![]() As Tom Wolfe would soon declare of surfer culture in “The Pump-House Gang,” a signature piece of New Journalism, “practically everybody comes from a good family.” ![]() These were the 1961 Beach Boys, mind you-they of the short hair, the Hawaiian shirts, and the frat-rats-in-training voices that had yet to ascend to choirboy eloquence-so the surfing fad would be pegged initially as the province of bland, spoiled sons of Leave It to Beaver parents living in the suburbs. The seven-page article, “The Mad, Happy Surfers: A Way of Life on the Wavetops,” published that September in an issue with Jackie Kennedy welcoming readers to the newly redecorated White House on the cover, would loft surfing into the national consciousness just before the first Beach Boys song, “Surfin’,” broke into the pop charts. That would start to change that day, though, when a Life-magazine photographer would sight the boys riding the waves at Malibu and make them stars of a photo spread. ![]() ![]() The sport that was their lifeline-surfing-had been lifted from obscurity two years earlier by a Sandra Dee movie called Gidget, but it still wasn’t something young America was dying to do, the way dancing to rock ‘n’ roll and twirling Hula Hoops had been. One summer day in 1961, three 16-year-old Beverly Hills boys-Mike Nader, Duane King, and Larry Shaw-got up at dawn in their separate homes and eagerly pulled on their swim trunks. ![]()
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