Lost Hills: Dark CanyonMiki Dora, Malibu’s most celebrated surfer, was known as Da Cat. Gorgeous, graceful, and debonair, Miki was intimidating. He ruled Malibu from the 1950s to the 1970s. But then, he disappeared. Because Miki was not just a surfer. He was a con artist, who led the FBI on a 7 year hunt around the globe, while he searched for the perfect wave.
Pushkin Hey, Lost Hills listeners, it's Dana. I wanted to let you know that you can hear the entire new season of Lost Hills ad free, along with other great binge listens by becoming a Pushkin Plus subscriber. Find Pushkin Plus on the Lost Hills Show page in Apple Podcasts, or at pushkin dot fm slash Plus. Not too long ago, I met a surfer named Denny Auburg. He lives in Santa Barbara now, but he learned to surf in Malibu when the sport was barely known on the mainland.
I still go surfing after about sixty two years of surfing, go down to Rincon and live close by him. I still have the stoke.
Denny told me a story about one of his early surf experiences, a day that made an indelible impression on him. It was nineteen fifty nine. He was twelve. The waves at Malibu were huge, but he and his friend decided to paddle out anyway. They were kooks. They didn't know what they were doing.
So we were beginners. You know. We're down at Malibu and it was a big day, you know, But we went out by the pier when it gets real big. You have to go way down by the piero to paddle out, and so we jump in the water with our boards, you know, a little skinny twelve year olds and start turning out a little skinny arms, you know, doing this kook paddle trying to get out, and a big set of waves, I mean, the big waves came like a row of five or six waves. Out to see them, I never forget this, the beauty of this wave coming.
As the wave approached, Denny saw there was a c on it.
Just perfectly placed on this wave, just trimming at the very top of the wave. And there's a precision. When you're trim it means your board's flushed sideways to the wave, it's inside it, and you're getting speed that way because it's in the right position. The fins just hanging on at the top of the wave, and it's hand position. The way he's kind of arching in the little vales of water coming off to those. It was the most gorgeous thing, you know, the colors. He's riding this wind blowing spin drifts back and we're just watching this thing. Oh my god. But we realized he was coming right at us, you know, We were the cooks in his way, you know, coming right at us, so we had to turn sideways. You know, it's hard to explain, but when you turn broadside, you just get obliterated. It just took our board, It just took us and lasted us, churning into the white water down by the end of the pilings of the pier, I really felt like I was going to drown. My friend told me I almost drowed. I don't remember, but I remember spitting out sand, and you know, just like, oh my god, who was that guy?
Who was that guy? His name was Mickey Dora, also known as the Cat, also known as the Dark Prince of Malibu. In the nineteen fifties, as surfing spread from Hawaii to California, Mickey gained a reputation as the most dynamic and watchable surfer on the mainland. He was Malibu's first homegrown celebrity and the surf world's first personality. He put Malibu on the map. Mickey Dora was beautiful and charismatic, but he was all shade. You don't earn that name the Dark Prince for nothing. He represented Malibu's dark side. What I think of as Malae's true nature. He violently opposed the happy, sun drenched Malibu that would come to dominate pop culture, starting with the Gidget movies in the late fifties, Malibu Barbie in the seventies, and everything that came after that. He hated Gidget and everything she stood for new surfers, girl surfers, surfers he thought didn't belong. He went to war for the soul of Malibu, the soul of surfing. Some days I think he won. Mickey Dora was a surfing Jesse James, an unrepentant outlaw, idolized by the so called wild kids of Malibu Beach. A scoundrel who people say would screw them over for fun, scam them, steal from them, and break their hearts. A rebel who made his own rules. The legends were endless, mostly not fact check, and Mickey was their primary author. He stole Ringo Stars snuffbox or was it John Lennon's lighter? He dated Cher before Sonny. He knew who kidnapped Frank Sinatra Junior. He was a diamond smuggler, a drug lord, a double agent, a European aristocrat, a prophet of the coming apocalypse, he was an emotionally unstable man, armed and dangerous. That one was courtesy of the FBI, who tried to catch him for seven years. Because in the early seventies, at the height of his fame, when some of his bad deeds were catching up with him, Mickey just disappeared. He went on the lamb, leading law enforcement on a goose chase that spanned the globe. But while the law was hunting him, he was hunting something else. The Perfect Wave, a once in a century event sometimes called the rogue Wave or the episodic Wave or the Ninth Wave. Does that sound familiar. If it does, that's because it's a lot like the plot of Point Break, the cult classic from nineteen ninety one. In Point Break, Patrick Swayzee plays a groovy surfer named Body who robbed banks so he could travel the world and find the Perfect Wave. Well, Mickey was a real life Body, minus the Kumbaya.
