Pacific Passages: An Anthology of Surf Writing

47. “The Pump House Gang Meets the Black Panthers—or Silver Threads among the Gold in Surf City” (1966)

chapter 47 “The Pump House Gang Meets the Black Panthers—or Silver Threads among the Gold in Surf City” (1966) Tom Wolfe 1931– Tom Wolfe became known in the mid-1960s for his writings on car culture , collected in The Kandy-Kolored Tangerine-Flake Streamline Baby (1965), for his portrayal of the 1960s counterculture in The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test (1968), and for his association with writers who formed part of the New Journalism school of writing (The New Journalism , 1973). Later successful works include The Right Stuff (1979), The Bonfire of the Vanities (1987), and A Man in Full (1998). In this essay (the first of a two-part article), Wolfe made the important link between economic prosperity in Southern California and the growth of surf culture, which, like the car culture he described in The Kandy-Kolored Tangerine-Flake Streamline Baby, showed the great impact of teenage culture on American society. In his introduction to the collection of stories The Pump House Gang (1968), Wolfe captured other important shifts in surf culture of the time. He tracked the first movements of surfers into the counterculture and argued that their lifestyle had in fact established the foundation for the later generation of hippies. Wolfe also correctly foresaw that the generation of surfers from the boom years in the early 1960s would manage to hold on to that lifestyle past their teens and early twenties: The day I met the Pump House Gang, a group of them had just been thrown out of “Tom Coman’s garage,” as it was known. The next summer they moved up from the garage life to a group of apartments near the beach, a complex they named “La Colonia Tijuana.” By this time some were shifting from the surfing life to the advance guard of something else—the psychedelic head world of California. That is another story. But even the hippies, as 180 the heads came to be known, did not develop sui generis. Their so-called “dropping out” was nothing more than a still further elaboration of the kind of worlds that the surfers and the car kids I met—“The Hair Boys”—had been creating the decade before. The Pump House Gang lived as though age segregation were a permanent state, as if it were inconceivable that any of them would ever grow old, i.e. 25. I foresaw the day when the California coastline would be littered with the bodies of aged and abandoned Surferkinder, like so many beached whales. In fact, however, many of these kids seem to be able to bring the mental atmosphere of the surfer life forward with them into adulthood—even the adult world where you have to make a living. As evidence of this last comment, Wolfe focused (in the second installment of the essay) on what he called the “surfing millionaires”—John Severson (founder of Surfer magazine), Hobie Alter (early surf shop owner and inventor of the Hobie Cat), and Bruce Brown (director of The Endless Summer)—surfers over twenty-five who had managed to mold tremendously successful livings from the surfer lifestyle. The trend has continued today with a multibillion-dollar surf industry that furnishes myriad surfers both young and old with the means to continue living what Wolfe calls “The Life.” our boys n e v e r h a i r o u t . The black panther has black feet. Black feet on the crumbling black panther. Pan-thuh. Mee-dah. Pam Stacy , 16 years old, a cute girl here in La Jolla, California, with a pair of orange bell-bottom hip-huggers on, sits on a step about four steps down the stairway to the beach and she can see a pair of revolting black feet without lifting her head. So she says it out loud, “The black panther.” Somebody farther down the stairs, one of the boys with the major hair and khaki shorts, says, “The black feet of the black panther.” “Mee-dah,” says another kid. This happens to be the cry of a, well, underground society known as the Mac Meda Destruction Company. “The pan-thuh.” “The poon-thuh.” All these kids, seventeen of them, members of the Pump House crowd, are lollygagging around the stairs down to Windansea Beach, La Jolla, California, about 11 a.m., and they all look at the black feet, which the pump house gang | 181 are a woman...