By Phil Jarratt
Sitting in a bar across the street from his surf shop, Hastings Street businessman Michael Holmes can barely contain his excitement as he carefully unwraps his treasures and removes them from a big box.
“Well?” The owner of Noosa Longboards and recent appointee to the Tourism Noosa board is beaming at me. I can see the ladies at the next table looking curiously at a pair of cowboy boots and a little book with a tapa cloth cover taking pride of place between our beers. “Amazing,” I reply.
And they are, although it might take a collector of the eclectic to see it. But collecting historical memorabilia is a passion that Holmes and I share, although he’s way above my pay grade. For example, I have a copy of the 1983 reprint of the 1935 book, minus the tapa cover, for which I paid $US150 some years ago at the Old Lahaina Book Emporium on Maui. He bid several thousand dollars for his original at the Bonham’s Auctions “California Dreamin’” on-line auction in Los Angeles last July, then had to wait months to get the traditional tapa cover through quarantine.
The book may or may not have been the personal copy of its author, Tom Blake – there are some pencil notations on a few pages and it was once sold in a lot with a collection of Blake’s personal correspondence – but there is no doubting that this near-mint condition copy of The Hawaiian Surfboard is the first published book devoted entirely to surfing.
But Duke’s boots are what really caught my eye. Described in the Bonham’s catalogue as “fashioned in dark brown, white and mahogany leather, with wooden soles and heels tipped with ‘Soft Nylon Bilt-Rite’ heels, interior loops, no label, ‘0597’ in pen to sole of right boot…Provenance: purchased directly from Nadine Kahanamoku.”
The late Nadine Kahanamoku was the widow of Duke Pau Kahanamoku, the great Hawaiian Olympic swimming gold medallist, silent film actor and godfather of modern surfing, who died in 1968. Having spent a year researching him for a book I wrote about Duke’s 1914-15 tour of Australia, I thought I knew pretty much everything there was to know about Kahanamoku, including the highly unconventional affair he and one of his brothers had with the billionaire tobacco heiress Doris Duke. But, other than a set-up in the MGM lot when he once played a Red Indian brave in a silent western, I didn’t know he was a horseman.
“He was an excellent horseman,” says Michael Holmes. “I found that out when I researched the Hawaiian paniolo (cowboy) culture.” Holmes later sends me a photo from the Bishop Museum showing Duke resplendent on horseback leading the 1960 Aloha Week parade in Honolulu, wearing…you guessed it, the actual boots. He also disputes Bonham’s claim that they were purchased from Nadine.
“When Duke died, he left his boots to his young brother Sargent, who had three wives and a stepdaughter through the last one. When Sarge died, he left them to the stepdaughter. That’s the true family connection. She apparently later sold them to a prominent Honolulu antique dealer, but he was doing it tough during Covid and put a lot of items on the market.”
Michael first saw both the book and the boots on display at the Moana Surfrider Hotel on the Wakiki beachfront a few years back and has been waiting to pounce ever since. He says: “I’ve been a Duke nut all my life but I’d never owned a personal item. I felt the same way about Elvis, had to own something he’d owned.”
The memorabilia of surfing and popular culture are Michael’s major interests as a collector, but he’s also pretty good at collecting people. He met Kathy Kohner Zuckerman, the original “Gidget” when she came to the Noosa Festival of Surfing in 2010, and has become firm friends with the LA-based surfing icon and her husband Marv.
More recently, he arranged a meeting, also in Los Angeles, with John Van Hamersveld, the legendary octogenarian graphic designer whose portfolio includes the poster for the film classic The Endless Summer, and equally famous album jacket images of John Lennon and Jimi Hendrix. As well as trading collectibles, the two have now become mates.
Michael’s son Ash, who manages Noosa Longboards, has also been dragged into his father’s obsession. “He’s worse than me!” Michael laughs. Perhaps not surprisingly, the surf shop which has always had a cultural leaning, has now become more of a trading post, with rare books and vinyl given as much space as tee shirts and boardies.
It’s a fascinating mix, and very soon it will be expanded by the arrival of the showpiece tapa cloth book and the cowboy boots, locked securely in a cabinet. But they won’t be for sale. Not now, not ever.