He said, criminals break the laws. I live outside the law.
Mickey's alias is Richard Austin, Roach Junior, micklos Dora, Mickey Dora.
It was a Swiss bank, and yeah, they found four hundred thousand dollars in the bank.
Alexander Dora.
Nobody knows exactly where it came from.
There were all sorts of theories.
Miklos Dora, Cornell, Michael s Chapin.
Australia, New Zealand, Bali, Thailand, Malaysia, India, and I'm probably missing a few, all of Europe.
Michael spring Chapin.
He went to amazing places before anybody was doing that stuff by himself.
Nicol spring Chapin, Michael Stanley Chapin.
You don't have to be a conspiracy theorist to connect the dots around this.
Alexander Micholas and I fell in love the minute he walked out of the water, until I realized he was a scoundrel.
In a road and was training me to be an accomplice.
I'm going to get in big trouble for saying all this. He was narcissistic, but also incredibly intelligent and also i'd say a little bit sociopathic.
It just all gets darker and darker and darker until I just want to sort of turn away from it.
I don't want to know about it anymore.
At its core, surfing as a counterculture, so Mickey being an anti hero that just makes some Surfings Hero, I'm Dana Goodyear and this is Lost Hills Season three, The Dark Prince, Episode one. The legend of Mickey Dora.
Who is the best in the world, Who's the worst in the world.
I don't give a fuck. I don't give a damn.
Do you want to think I'm any good?
Fine?
If they don't think I'm any good, I don't give a shit. I have there no right ways and enjoy myself.
Mickey Dora died from pancreatic cancer in two thousand and two. For reasons I'll get into later, there are very few publicly available recordings of him. What you're about to hear is probably the longest and most revealing clip that's out there. It's from a nineteen ninety documentary called Surfers the movie. In it, Mickey lays out his surfing philosophy.
My whole life is this escape.
My whole life is this way. If I drop into set the whole thing up, pull up a bottom troom and pull up into it and shoot for my life going in for prom and behind me all of the shit goes over my back.
He had been such a big part of surf history, and as a kid, I soaked all that up. I started surfing in the mid seventies, late seventies.
This is Kelly Slater, the eleven time World Surf League champion. He's regarded as the greatest surfer of all time. When he was in his twenties, Kelly had the chance to spend time with Mickey Dora.
It was part of the experience, you know, it was a part of a essentially like a grassroots experience to be around Mickey Dora in the surf world because he was a legend. He was a living character to us, to people in my era and just before me. Mickey was He's one of the biggest names in surfing, and he did represent the lifestyle and the freedom that surfers have and you know, a means to an end to go travel around the world and surf.
Mickey was one of the original California surfers, an innovator who was among the few standout masters, certainly the most notorious and memorable. At the moment that surfing exploded into the mainstream. Mickey had an ideology about surfing. Casual surfers they should get out of his way, or better yet, stay out of Malibu altogether. Professionals like Slater, they were defiling something sacred. Mickey's way was total commitment and total freedom, no rules.
The cool thing about Mickey's story is there's always been this sort of tinge of like a little bit of an outlaw lifestyle or something. An expat, a traveling person, somebody there's a little bit of mystery in their life or whatever. That was really prominent back in the fifties and sixties and seventies and surfing, and it really built up the lore of mysterious characters.
Around the world.
I don't know if all the stories I heard were true or not, but that was the early days of like seven. Maybe he pictured himself as like this kind of like almost like a spy in this surf world or something, and that was sort of celebrated to have this sort of life at all costs and make it fun while you're doing it.
