Summer of 1967: Memories of a Little Surfer Kid from Ocean Beach

World Surfing contest held at OB in 1966. Photo by LeRoy Grannis

Editor: During this summer, we’ve been collecting and publishing accounts and memories of the 1967 “Summer of Love” here in OB and elsewhere. Here’s our latest by Seal:

By Seal in the Selkirks

Born at 5142 Cape May in 1954, my parents divorced in 1959 and I was living in Mission Beach with my dad and step-mom by 1961.

Summer of 1967: I had just graduated from 6th grade at Mission Beach School and was heading to Pacific Beach Jr. High in the Fall. I turned 13 years old after summer in 1967.

My Granny K was managing an apartment building at the end of  Del Monte St. that had this huge rickety wooden stairway set in the concrete facing on the cliff that led down to the rocks. It was the shortcut to the Pier and beach. If my parents dropped me off, that was the way I would walk carrying my ‘OB’ board that she kept for me in the apartment building’s storage shed that Grandpa used to keep his maintenance tools in.

If I rode my bike from MB over the old Ventura St. wooden bridge, I’d go the long way around from her apartment to get to the Pier because I’d built a 2-wheeled rack for my surfboard and always brought it when I peddled over.

It’s also when I started learning how to do fiberglass repairs because I dropped it a number of times along with the occasional ding from banging the tail or nose against the rocks while walking. If I had my bike and rack and there was a swell up, I’d go surf Osprey or Rockslide or pedal farther down to Garbage. Got a lot of dings surfing the Cliffs, too.

The next year, 1968, they moved and started managing another apartment building on Santa Monica across from the supermarket (Safeway?). It was a much closer ride to the beach from there instead of walking the cliffs route but I liked being up on the cliff better and missed being right above the ocean.

I didn’t know anybody my age in OB because I never went to OB Elementary, so I’d mostly surf alone unless my best friend from MB Jeff Dec came with. He wasn’t allowed to go to OB since his parents thought OB was the beatniks, bikers, and bums zone; and only the ‘bad’ people lived there. So he’d lie about where he was spending the night and we’d ride our bikes over with his board on my bike rack.

But that wasn’t very often and only in the summer because they lived in Glendora up in LA and only spent the summers at their house on Liverpool Ct.

Actually, 51 years later I still surf alone when I get out to the Olympic Peninsula for an occasional surf camping trip at La Push First Beach, and I snowboard treelines all winter alone on the local ski hills. Funny how old habits from childhood continue your entire life.

I watched Nat Young kick the asses of the best surfers in California the year before at the Pier during the ’66 World Surfing Championship. Watching that was to the surfing world like hearing the difference between the ‘Beach Boys’ who NEVER SURFED and the rock & roll of ‘Jefferson Airplane.’ Eye-opening cosmic shift in the surf world and how we looked at riding waves.

My Summer of ’67 OB board was bought for me by my Granny and was one of the new V-tailed shorter shapes based on Nat Young’s board. I had saved my own money from my Mission Beach paper route delivering the local Independent newspaper and then the Copley Press Evening Tribune to buy my MB board but what a surprise it was when one morning she walked me down Newport to go eat breakfast and wanted to go into a surf shop “just to look around.”  She thought I should have a board for OB and not have to drag my board over the dangerous Ventura St. bridge behind my bicycle. My granny bought me a brand new surfboard! She never told my dad that she did this because he wouldn’t have approved.

I think the new OB board was the Channin/Diffenderfer V-tail purple & black psychedelic short board. I don’t remember which one of the shops we found it in that day. Or maybe the board was one of the new Weber V-tails? I don’t quite remember which (I had both at one point) but from then on I had a board in OB to surf on.

My father hated surfers and never came to watch but Granny thought watching me paddle out and ride waves was absolutely thrilling. It was almost embarrassing to have her there on the beach by the Pier waving at me after every wave I caught. It became seriously embarrassing when she’d start clapping applause after a long ride. But then she had been born and raised in Iowa farm country so what could a little beach kid expect?

My stepmom let me grow out my hair that year (my ex-Korea vet father didn’t approve) and in summer of ’67 I was just another one of the little Beatle-cut shaggy-haired gremmies in OB trying to switch from noseriding to ripping turns on V-bottoms. Far more dynamic surfing! Got ran over a lot by the older guys on longboards at the Pier, though. Guess they were having a real hard time with the surf revolution Nat Young brought about and most were…buzzcut hair and standing on the nose trimming.

Grandma never did understand why I was a goofy foot and stood ‘wrong’ with my right foot forward unlike the older surfers who were all regular foots.

My stepmom was a Peace & Freedom Party activist while attending SDSU against the US war on Viet Nam. Her brother, my uncle Kenny, didn’t come back. I went to many protests both in San Diego and San Francisco where her family lived  including (if I’m remembering correctly) at least one anti-war march held in OB in 1967. My Granny K joined my stepmom and me in that march in OB.

