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