I started surfing ten years ago, and there's not another way to say it. I felt totally in love with it. The smell of the wax, the taste of salt, the squinting into the sun, the scar I'll have forever from the rock at low Tide Malibu that cut through my wetsuit and gashed my shin. I love the salty, shaggy people who seem to congregate around the southern California breaks people with stories from the not that distant past, when mainland surfing was born. I got into surfing when I had a newborn and a two year old, was writing a book and teaching at a university and writing full time for The New Yorker. I was living in a world of obligations, deadlines, bedtimes, clocks, a life measured out in teaspoons. Very unfree surfing released me temporarily from that identity. It let me drop out, It let me live life by the tides. This one day, early in my time surfing, I was in the water at Sunset, a beginner's spot between Santa Monica and Malibu where you park along Pacific Coast Highway and scramble down the rocks with your board. I was sitting there in the long lag between sets of waves, bobbing, looking up to the highway, watching all the cars streaming by. So many times I'd been in my car on that stretch of road. I glanced over at the surfers in the water below. They had seemed scenic a picturesque feature of Los Angeles. But now I was in the waves, and it was the opposite the cars, the city clustered at the ocean's edge. That was the backdrop. That world looked temporary, illusory. This here was real. To this day, Mickey Dora is held up as an idol many people's idea of a pure surfer. That was the case for Denny Auburg, for sure. He idolized Mickey as a kid on the beach in Malibu, and you can hear it in his voice. He still does.
Mickey is twelve years older than me. He was a man when we were kids, you know, twenty five serious.
Denny's house is a simple wooden structure on his buddy's avocado farm. The window ledges are lined with surf memorabilia, trophies and plaques and photos of Denny as a tow headed teenager.
Yes, a picture of him.
This is you surfing.
Yeah, that's Mickey Dora next to me.
Your style is not totally different from Mickey's.
Yeah, we probably all copied Mickey. You know, he was a big influence. That's another thing, you know that people copied his style and learned from him. You know, he was a teacher just by doing it, you know, taught us what to do, you know, how to ride a wave.
You know.
Amazing.
The way Mickey served it was poetic. No one who saw it could forget it, and no one could match him, though everyone tried.
His nickname was the Cat because he had feline grace on a wave, you know, the way pussy fliped to the nose, you know, boom boom, real agile. You know. They call him the cat. That's why they made him, not because he was a cat burglar, but I guess he was that.
Along with Mickey's unparalleled ability on a surfboard, his appearance was unique on the beaches of southern California in a sea of boy scout blondes. He was obsidian dark hair and eyes, and the kind of complexion people often called a swarthy.
The fact that the guy who caught our attention the most is this hairy, dark haired guy who didn't look at all like the archetype. I respond to that as well.
This is Matt Warshaw. He's a surf historian and the curator of an incredible online resource called The Encyclopedia of Surfing.
In the surf world, You know, he looks so perfect to be that person, the way Bowie looks so good to be the person for that period of glam rock, you know. And it's not even the handsomeess grinned by itself. It's almost like this chesture cap thing like sometimes you think of Dora. It's like the rest of him sort of fades away and it's just this dark hair and that really sort of devilish grin.
But what really set Mickey apart was the persona he invented. Mickey Dora was a character, a complex self invention that was meant to draw a maximum attention and to throw people of his trail.
Mickey seemed to have I guess what we would call a brand, and I got.
The feeling that he dressed sort of for us.
He you know, he would show up in things that you wouldn't expect a surfer to wear, you know, he would just wear a tennis sweater to the beach. I read someone said that NICKI would show up with a starlet one day, and they'd show up with two really pretty boys the next day. So I think that he was never not having fun and sort of just enjoying himself, especially in these early years, just sort of playing with the image of being a surfer before anybody else was doing it.
The ocean is infinite, but waves, waves shaped for surfing with a face and room to play, are finite. The deepest joy in surfing comes from a long, uninterrupted ride. That's the whole point, to be alone on a way or so I hear. I've been surfing in Los Angeles for a decade and I've rarely had a wave to myself for more than a few seconds. There are too many surfers and not enough waves. Denny Auberg remembers the time before the early nineteen fifties when Malibu was an undiscovered wave. Most days it was only Nicki, Dora and one or two others in the water.
