With Punks and Pros
Chapter 7 - kings of Oahu
And young men they dream to ride the sunset
Content on evening smiles and weary bones
From miles around they come to touch the legend
Saying goodbye to where I come from this is homesource: https://www.lyricsondemand.com/kalapana/many_classic_moments
My time had come on Oahu. No longer feeling life was a constant struggle, I finally was able to support myself with a bit of money from a job that I was loving and could now afford to pay rent. For my first Hawaiian board, I bought a 6’5” thruster that had been left behind by former world champ Shaun Tomson. A benefit of surfing Oahu is that pros come for the contest season in December and January and then move on, leaving their boards behind for surf shops to sell for them. Cheap. With my new job came the opportunity to surf every morning because I didn’t start until 3 in the afternoon and the weekends I was off. I also was not alone. There were a bunch of guys from Florida who all came from the same city., a suburb of Orlando called Winter Park. We had somehow come to Oahu at the same time for the same purpose. To surf, especially the mythical North Shore. As Central Floridians, we all had grown up with the long hour drive over to the coast where head high waves were considered big and that, as surfers and teenagers, always resulted in some kind of traveling party, everyone jammed into some cheap, shitty car. We all chipped in for gas. That was required, most often it was change. A few dimes and a quarter we saved from lunch money. All cars came standard with an AM radio that we upgraded with a cassette player and beneath that was an ashtray for cigarettes. Surfers ashtrays were always slid open and filled with coins and leftover mini joints of weed called “roaches.” These roaches would get recycled eventually into a joint sized joint. The cassettes had a very thin tape inside that were endlessly getting jammed in the player which resulted in attempts to salvage the treasured cassette, usually Led Zeppelin, Black Sabbath or Lynyrd Skynyrd. As Florida boys, the Skynyrd tapes were valuable, a band that made us proud even though they came from Jacksonville, a total dump of a city. If the tape was unsalvageable, long tangled masses of tape, we had boxes in the back seat to stash them to repair later at home, attempting to rewind the mess with a pencil shoved into one side of the reels. I used to throw mine under the seat to use as a weapon whenever I had an idiot behind me tailgating. This was before road rage guns. They would speed past and give the middle finger at my middle finger. Whoever had the turn to drive would be the first one up well before sunrise, pile his board on top of the only surfboard racks manufactured at the time, Aloha Racks that as steel, usually rusted within weeks of purchase and were giant suction cups that were clipped to the roof via rain gutters on the roofs that every car had for some reason. Hooked inside the door, Aloha Racks were notorious for flying off at speed, usually helped by a semi truck blast coming from the other direction. Weed was highly illegal, but nobody cared. If anyone ever tells me they didn’t smoke in the 70’s, I don’t believe them. In over 50 years of my experience with marijuana in various forms, I have never smoked or eaten more of it than those days driving back and forth to the beach. The floors of our cars were never cleaned and any cop could have pulled us over, reached in and picked up seed and stems from the floor. Or just looked at the roaches in the ashtray. We all rode single fin surfboards, usually around 6 feet long. My first board I bought for $25 off of a neighbor who was older and going off to college. In the winter, we wore scuba diving wetsuits. The legs were a long john and over that you had a jacket with this beaver tail invention that went from your ass, under and back to the front where it was held by two clips. In the spring, we ditched the long johns and just wore the jacket, the beaver tail loose and flying behind you when you rode waves. About midway through high school, the first surf leash was invented in California by Jack O’Neill’s son Pat. The leash took out Jack’s left eye and my own head several times. Supposed to keep you from swimming for your board, wearing a leash resulted in you coming to the surface after a wipeout with both arms covering your head, something we had learned in elementary school under our desks when we were taught how to survive a nuclear bomb from Cuba. Florida kid school time memories.
Surfers all shared a commonality in a deep contempt for status quo and especially authority. To this day, I still have this “problem.” On April 23, 1976, in the final month of high school for me, I heard that I was not alone in a huge way. The Ramones released their first album. As soon as I dropped that needle onto the album it became an anthem for me. "Hey ho, let's go!" The first punks were long hairs like me and I could finally “dance” to music, jumping up and down was actually called doing The Pogo. I knew absolutely no cheerleaders, popular kids or jocks that surfed and was proud to strut my skinny ass around campus wearing puka shell necklaces, stupidly bright polyester Hawaiian shirts, jeans with holes all over them and “Jap Flaps”, exactly what we called them, huge oblong flip flops with weaved grass under your feet and a velvet thong that went between your toes. Walking into a quiet classroom late always turned heads before you even got into the door, “flap, flap, flap” slapping the floor as you pulled the door open, your Hawaiian shirt blinding the teacher.
Everything we did, wore and aspired to be stemmed from wanting to be different. We were Hawaiians in Orlando. Surf bums is the perfect title. Riding big waves like our heroes in the surf mags was it. All we wanted to do in life. Too bad high schools, along with all the other fucking club photos, sports teams photos, faculty photos and geeky student of the year photos, didn’t care to highlight a page dedicated to proud surf losers. These people that I ended up on Oahu with would have been on that page.