Granny K was an adult during WWI who married a returning vet in 1919, and her second husband Grandpa K was an ex-Seabee with a Bronze Star. She hated war just as much as my stepmom who was virulently opposed to this war and the draft as were so many others that lived in OB at that time.

I remember the taunts and anger directed at the marchers, and the racist slurs hurled at my stepmom during the OB march of ‘Gook’ and ‘Slope.’ At MB School in 1967 I had fights picked against me because of her facial features and anti-war attitude. They continued at PB Jr. High.

My stepmom is listed on the japaneserelocation.org website as a young child when her family was shipped to one of the camps and their family’s farmland in San Francisco stolen by real estate speculators. I remember her proudly holding her ‘Bring Them Home’ sign she carried for her brother. But she argued in my favor to let me surf against my father’s wishes, and taught me to drive her 4 speed stick VW Beetle a couple years later, but that was down Mission Blvd and not in OB.

I saw a lot of fights that summer that were started by the drunken Navy and Marine recruits on their first leave hassling the longhairs, freaks, and surfers hanging out on the beach after dark who were mostly playing guitars and singing folk songs to attract the cute beach girls around the fire rings. One or two would come up and start it, knock the guitar out of someone’s hands or get really obnoxious to the women, and soon as the words escalated into arguments a group of swabbies or jarheads would come running up out of the dark to jump in.

The cops would just sit in the alleys and hide behind buildings in the dark and watch for a while before roaring up with their lights and sirens going (after calling for a couple more carloads to help). They would pull the military guys off and send them on their way before beating the crap out of the hippie victims and arresting them for ‘disturbing the peace’ or ‘intoxicated in public’ and other nefarious charges.

Worse if they found the bag of grass of course. I witnessed a lot of that happening in OB that summer. Rarely messed with the military guys that started the fights because, after all, most of the cops seemed to be ex-military. Viet Nam was happening and these draftees were supposedly going off to fight for our country and beating up peaceniks was just blowing off a little steam.

How’d that Viet Nam thing turn out, eh? The hippies turned out to be right about all of it.

Some nights the jarheads and the swabbies would fight one another in their drunken rages because there wasn’t anybody else to beat up. That’s about the only time I saw them get busted for violence, but invariably the Shore Patrol would show up and the local PD would let them haul the swabbies and jarheads away instead.

Bought my first ‘lid’ of grass (or was it called a ‘can’ then?) at one of those beach fires in OB that summer, too. Remember when you could get four fingers by two fingers of Columbian in a brown paper bag for $10? And now, 50 years later, California finally re-legalizes a plant that should never have been made illegal in the first place.

And 50 years later I’ve been growing my own for years up here in Washington State with a medical card. Took you long enough, OB!

Ten years after the Summer of Love my cousin John got arrested selling an ounce to a narc in OB and got sent to prison where he was knifed to death. Good young rock guitar player and a serious jerk of a cousin, but he never deserved to get murdered for a bag of grass.

The violence of the San Diego cops in OB was part of the Summer of ’67 that all young people faced. I remember watching cops smiling and even laughing as they beat young people bloody with nightsticks, punches, kicks, and when they threw them against cars to search them because they didn’t like their looks or they had suspicious behavior.

Just about anything was considered suspicious because I often saw them pull a car over for a broken taillight driving down Newport or south on Abbott St., and invariably it was a surfer with boards on top or longhair in a VW bus or hippies in a broken down old car, and they would proceed to rip the car apart pulling seats out and emptying the trunk after searching those in the car right there on the sidewalk. And if they didn’t find anything, they’d just drive off leaving everything strewn all over the ground. After writing a ticket for every infraction they could find.

I was told numerous times ‘what are you looking at?’ or ‘get the hell out of here unless you want to be arrested’ or ‘it’s after cerfew, kid, and I’ll take you to juvie’ and many other wonderful verbal threats from the angry ‘peace officers’ when I was standing around and watching what they were doing to people. I knew what they were doing was illegal and against the Bill of Rights in the Constitution we were learning about in school.

But if any adults in the crowd said anything against what they were doing they were singled out by cops that weren’t actively participating and grabbed. When I got yelled at I’d ride off on my bike or skateboard far enough away hoping they would forget about me but I still would watch.

I’d go back to my Grandma’s and tell her what I heard and saw and she’d get this sad look on her face and tell me that this is what happens in the Soviet Union and not here. She used to tell me stories about the cops during the Great Depression and they didn’t sound any different than what I was seeing in 1967. Grandpa Harold would get mad and say he didn’t fight in WWII for Democracy and Liberty to see this crap happening in his own country. He won the Bronze Star on an island in the South Pacific, and he would drink a lot to not remember. He warned me to stay away from the cops and try not to be noticed because it ‘was safer.’

The cops did the same thing in MB as I saw the same behavior happening on the other side of the jetties in 1967.