And you had this wonderful wave to yourself, which makes a big difference, because when you have a wave to yourself and a perfect wave, you get the right of your life and nobody gets in your way, and it's just the nature all around you, and it's yours, you know, and it's a personal connection with nature that it's hard to duplicate, you know, It's just nothing like it because it's so gorgeous in the water and the wind blowing the waves back, and you're free and there's no distractions you in the ways.
Malibu is a perfect long, right breaking wave that peals from way off the point to the Malibu Pier, and Mickey Dora owned it for about two decades from the early fifties to the early seventies. And because it was Malibu, that meant that Mickey Doora stood for something, an attitude that would spread through the culture. Here's how one of his admirers wrote about Mickey's influence in an authorized biography, quote, he was our Elvis. There was no one else to articulate the fundamental gestures of the sociopathic manifesto of a coalescing youth consciousness unquote. The youth were sociopaths, and Mickey was their leader up until nineteen seventy four, when he vanished from Malibu. That's when he became their god.
It was a mystery. It was kind of like, where's Mickey Dora And they still had his name on the wall. Some guy spray Can Dora lives you know, on the wall and stayed there forever, you know, and it kind of left us. He left his mark in that way, you know, and people would wonder where's Mickey. Nobody knew. It was very much of a mystery for years because he was on the run, you know, and kind of like Billy the Kid, you know, he was gone. He's kind of had this reputation the bad boy on the run, the fugitive, so it added to his reputation.
Mickey Dora was a born con man. He could talk his way into anything and out of almost everything, because alleged scams ranged petty and kind of ridiculous, like renting out surfboards that didn't belong to him, to blatantly criminal credit card fraud, fake plane tickets, stolen ski equipment, stolen antiques, stolen passports. Eventually, his schemes would land him in federal prison. You associated with him at your own risk. Denny Auberg has a story about this, the kind of thing that would happen on a typical day hanging out with Mickey in the early seventies, Denny was invited to Kawhai by a Hawaiian surfer named Joey Cabbell. At the time, Mickey was also in Hawaii. Cabell told Denny he'd like to see Mickey too, so.
I called up Mickey and told him, Joey invited you to come, and he came right over. He shut up. It was amazing.
Coabell, who was in peak physical shape, proposed the hike to a beach to spend the night. It was an eleven mile hike and not an easy one.
So I'm trudging along with Mickey on this really tough hike, you know, for us, and we're like city slickers. Dora had these leather boots on, really the wrong equipment, you know, and I was kind of feeling a little sick myself, and it got dark on us, and we're going through these canyons and pushing branches away. Micky was tortured.
Finally they arrived at the beach. They were exhausted and Denny was starting to feel really bad.
He passed out in some cave, you know. He woke up in the morning and Micky could see that I was a little sick, so he is mine started working like, I can't hike back. I got to figure something out. He saw this helicopter go by, you know, and it was they had a tourist, So Micky had an idea.
Mickey slipped away and went down to the shoreline, where he gathered up some rocks and used them to write S O S in big letters.
The next day, I know, the helicopter lands on this path down the beach and Mickey goes up. He talks to the guy. I don't know what he was saying, but apparently he was telling the guy that my friend's dying on the beach. We need help. And the guy said, I can't come back right now, but you know soon did I take these people? And right before dark, this guy came back and Micky says, come on, that's it, let's go what oh okay, start start doing the fifty yard dash toward this helicopter down the beach, and Mickey says, slow down. You got to act a little sicker, you know. We walk up to the helicopter pilot and he kind of looks at me and I was trying to stick her, and he opens the door. He let me in to the helicopter and Mickey starts to get in behind him and the guy goes, oh, no, it's not you. It's just a sick guy, you know, you know, no make Mickey pulls out this little bottle. He said, I'm having an asthma attack. I can't breathe. You know, my feeter bleeding. I can't walk, you know, you just started crying the guy. You could tell the guy wasn't buying it, but he let him in, so we got lifted off the pad. It was the most beautiful majestic thing. I mean, the serrated mountains is colors, you know, and running this little bubble up in the sky. And Mickey turns, he says, our magic carpet.
