As I write this the full horror of the Los Angeles fires is only beginning to emerge but this much is certain: the body count will rise dramatically and if the forecast strong Santa Ana winds return, this might just be the first chapter in the blackest book ever written in LA County.
A confession – although I wouldn’t want to live there, I have a passion for the City of Angels and have had since I first visited half a century ago in 1975. Over that time I’ve returned for work and pleasure countless times, and while many people regard LA as a slightly ugly stepping off point for Disneyland and other theme parks and the old Hollywood sign, I discovered lesser known treasures like the art deco masterpieces of Downtown and Pasadena, the intriguing history of Chavez Ravine, the Mexican district all but wiped out to make space for Dodger Stadium (the Ry Cooder album that tells the story was rarely out of my car CD slot during the early 2000s when we lived in neighbouring Orange County) and, of course, the vibrant surf culture centred on Malibu.
I first surfed Malibu in 1976 with Denny Aaberg, both of us on longboards when no one in Australia was riding them, and over the ensuing decades developed a network of friends from Topanga to Paradise Cove. Over the same period several close friends moved into Pacific Palisades above the cliff line and we came to love its quiet, leafy neighbourhoods. In 2010 I led a Noosa Mal Club strike mission to the Malibu Surfing Association Longboard Classic, and the ‘Bu had grown so ritzy that we had to stay in motels at Calabasas, half an hour inland from the pier at Surfrider Beach but not without its charm.
Now all these places have been decimated by the fires. The news is full of stories of now-homeless Hollywood celebs like Mel Gibson, Jeff Bridges, Paris Hilton, Adam Sandler and Ben Affleck. The home of Tom Hanks, just up the road from our besties in the Palisades, seems to have been spared, although our friends have not yet been able to gain access to see what remains. And at the time of writing I’ve been unable to reach Kathy “Gidget” Kohner and husband Marv, whose lovely rustic ranch-style home is nearby. Or was. I know they would have been inundated with messages so I remain positive.
But let’s get back to Malibu, where the fire-front has met the Pacific from Topanga Canyon pretty much to Duke’s, where 80-something Gidget still hosts a couple of nights a week. Along Pacific Coast Highway between those landmarks virtually everything has gone, which makes me think how different it might have been if May Rindge had held the line a century ago.
Originally the home country of the Chumash first nation, the oceanfront property known as Rancho Topanga Malibu Sequit was picked up for $300,000 in 1892 by Massachusetts millionaire Frederick Rindge who turned his strip of “sundown sea” into a private kingdom. But after his death in 1905 his widow May faced increasing pressure from state authorities to release land for a coastal highway running north to Ventura County. May held firm until the late ‘20s when, strapped for cash, according to the best California historian Kevin Starr, she started selling beachfronts to the newly-rich Hollywood crowd, creating what would become the Malibu Colony. It was all over. They wanted a through road and they got it.
The resulting development created the good, the bad and the ugly, much of the heritage now gone.
The Palisades fires have now taken out several of the remaining cultural landmarks of the old ‘Bu, including the classic seafood restaurant Reel Inn on PCH, and back up the hill a mile or so the great cowboy actor Will Rogers’ ranch estate with golf course and stables. In later years the property was gifted to California Parks to become a museum and also became home to the star-studded LA polo set. Gone now, all of it.
Vale Mike Hynson
As if California didn’t have enough to be sad about this past week, the wild, weird and wonderful Mike Hynson “gracefully kicked out at the age of 82”, as Surfer.com put it.
Best known as Robert August’s sidekick in the landmark Bruce Brown 1964 surf travel epic The Endless Summer, Hynson later became one of the most revered surfer/shapers in the world.
After the phenomenal success of Endless Summer, Hynson became part of the Orange County surf/drug scene, with his increasingly colourful surfboards reflecting the mind expansion techniques of the day. As surf historian Matt Warshaw noted: “Mike Hynson was the second-most polarising 1960s surfer, behind Miki Dora. He was also a gifted, innovative board designer and an immaculate craftsman. And the style sense! Off the charts. Hynson was the best-dressed surfer of the 1960s, hands down.”
Although Robert August became a regular at the Noosa Festival of Surfing in the early years of the century, we only got Mike here once, in 2010. He was a handful, but an enjoyable guy to have around, and still a great surfer.
He passed away peacefully in Encinitas, CA.
