JERSEY BOYS '69

Nick Holt reached out a few months ago asking for suggestions on how to get some old Super 8 home movie reels digitized. He was mostly excited about some long-lost Honolua Bay footage shot by his then-teenaged New Jersey-raised father during a family vacation in Maui, in 1969 or 1970. We're still waiting to see that, but in the meantime Nick has digitized and posted a few reels of his dad and friends surfing and fooling around on Long Beach Island. He sent me the links and I was pulled right into the screen.

This has happened before—I made this clip from similar 1965 8mm footage shot at Malibu, and this one from a 1975 East Coast road trip. Unknown surfers in unremarkable waves, in vignettes that are almost stereophonic for being so distant yet so familiar. If you surf—if you've ever even just spent a few days running around on the beach—you have a good idea what these anonymous teenagers are experiencing and feeling.

So maybe all we want here is what you get in the clip: two tightly-edited minutes set to a funky period-correct song.

But maybe we want more, I did anyway, so I asked Nick to have his dad give us some background info, to which Nick, a bit enigmatically, replied: "How deep down the rabbit hole would you like to go?"

Nick lives in Los Angeles, his father lives in Santa Cruz and can be, as Nick puts it, "a closed book." But Nick got his dad to open up a bit.

* * *

My father moved to California—first to Santa Barbara, then Santa Cruz—after his parents went through a traumatic divorce. The two couples you see in the boat at the beginning of the clip, they were all best friends. Then there was an affair, the friend group broke up, marriages split, the whole thing. To hear my father describe it, he was freed from a suffocating burden of memories and people he no longer wished to face. I was born into what amounted to a deep and not-talked-about family mess. I only knew that my father and his father did not speak. It had been decades. But my dad was extremely close to his mother, my grandmother, who had also moved to California, and I came to idolize her. For the first nine years of my life, she was my anchor. We would visit her on the weekends, driving down from Aptos to her place in Carmel. She lived in a home across from the Salinas River marshlands. We would sit at the edges of the marsh and look for mallards and egrets. She was my stability in an upbringing of tumult.

She passed away before I was old enough to ask much about her life in New Jersey and Pennsylvania, but from what she said about my father’s upbringing it sounded idyllic many ways. He grew up in a suburb of Philadelphia and spent his summers on the Jersey shore, which is a pretty short drive east, about 90 minutes. On Long Beach Island, he got into boating, sandboarding, and surfing. I tried to imagine their life before it all went sideways—outings on the boat, my grandfather's confident smile, wind blowing through his hair, the sun glistening off the water while everybody laughs. In my mind it all looks so much easier and simpler than life today. That notion is of course misplaced. Reality is always harder, more nuanced, and more interesting.

Last year, my father reminded me of some Super 8 reels of his youth in New Jersey. He found them and gave them to me—10 reels altogether, mostly of those halcyon summers on Long Beach Island. As a Christmas present, I had the reels digitized and posted them online. I sent the links to my dad—and this is where things really took off.

My dad watching the reels opened a window to my history. He was finally able to reflect on these memories and share stories I had not previously heard.

I learned how his wife—my grandmother—did a lot to foster the surfing community in LBI. She spent hours on the sand with a camera and tripod and scattered film canisters, filming my dad and his friends while they rode waves and messed around on the beach. After the film was developed, she'd invite local surfers over for afternoon viewing parties. She was a beacon for these kids and some of them had it rough.

I asked my dad about his surfing buddies, and what drew him to the sport in the first place. His response, “Beats me. Same as anybody else, I guess. We had our little pack, we loved riding waves and had a blast doing stupid shit. Like the time we waited for a good onshore wind, put a cherry bomb on the string of a kite with a cigarette as a delay fuse, and tried to blow up Beach Haven.” He very much remembered driving his Bronco on the wet sand during low tide, and described sitting in the lineup during lulls between waves, sharing stories about the latest school drama, then going home to read and swap the latest surfing magazines, while dreaming about empty California lineups. In fact, my father and his friends soon left for Santa Barbara to chase their version of the Californian dream.

My dad and I texted a few times after he watched the videos. His memories were bittersweet.

Watching them reminded me of two of my closest friends both of whom killed themselves. Scott Cromwell is the guy with the beaver tail wetsuit. His parents were awful social climbers and I think that had a lot to do with it. He killed himself a couple of years after we both left for California.

Tim Connors, the other guy, the more heavyset goofyfoot, was super smart. He moved out here too, and went to Stanford. We kind of fell out of touch but saw him multiple times over the years. He dropped out of Stanford and started growing pot. He ended up in Arizona taking care of his mom who had advanced dementia. After she died he started to develop it, too, and decided to end it before it got too bad.

As kids, Tim and his family lived a few blocks from me. We were classmates at a prep school called Haverford. Scott was there too. It was a time of massive upheaval. I was in 5th grade when JFK was murdered and from there we went into Vietnam, so . . . .

I hated Haverford. All boys, big emphasis on being a jock—which I sure wasn't. Lots of weed, which was very illegal, and LSD was popular. We all gazed longingly at California, not just the surf but the whole deal, so a whole bunch of us, all at once, just picked up and moved to Santa Barbara.

I lived in my van and had a job processing film. Which I got fired from for not showing up. I remember being in the shower after surfing Rincon and remembering, Shit, I'm supposed to be at work! Anyway, I ended up totaling my van, so I moved up to Carmel and stayed with Mom until I started UC Santa Cruz in the fall. I've been here ever since.