Right when the helicopter landed in town, there were news reporters and cameras everywhere.
They thought somewhere they were bringing the dead guy. You know, we land and all these people kind of crowded around me, you know. And as soon as I get out and they go, where's the sick guy? Oh that was me? And they're all disappointed, you know, and they leave. Mickey was disappeared. He's nowhere, tom around. He disappeared on me. He left me holding the bag. So he pulled this whole thing off, and I went through and got checked out. I did have some little dysentery thing. The cops had gone looking for Mickey and they found him trying to rent a car at the airport and they dragged him back. You know, they were trying to interview the guy, and he's showing him all these fake ideas, and one said Chapin and the other one said Dora, who are you? Are you Chapin our Dora? And he's laughing, I'm chaping Dora, you know. And I don't know how it happened, but he got out of the whole thing, and I was the fall guy.
To Mickey, Dora, the highest value was freedom, and that to him meant doing whatever served him best in any situation. For Mickey, freedom took priority over any other moral or ethical consideration, and he would do or say almost anything to get what he wanted. In nineteen seventy four, Mickey left Malibu and set out on an adventure that took him all over the world searching for the perfect empty wave. He didn't have the money to travel like this, but he did it anyway, using blank airline tickets that he filled out for whatever destination he wanted.
Mickey had a whole bunch from a woman who worked at the Pan American office.
This is Linda Kai, Mickey's girlfriend, an accomplice for much of the nineteen seventies.
You could actually write your own tickets back in those days, they were paper tickets written on and all you needed to know was the mile age, and he had all the paraphernalia to work her out. Now, I don't know who the girl was and gave him the stuff. He must have made a sweet you know. But you're flying on these sort of forged Everything was fake.
They shopped and dined and stayed in nice hotels, all of it, according to Linda on forged credit cards, and all while being tracked from surf spot to surf spot by baffled agents of the FBI and Interpol.
Back in the day, credit cards were plastic, of course, but they didn't have the strips on the back like they do nail the manuscrip. They had numbers and dates. I was assigned to take a little razor blade and change some numbers, and we did and make it good for another month.
Mickey had a way of justifying all this theft and deception.
Mickey described at once as he says, I'm not a criminal. He says, I don't commit crimes. He says, I'm an outlaw. He says, and there's a difference.
Did you buy it?
Yes, I still do.
One of the great accomplishments that Mickey set out and probably was successful at was never working a day in his life. That was his real goal, and he accomplished it. I don't know if he ever actually had a job.
Jim Kempton used to be the editor of Surfer magazine, and these days he runs the California Surf Museum. He knew Mickey pretty well in the seven when they were both living in a surf town in the south of France. In fact, Mickey crashed at his place a lot, used his shower and his kitchen. One day, Jim noticed his passport was missing.
And then sitting on the beach, you know, maybe two weeks later, I see this South African guy look sort of like me, and there's my passport.
Micky sold it to him.
I'm sure he did. I don't have I mean, how would you ever prove that right unless you arrested them both, which I was not going to do in any event.
Did you ever say anything to Mickey about it? In the surf world, it was almost currency to be scammed by Mickey. You'd come away from the experience with a story to dine out on for years. Mickey's appeal was not in spite of his criminality.
But because of it, there's a.
Lot of people who love the outlaw, who loved getting away with it is something that for many people is a great satisfaction to them to see people be able to accomplish that, and Mickey for a long time was able to do that without payment. We tend to idolize our outlaws. Jesse James, pretty Boy Floyd. You know, you hear those stories about them, you'd think that those guys were somehow like heroic. They are sociopathic killers, every one of them, you know, that murdered people in cold blood and yet did they give to the poor. Yeah, they did, mostly though, to say, to make sure that they didn't tell the cops where they were. We definitely idolize our outlaws. That's just something that is I think baked into the American psyche.
And it's very prominent in surf culture.
Very few nice guys are as idolized as the bad boys are, and.
