Still Catching a Wave

Hanging 10 on the 40th Anniversary of the Surfer Classic

ENCINITAS, Calif.

There were some seriously leathery old dudes at La Paloma Theatre the other night. Guys in their sixties -- heck, in their seventies -- sporting baggy shorts, flip-flops and aloha shirts, glowing with the kind of solar-irradiated skin only a dermatologist could love. Several of them used the word "stoked," as in they were stoked to be there, stoked to keep surfing, stoked to be, you know, alive.

In the mythology of surf culture, three early events loom large in the presentation of the sport to the mainstream:

There was Duke Kahanamoku, aka "the Big Kahuna," the Hawaiian Olympic gold medalist swimmer who brought his 10-foot-long redwood plank to America in the 1920s and introduced wave-riding to the world.

Then there was "Gidget," the 1959 Hollywood film starring Sandra Dee as the original beach blanket bunny.

And, finally, there was 1966's "The Endless Summer," the anti-Hollywood "home movie" made by Bruce Brown, who hired a couple of teenage surfers (Robert August and Mike Hynson) to travel around the planet looking for clean sets to ride, from Ghana to Tahiti to Malibu. It was a $50,000 gamble, originally shot on a handheld 16mm camera, without sound, that went on to gross $30 million. Validated by the critics, who were charmed by its corny innocence and tasty waveage, "Endless Summer" is still considered the ur-text, and the most important and influential statement on surfing.

So this was the setting for a rare reunion of the filmmaking team, which had come together for a $50-a-ticket cancer benefit at La Paloma in Encinitas, a beach town north of San Diego. Rare because Hynson left the scene for a long time, caught in a wicked undertow of drugs and alcohol. Rare, too, because of some bad blood. Hynson sued Brown in the 1990s, claiming a share of film profits (he lost). But on Thursday, they all took the stage and smiled gamely.

The ambiance for the evening? Mellow to the bone. Cold beers. Peapods stuffed with cream cheese. And nostalgia in the summer breeze: The crowd was mostly over 50. Among the celebrity sightings: Tom Morey, inventor of the boogie board, rubbing tan elbows with Gidget.

Kathy "Gidget" Kohner Zuckerman handed us her card, showing a raven-haired bikini-clad water nymph holding up a longboard on the beach of Malibu.

Zuckerman warned she is a hugger. "I've spent my life telling people that Gidget is a real person!" she said. "I'm not Sandra Dee. I'm me." Another hug. "I first entered the water on June 24, 1956. That's 50 years ago." She is five feet of pure perkiness. These days she engages in ceremonial surfing only. She plans on riding a wave to mark her upcoming 65th birthday.

Zuckerman kept a diary of her days on sand and sea back in the Malibu of the 1950s. She told us that "Moondoggie" was a real person, too.