became an educator and is now principal of Marin Montessori School, as well as vice president of USA Skateboarding. When he was 13, his family moved to Topanga Beach from La Jolla in March 1960, when his father, who made government films for an aeronautics company, got the call from Hollywood. “To make the move easier for me, my parents agreed to buy me my own surfboard. I surfed every single day, sometimes getting up in the dark to go out before school.” Bill Cleary, a writer, ex-Marine and surfer, lived next door.

Known as the Hemingway of the beach, Cleary would go on to co-write the indispensable Surfing Guide to Southern California in 1963 with David H. Stern and published by Jim Fitzpatrick’s father. A subsequent meeting with L.A. City lifeguard Larry Stevenson, who had created the era’s must-have Makaha skateboard, led to the formation of the eclectic Surf Guide magazine, which Cleary edited. According to Surf Guide contributor Bob Feigel, one factor that set the magazine apart from its competition like Surfer is that words never took a backseat to the photos. Later, Cleary wrote for Life magazine, and authored a few books, including 1967’s seminal All The Young Wave Hunters, which dealt not only with the ever-more-popular surfing world, but the deep truths and characters involved. Miki Dora figured prominently in the Malibu chapter, the beach where he reigned for years as king, but Cleary didn’t stop there. As editor of Surf Guide, he put Dora on the cover of October 1963’s legendary “Angry Young Man of Surfing” issue. He also featured Dora in the November 1964 Malibu issue.

Dora, who had one foot in the pre-Gidget paradise of empty waves, and one foot in the paradise lost that followed, never got over his dislike of crowds or the relentless commercialization and media exploitation of surfing and surf culture that led to them. Just the same, he knew he had to ride the wave in the direction it broke.

Cleary died in July of 2002. The hours I spent reading the papers he left behind as part of my research for the Dora biography reveal that Cleary’s fascination with Dora never abated.

Even though Miki Dora had died six months earlier of pancreatic cancer — an ironic end for someone so health-obsessed that he had vitamins and supplements sent to him by friends around the world — to this day he remains arguably the best known and most notorious California surfer ever, in large part because his charming, complicated and contradictory personality was as irresistible as his surfing. As I wrote in All For a Few Perfect Waves: “Dora was surfing’s most outspoken practitioner, charismatic prince, chief antihero, committed loner and enduring mystery. Obituaries ran from the Los Angeles Times to the London Times.”

It takes a whole book to really tell the story.

Unfortunately, at 500 pages the book is too short, though hardly incomplete. Much was left out due to the realities of publishing finance and reader attention span. The just-released paperback contains another 35 pages of fresh material, but much more remains.

The excerpt that follows was originally part of a longer chapter in the book that was painfully left behind through no fault of its own. But thanks to Malibu Magazine, readers will get a never-before-published look at Topanga beach of the 1960s, the hidden days of Dora’s hidden life and Bill Cleary’s fascination with him.

GEORGE VAN NOY: I was a world champion in the butterfly on the UCLA swim team. When I met Bill Cleary through a teammate, he asked if I wanted to share his place at Topanga. We were roommates from 1959-1961, for $50 apiece. Our window, which we usually kept open, looked onto a little section of sand and a sea wall made out of wood that was about three and a half feet high. At high tide we could sit at the window and watch the second break at Topanga. When the wind was offshore, it would light up the waves, and three-to five-footers would hold up all the way from the first point to the traffic signal. Shell-thin, beautiful and fast.

BOB BEADLE: The attraction went beyond the waves. Living on Topanga beach was marvelous because it was an isolated community in which everyone was accepted. There was the golfing drunk next door who had dry heaves late at night, the gay guys, the grandmothers, the little kids, the dogs and cats.
Miki was always a ghost at Topanga, drifting in and out at the unlikeliest moments.

JIM FITZPATRICK:  The beach was open at the traffic signal where Topanga Canyon intersected with the Pacific Coast Highway. You could walk a trail from the highway, through the sage and weeds, right down to the sand. In the summer of 1960, crowds weren’t an issue. But by the following summer there were parking problems and too many surfers.

Bookmarks: Page 1 of 3 pages  1 2 3 >