How they each arrived to the island is a story that needs telling.
He had grown up walking distance from Canoes, a perfect place to learn to surf in Waikiki. Going to elementary school at the base of Diamond Head, every afternoon meant running home to drop off school stuff and grab surfboards for afternoons of fun in the water with friends. Dan “HoBitch” Lefforge had an idyllic life for 10 years there on Oahu, a very happy kid. Except that his parents fought and eventually the divorce happened. His mother packed up her kids and went to a suburb of Orlando to begin a new life. She had moved as far away as possible. Dan was lost in a different world. Except by some chance of fate, those that seem predetermined in some weird manifestation of direction, that one that changes a life forever, his mother had chosen to rent a small house right next door to one of the most unique families in Orlando, The Albershardts.
Steve “Turtle” Albershardt was the third of four, very active brothers born to Jill and Dick Albershardt, sweethearts from Indiana who had moved to the Orlando area because Dick had wanted to go into business with his brother, building condominiums. The 1956 NCAA National Champion on trampoline at Indiana University, Dick was an internationally famous comedian on a specially designed trampoline that he travelled all over the world with, performing in Vietnam with Bob Hope twice and appearing on the Ed Sullivan Show several times. He had wanted to try to settle down with his family, but he was ripped off by his brother in the business and kept at what he knew best, traveling to perform. At the same time that Dan had moved in next door, skateboarding had taken over the country with the invention of new wheels made of urethane that allowed skaters to go vertical on ramps and pools. Skateboard parks were being suddenly built in several areas in Florida and competitions were held. Two of the Albershardt brothers, Steve and his older brother Mark, became trophy winners. Dan, being from Hawaii, was considered cool and began to hang out at next door. As surfers as well as skaters, they soon were off to the beach together riding along with Mark, who was old enough to drive.
Jon “Maynard” Imhoof is my younger brother by three years. Our youngest brother, Karl, died tragically when he drowned in a local lake when he was just over a year old. How this affected both of us has never been discussed and our parents chose to never mention Karls name again. I am guessing without any proper counselling, I am pretty angry with God about it. I do know that Maynard at this particular time that I am writing about, was a high school dropout who, at the age of fifteen, had already been surfing in El Salvador and Mexico. At the time, El Salvador was in the midst of a deadly civil war. Maynard came back from that trip never wanting for confidence ever again in his life. We had learned to surf together after returning from a summer trip to California via Greyhound bus, having witnessed the surf at Malibu, surfing became a jolt of absolute living that changed both of us. We had found the Grail. Jon dropped out of school because he “wasn’t learning anything.” Forced to pay rent by our parents, he began a series of extremely terrible jobs such as being the crab cook at the oyster restaurant where I worked, making smoothies at a health food bar where he spent his afternoon break locking the door and smoking bong hits in the bathroom and as a pizza chef. At the pizza job, Maynard was provided a small pickup truck by the business for deliveries. When a call would come for a pizza to go, Maynard would get the address and then immediately dial another number. This one to another punk named Jimmy Page, the son of freedom loving hippy artists who let the boys build a skateboard ramp in the backyard. Page famously was getting his haircut by a neighborhood girl. When she asked how he wanted it, he muttered, “I don’t give a crap, just make it look shitty.” Maynard would deliver the hot pizza and then get “lost” picking up Page and others to raid construction sites of building supplies such as nails, 2x4s and sheets of plywood. The owner of the pizza place never knew why pizza took so long to be delivered or that he had unknowingly supported the construction of a massive twelve foot tall skateboard ramp that could be heard in use day and into the evenings once it had been completed. Due to complaints from neighbors, it was dis -assembled within weeks.
In 1976, every single teenager that I knew had a job. Part time unless you were a dropout like Maynard and had to pay rent. Parents from the depression era valued work and required us to earn for ourselves. I bussed tables, cleaned nast RV rentals at Disney and shucked oysters at a popular place called Lee and Ricks. The cream job was at a place on Park Avenue, Orando’’s attempted version of Europe on a street. Cool little bars and eating spots. At the center of it all was a cafe called The East India Ice Cream Company. The management hired as waitresses, hot chicks from Rollins College just up the road and high school aged kids with personality to work the kitchen. The kitchen staff was known to be always smiling and laughing because they would regularly take hits off of the nitrogen gas that was used to make the coffee and specialty drinks. It was a hangout of all kinds of different people from town where you could just pour your own coffee to talk, study or people watch for hours. They never hasselled customers to leave or buy anything else. This is undoubtedly why they went out of business. A few years ago at a party, I was introduced to the aged owner who I had never met. When I attempted to tell him that I had this story about workers at East India and it changing lives, he misheard me thinking I had worked there. He looked me in the eye angrily and asked “what did you steal? Everyone stole something from me there!” The kitchen happened to be staffed by Maynard, Turtle and another surfer named James “Aves”Avis. Three reasons the nitrogen tank emptied sooner than it was supposed to. A frequent customer who bought the cheap cup of coffee and wasted hours there spending nothing else was a punk of the non fiction, authentic version. The son of an Air Force career father, Mike Watts was infamous around town because the cops followed him everywhere he went, like a pissed off pied piper dressed all in black. Walking through the Winter Park Police Department parking lot one sunny Florida afternoon after school, Watts had taken bricks that were being used to repave the streets in town to make them more retro appealing and thrown whatever he could hold under his arms full force through several cop car windows. He had had enough of authority. Given community service and probation by the judge, Watts was endlessly hounded around town evermore. When he went for walks or while riding his bike, there was always a cop car following him. While at East India, he would sit on the outermost table and have a staring contest with a patrol car parked across the street. He had the perfect last name, Watts - the unit of electric power. Everyone called him Watts.
