SUNDAY JOINT, 8-25-2024: UNCLE DAN HAS HUNG UP HIS SWASH AND HIS BUCKLE

Hey All,

I'm in Baywood Park this weekend, at a memorial get-together for Daniel Blau, my uncle, the person who got me started surfing and is therefore the flapping butterfly wings that gets us to EOS, the Sunday Joint, the whole thing.

Dan was a happy accident. He was born 15 years after my mom, who for the rest of her life maintained a lightly held resentment because he was basically the favored child and her parents cut Dan all kinds of slack while my mom and her big brother Robert were more held to account. The two older kids were dark-haired, bright and funny, but intense. Dan was blond, also bright and funny, but happy-go-lucky. He would occasionally have low periods. But his default setting was cheerful, and remained so until his death, two months ago, at age 78.

The Blau home was a funky old stucco-walled two-story on a hill near Echo Park Lake. Ted Blau, Dan's father, who looked like Clark Gable's better-looking twin, went to UCLA on a football scholarship, got a PhD in French from the Sorbonne, and taught philosophy at LA City College. His wife Helen graduated from the New York Art Institute and taught high school French.

Ted loved the water, swam like a marlin, could break out a springboard dive at the club pool that left onlookers impressed and possibly aroused, and was, if anything, even better at the still-new sport of bodysurfing. Ted taught Dan to bodysurf at a young age. I don't know when Dan began surfing, but he was probably one of the Gidget-inspired grems out there frantically paddling out of Miki Dora's way at First Point Malibu in the late '50s. My mom told me once that Ted would wait in the car while Dan surfed, which she thought was outrageously indulgent.

Of course, she knew better than anyone that her little brother was basically an ambulatory magnet, as ready to laugh at your jokes as he was to crack his own, a bit slack but super easy to hang around with. Everyone was drawn to Dan, his father included.

I was five and Uncle Dan was probably 18 when he visited our house in Tarzana one afternoon, took me out to the backyard pool, balanced me atop his board and pushed me toward the deep end. Literally and figuratively.

Three years later, after my family had moved to Venice Beach, Dan and my dad and my dad's best friend Ed loaded three boards into a borrowed VW van and took me and my little brother Chris on a weekend camp-out surf trip to Rosarito Beach, Baja, where Dan launched me into a few whitewater waves until I told him I could do it myself.

The following summer Dan showed up one afternoon with a fire-engine red 7'4" pintail, my first board, a merciless and already outdated piece of DIY surfcraft that one of his friends had cut down a few months earlier from a longboard and, I'm guessing, gave it to Dan at no charge to give to me, just to get the thing out of the garage. It was heavy, rockerless, too wide to fit under my arm. Even at nine, I knew that only kooks and old-timers put their board on their head, so mostly I dragged that red beast across the sand like a yard sled. The board fought me every step of the way during my first few months of surfing. And of course I loved it deeply, and loved Dan for giving it to me.

I wish there was more to our shared surfing lives. We drove to Malibu together in 1970, but it was flat, so we kept going and ended up surfing tiny soft overcast waves at a place called Mondos, in Ventura. That was the only time we surfed together.

Dan and a couple of friends built a trimaran, the Pendragon, and he sailed across the Pacific, around South America, through the Caribbean, with frequent and lengthy stops, on and off, for ten years. That's him at the top of the page, surfing Costa Rica in 1974.

When necessary, at various ports of call hither and yon, Dan and crew would pull the boat out for cleaning or repairs, and he would find work on the docks or in a nearby town. He was a whiz in the kitchen, and in the late '60s worked as a cook at Captain Jack's in Sunset Beach, near Huntington, which was owned by former West Coast surf champ Jack Haley—who Dan said was loud and sometimes funny, but mostly a giant blowhard.

At some point during his sailing years, Dan ran a load of Latin American weed up the coast to Los Angeles—but he was a wreck the whole time, just not having the game or the nerve (nobody in the family is especially gutsy), and that was it for the drug trade.

At an afternoon party on the island of Mustique, Dan met Mick Jagger, and the two ended up peeling away from the bar and walking to the beach, where Dan taught Mick—shirtless but still in his party trousers—how to bodysurf.

Dan hung up his swash and his buckle (as he loved saying) in the early '80s. He settled in Brisbane, where he taught art at a Catholic school and married an upbeat ex-biker who had two young daughters. Some good years followed. When the marriage ended, Dan moved first to San Pedro (my mom lived on one side of town and their mom, Helen, lived on the other; the three were together often before Helen died). Then he moved to the Sierra foothills not far from Stockton, after he met and married Donna Crawford, who was (still is) soulful, steadying, and adventurous. They were together for 20 years. She was the grown-up of the two, but in close touch with her silly side, and they were a fantastic match.

Ten years ago, Dan was diagnosed with Parkinson's. He was told it would not kill him, and it didn't, technically, but any illness or ailment that came his way was worsened by the disease, and it all piled up high enough that his death after just a few days in hospice—at home, high, asleep and pain-free, with Donna laying next to him—was a mercy.

Donna and I emailed and talked on the phone often during this time. One call came maybe three days before he died. She'd walked in into the room and found Dan awake. This was when he was sleeping nearly around the clock. He looked across the room and calmly asked her to check out the surfboard hanging on the wall. Then went back to sleep. There was no board, but that's where his mind was, and it was the brightest moment in an terrible week. "Always a surfer boy," she said.

Matt