There were still abalone and lobster off the Cliffs in 1967. I’d take a mask & snorkel and fins and my beavertail wetsuit, an ab iron or bug gloves, and go try to find some dinner for me and my grandparents if it was calm. Or throw out a hook with mussel meat on it. Lots of fish to catch off the rocks in those days.

That summer was the first time I came face to face with a big shark, right off of Del Monte. It was a totally flat summer day, no swell at all showing and a very low tide. I was farther out than usual in my mask, snorkel and fins having been dragged out by the ebb tide. We always would see sharks, they were just part of the scenery off the Cliffs (and any beach for that matter). I was hanging right off the edge of one of the rock reefs that was barely underwater with the low tide, floating face down and diving to look at different fish and nooks & crannies in the reef.

I was coming back up to the surface for air when I caught movement in the corner of my mask out at the limits of visibility. It was a hammerhead and must have been thirty feet long! Well, maybe not 30 and more along the lines of perhaps six feet but it wasn’t a sand shark and I’d never seen anything like it before except in a book from the library. The fish wasn’t coming at me, just sweeping along farther out at the edge of the gloom in deeper water heading north, and I let myself float right into the shallower water above the rock reef and tried to still my pounding heart and not make any movement. It disappeared and I waited floating on the surface hanging onto a rock with my hands in the little wash that was moving me until I gathered up enough courage to swim back in. Obviously I wasn’t on the menu that day.

And Grunion runs. The one time that parents let you stay out until 2am! Every wave with hundreds washing up and wiggling all over the place while you were trying to hang on to their slippery bodies long enough to get them in the bucket. My Granny K was the only person I knew who could cook those little fish and make them taste good. Grunion tacos for lunch and dinner the next day. Yum! I never chased Grunion at home in MB because nobody could cook them like she could though I knew people who tried and then pretended that the nasty little fish tasted good. Unfortunately the recipe died with her.

Anybody else go to the Coronet Store on Newport for candy to sneak in to the Strand because they charged too much for ‘movie candy?’ I always did, and to Food Basket on Mission Blvd. and Garnet when going to the Roxy in PB.

But that summer I got caught walking in the Strand’s door when a candy bar fell out of my pocket and had my arm grabbed by the ticket taker. He told me I couldn’t bring any of it in, and I had to stand there and eat it all at once in front of the manager or they’d make me miss the movie.

And I never once won one of the Saturday matinee ticket stub drawings at either movie theater.
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Seal in the Selkirks – formerly Seal’s Ding Repair 1976-1980 in MB, 1980-1987 in OB at 2151 Sunset Cliffs Blvd.

Post Script: About my name and more on what I’m doing

If there are any people around down there in OB and MB that remember me they’d only know me as Seal the guy who ran Seal’s Ding Repair. Nobody remembers the little kid named Kent at Mission Beach School.

It was the early/mid 1970s when the nickname got stuck on me by my friends and other surfers that were bringing their broken boards for me to fix. It started out as a joke, ‘Seals’ plural because the group of us surfers all barked like seals (I still have a good bark!) and we were ‘sealing’ up surfboards, plus I started the shop in James’ front yard on Lido Ct. and he was going to learn how but he drank more beer than sanded boards and it ended up the singular possessive Seal’s since I did all the damn work!

I was Seal in the United Karate Federation of OB studio on Newport for years, all my younger cousins left alive call me seal, my two younger brothers (by different dads so I never lived with them) call me seal, my adult step-kids always have and all three of them were born on Longbranch in OB, my 2 ex-wives, the grandkids, the few old friends I’m still in contact with, all my karate students, all the bands I’ve been in, all my snowboarding students, and everybody I’ve met or known since the 1970s and everyone in the three different mountain ranges in three different states I’ve lived in since 1987 (Utah, NorCal, and here) all know me as Seal.

The last book I wrote was ‘The Lunch Counter Trilogy’ published on www.riverbreak.com/news/storie s (in three parts with GREAT video segments and pics), and it has authors Seal Morgan and Don Piburn.

The next book I’ve been writing the last 1 1/2 years is called ‘Massacre Sites; Working for the Dead’ and will be signed Seal because those that were involved with those intense spirit experiences at the Hog Farm in NorCal all know me as Seal.

One has to keep a sense of humor about all this shit. Ha!

Last but not least I thought I’d add two pictures of where I currently live for you to see. One taken last summer, the other in winter  few years ago. This 8 acre property on a ridgeline is at 2339 ft elevation and is 25.5 miles from my local snowboarding hill’s parking lot…I surf mountains. It may not be as close as the OB Pier was but I like this place! An added advantage is that the dogs have never had to be on a leash though they have a 65×20 foot dog run under a ponderosa tree they go in when I’m gone all day. I put on the new roof, put in the new windows, hung and painted the new siding and window trim, will never finish working on the house ever, and I pulled in 1/2 cord of firewood yesterday and need to do the same again today.

Never ending work for an old OB/MB surfer dude living in the mountains but I truly do like where I ended up. Best go get ready to move more wood home.

Do something fun every day!

seal in the Selkirks