As Mickey Dora the most idolized of the bad boys.
He's not one of the most idolized the bad boys, who's also the most bad guys of the bad guys.
The darkest parts of Mickey Dora, though, don't have anything to do with his hustles and his cons or even with the more serious fraud for which he eventually served time. The darkest parts of Mickey have to do with his soul and the attitudes he harbored there of exclusion, racism, and xenophobia, a pattern of hate that maps onto the white, white world of mainland surfing, where he was Malibu's superstar, in his sunglasses, with his cheshire Cat smile, showing all the little sociopaths how it was done.
Mickey Dora was a secret key to California culture, and an invisible thread that wound up running through much of what we know is modern California culture. You look at how California culture has affected America's culture and how America's culture has gone on to affect the world, and you can kind of draw a line back to Dora on a number of different things.
D V.
Divisentis is a film and television writer who, back in two thousand and four, was hired to write a movie about Mickey.
I was approached by Appian Way, which is Leonardo DiCaprio's company.
The movie never happened, but it was supposed to start. DiCaprio as Decat just two years after he played the con artist Frank Abagnail Junior and Catch Me if you can. Dev ended up spending a lot of time thinking about Mickey Dora.
He embodied, in both his thinking and his actions, the contradiction between not being a native to somewhere and somehow feeling proprietary about that place.
Surfing is supposed to be a feel good sport, right wrong. Surfing is a club and the membership is capped.
Everybody's getting pissed off about being displaced, and everybody's getting pissed off about being commodified, and everybody's being pissed off about sharing resources and sharing territory, and it just never ends. And it still it just goes on to today. So you have people like Mickey who have picked a spot where it's supposed to be and nobody else is supposed to show up. I think that Mickey himself was very aware of the fact that he was excusing himself from any prosecution for being an invader, and it's just like, yeah, yeah, I know, I am too, but we're done now. No more after me.
The way Mickey Dora saw the world, I have no business surfing, and neither do you not at Malibu? Not anywhere? Knowing of my interest in the dark side of Malibu, a friend of mine, a fifth generation Californian who grew up surfing in Santa Monica and Venice, turned me on to an essay that ran in the June July nineteen seventy six issue of Surfer Magazine. It was called the Curse of the Shumash subtitle Malibu is a land of strange occurrences and contrast. This was right up my street. I bought a copy of the magazine on eBay. It turned out to be an odd piece of work, a pseudohistory of Malibu told through the vibrant surf culture that flourished there and apparently guyed circa nineteen seventy six with the introduction of Malibu Barbie. The piece was peppered with arcane references to Mickey Dora, his antics, and his self imposed exile. He was obviously the star of the article, of the place and of the time. Flipped through it, studying the grainy photographs. On one page there were several pictures of Mickey going down the line at Malibu, and on the facing page there was a picture of Mickey in a dinner jacket, sunglasses, and maybe a wig, holding a surf contest trophy in one hand and a baby doll in the other. He's standing in front of a sign for Camario State Hospital, a mental institution that some say was the Hotel California the Eagles sang about the one you could check out from but never leave. In the image, Mickey also has a surfboard with him angled away from the camera so it dominates the lower half of the frame, and on the bottom of the board is an enormous swastika. Who wrote this thing? I flipped back to the byline, Carlos Eizan Iszan is an unusual name. It took me a second to realie that it was a pseudonym. Aizan is Nazi spelled backwards. My friend who'd recommended this essays Jewish and not in any way sympathetic to this kind of stuff. He's just into the Malibu lore like I am, and probably hadn't read the piece since it came out in nineteen seventy six. But looking at it now I felt a kind of uncomfortable recognition. Something, unfortunately was starting to make sense. Much as I love surfing, there are things about it I have to suppress in order to keep enjoying it. Signals that there is something rotten there. There's the sign at my local break that warns koochs to stay off the main takeoff spot. There's the scarcity of black surfers in the water. There are the reports year after year of swastikas and Hyle Hitler's and antisemitic flyers in beachtowns across southern California. In twenty twenty one, in Manhattan Beach, a coastal city in La County, an older white surfer was filmed yelling the N word at two young black men in the water. A nearby teenager told them, this is a locals beach.
