Terry Tracy, model for "The Big Kahuna," was an easygoing, fun-loving surfer who inspired the "Gidget"
movies and television series. He helped make surfing an international
sport — in the process becaming the embodiment of the cool alternative
lifestyle of sunglass-wearing beach bums. Tracy, aka "Tubesteak," died on Wednesday, August 22, 2012 at his home
in San Clemente, Calif. He was 77.
Read the Full NY Times Obit.
"When I was 8, my parents divorced and my mother married a man whose career took us from Washington to Melbourne Beach, a town on the “Space Coast” of Central Florida, where I learned to surf..."
Read: "After the Agony of Youth, The Ecstasy of Surfing" by Thad Ziolkowski from the NY Times. A paen to Hanalei.
*O.M.O. equals "Our Mother Ocean"
Andy Irons World Champion Surfer (1978 - 2010)
To An Athlete Dying Young
AE Housman
The time you won your town the race
We chaired you through the market-place;
Man and boy stood cheering by,
And home we brought you shoulder-high.
To-day, the road all runners come,
Shoulder-high we bring you home,
And set you at your threshold down,
Townsman of a stiller town.
Smart lad, to slip betimes away
From fields where glory does not stay
And early though the laurel grows
It withers quicker than the rose.
Eyes the shady night has shut
Cannot see the record cut,
And silence sounds no worse than cheers
After earth has stopped the ears:
Now you will not swell the rout
Of lads that wore their honours out,
Runners whom renown outran
And the name died before the man.
So set, before its echoes fade,
The fleet foot on the sill of shade,
And hold to the low lintel up
The still-defended challenge-cup.
And round that early-laurelled head
Will flock to gaze the strengthless dead,
And find unwithered on its curls
The garland briefer than a girl’s.
