A'ight, so far as I know, nunyuz was born in Commiefornia within 20 miles of the beach like I was. So here's your West Coast Cultural Anthropology minute for the day.
This is Tom Blake. The picture was taken in 1922, but if I'd cropped it carefully and asked you to guess when it was taken, I bet most of you would guess it was much later because you don't have to spend more than a minute or two in SoCal now to see a bunch of guys that look just like this. It might seem a trivial thing to note. It's just a consequence of being in the water at the shore, right? Yes and no. Tom Blake always looked like this. When everyone else, and I mean EVERYONE else was spending most of their waking hours in suits with carefully greased hair, Tom Blake looked like this. All the time. He lived out of a van in California, or in a shack on the beach in Hawaii, wore baggy shorts and sandals, and simply ignored everyone else's definition of a "normal life" in favor of surfing. In the 1920's. What we now refer to as "the surfer look" can be traced back to one man - Thomas E. Blake. He was not just a typical surfer, or the prototypical surfer, he was the archetype. And he was the archetype not because he invented the look - Pacific Islanders had been looking like that for millennia - but because he decided if it was appropriate for the beach, it was appropriate everywhere else, too...and fuck you and your expectations very much if you disagreed.
He is the guy who invented the hollow-core surfboard, and the first to put a skeg (fin) on a board. He also invented the sailboard, the underwater camera, and wrote the first book on surfing.
Oh, and no, he wasn't a California boy. He was born, and ultimately died, in Wisconsin.