Hateful, racist and anti Semitic messages spray painted all over the playground of a South Bay elementary school.
Yeah, and this is not the first time or even the second time.
And this was just in twenty twenty two, within a couple miles of that same beach.
A photo of a giant swastika which we've blurred, spray painted in the middle of the playground and you could see some kids playing nearby.
Whatever's going on here? Call it surfing's Nazi problem. It goes back decades. Mickey didn't invent this, but he played the supremacist to the hilt. Malibu belonged to him. Some called him the dark Prince. He called himself Malibu's quote rightful king. He believed himself to be superior, and everyone around him told him he was right. As surfing was discovered and began to be widely popular in the sixties, he railed that Malibu was being overrun with quote kooks of all colors, fags and finks, and a thousand other social deviations unquote. He railed against the gidget movies that had exposed Malibu to the masses. He let it be known that this was why he had to leave. Too many people who didn't belong were ruining his wave and everywhere he went. Mickey's stoked conflict, feeding surfing's rebellious young with stories of his exile and all those who'd done him wrong.
There's a lot of faults I can find with this culture that I was in the middle of for forty something years. Arguably still am, but I no longer sort of here to defend it. So putting Dora into all that, you know, there's just a lot about it that isn't great, and Mickey on his bad days is right at the center of all that.
Matt Warshaw, the surf historian, remembers being a kid and seeing this famous photoshoot of Mickey Dora that was printed in Surfer Magazine in nineteen sixty nine, and there was a.
Three shot sequence of him surfing where he comes down the way.
It's Malibu.
He's dropping in you can see a surfer in front of him, and the next picture Mickey's doing a turn off the bottom and the surfer in front of him is kind of looking back. And the third shot is Mickey's just shot his board right at the guy and it's gone right across his chest and knocked him off.
His feet right.
And at nine because I surfed Malibu where I was going to surf Malibu, and I just it's so bought into Kook's go home kind of thing. This was Dora regulating. Look what he's doing. You know, he's doing what needs to be done to get rid of the Koks. That guy dropped in on front of Mickey Dora, you know, get out of here, Kook and Da Da Da, and so as a kid. I thought that was kind of cool, and now I look at that now and I put that point right through that guy's back.
And it was terrible to me.
Mickey Dora presents a conundrum for surfers and anyone brought up on the California youth culture. He's so heavily influenced.
If I see a clip of Mickey surfing for a few seconds at Malibu, my heart as a surfer just it just melts, you know. If I just see a picture of him with that grin, there's something about that that speaks to my depths as a surfer. He's unresolved for me almost on a weekly basis. Like it's some days I'm very much on team Mickey, and some days I go, this guy's a really terrible human being. We need to put attention on and think about and talk about somebody else. Anytime I sort of spend enough time in his life looking at how he treated people and things that he said, I just start pulling away. How do I feel about Mickey Dora? You know, it depends on what day you ask me.
It seems like the surfing world is still not ready to have the Mickey Dora conversation.
Part of me is just saying, God, stay away from this.
But it seems to me that if I can make sense of Mickey Dora, who he was and what he did, what he means to people still, I'll get closer to the heart of this strange place Malibu, where the central question is about belonging insiders versus outsiders. Mickey was both. He was a shape shifter and a con man with a cruel and narcissistic streak entitled Charming and living entirely for himself? Is Mickey the secret key to California? If he is? It all begins in Malibu, on the beach where Mickey became famous. On the next episode of Lost Hills, a suspicious death sets Mickey on a strange new path.
At some point he was down in Mexico, I think, fishing and trying to not drink. He was going to row a dinghy out to a friend's boat, and the body turned up five days later.
That's next in episode two, Death in Mexico. Lost Hills is written and reported by Me Dana Goodyear. It's created by Me and Benadere and produced by Western Sound and Pushkin Industries. Subscribe to Pushkin Plus and You can binge the entire season right now ad free. Find Pushkin Plus on the Lost Hills show page in Apple Podcasts, or at pushkin dot fm, slash plus