Maynard was working the kitchen at East India saving for another trip. In the late seventies, Costa Rica was rumored to be a forested paradise with waves all over the country, uncrowded beach breaks and long points at the end of days of bus rides. Like many moments in life that at the time seem irrelevant, this decision of his alone changed not only his life forever, but also the lives of mine, Turtle, Aves, Watts, HoBitch and The Big Galluch as well as two girls, Maynard’s girlfriend Julie and Anita. Anita eventually marrying Watts in Hawaii.
HoBitch was working a cush job as a waiter at the very posh French restaurant in Orlando called Le Cordon Bleu. The Big Galluch was parking cars for bit tips and then snorting it away on eight balls of coke he split with other valets. Turtle talked to HoBitch about the Costa Rica trip and they immediately went to East India. Maynard had already told Aves he could come along and the addition of another was no big deal. Maynard was planning to leave them anyway after a few weeks and head to Peru. So it was that those three were set to go when two weeks before departure, Aves broke his arm skateboarding. He offered his ticket to Turtle. A free ticket to Costa Rica, where he took his skateboard moves for the first time in challenging waves. Surfing Florida was never going to be the same again.
A year later, HoBitch turned eighteen. He returned to Oahu to live with his father who required that he study at the University of Hawaii. He decided on chemistry as a degree. After the first swell back on the island, a letter was written to Maynard. “What the hell are you guys doing in Florida? Get the fuck over here!”
And so it was that the dominoes fell and one by one, these people left everything in Central Florida behind for the promised land. We had surfed together at Haleiwa, Gas Chambers and Rocky Point. The time came to test ourselves at one of the worlds most notoriously punishing and demanding surfing spots, a place where the lineup was full of heavy locals and professional surfers, Sunset Point.
Nicknames
HoBitch - After getting a VW bus, Dan regularly hounded anyone riding to the beach for coins for gas. On one occasion, the surfer got angry about being hassled for money and said “Ok! Ho Bitch, you got change for a five?”
Turtle - When one photo was developed taken of Steve skateboarding a homemade ramp, his older brother said “look at that! You look just like a fucking Turtle.” It stuck although his personality was anything but Turtle like. More like a mosquito.
Maynard - Jon was given this nickname because of his uncanny mannerisms. A character from a popular surfing comic called Maynard and The Rat by the artist Bob Penuelas for Surfer Magazine. Maynard was a constantly stoked to surf character and the name fit Jon perfectly. At the time, literally everything Maynard did revolved around surfing or skateboarding.
This story is from a memoir that I am writing called “kings of Oahu” that is based on a simple question often difficult to answer. What was the best year of your life? My answer came easy, the first season that I spent surfing Oahu in 1984/85. The reason why was the people that I was with. You can start from the first story
I have tried to recreate events, locales, and conversations from my memories of them. In order to maintain their anonymity in some instances I have changed the names of individuals and places, I may have changed some identifying characteristics and details such as physical properties, occupations, and places of residence.
Wow, you have a memory for the details, Mark. I had long since forgotten rewinding cassettes with a pencil, but it was incredibly relevant to the time. Referencing the Cold War hiding under desks was superlative! I recall those idiotic drills well. The Ramones? I have to admit, they were not on my hit list, but puka shells were, and flip flops were year-round classics, even for this Northeastern-born girl.
Thank you for sharing information about the cast of characters you spent your days with, as it explains so much about the collective search for waves and living on the edge. Sorry for the tragedy of losing a brother; how traumatic it must have been for your family.
Having started working at the age of 11, I understand the reference to our parents' work requirements. From babysitting to teaching swim lessons and lifeguarding, bussing, then waitressing at a family-style restaurant, chambermaiding at a hotel, and working in a jewelry store, all these experiences provided me with ample beach time all summer. I lived for sunny days and waves.
Thanks for the trip down memory lane. I look forward to reading about Sunset Point.