From the archives

Bodysurfer zealots – from Tia Juana River mouth to Oceanside championship

Vivid WWII scenes in San Diego, Skip Frye still surfs, Berkeley grad loves Mexican bad boy, man vs. animals, abuse by La Jolla shrink

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Boomer Beach. On the Boomer seawall, a hand-painted message reads: "If you don't bleed here you can't surf here."

  • Bodysurfers from Oceanside to the IB Pier

  • A little further up the coast from Cartwright and Bye is the hermetic Boomer Beach crowd of La Jolla, with guys like "Dolphin" Don Riley, "Freeway" Dave Freeman, who some think is among the best body surfers in the world, even though he avoids most contests like ptomaine, and John "Kamikaze Man" Demerjian, who last month badly wrenched the muscles in his neck at Boomer.
  • By Neal Matthews, Sept. 8, 1983
A classmate at Central Elementary near University Avenue brought in a Japanese sniper rifle. To prove its authenticity, he proudly pointed to 19 notches carved into the butt. (Mark Zingarelli)

  • From San Diego's 41st Street, Japan was a more odious enemy than Germany

  • I may be the youngest San Diegan to remember the Second World War, especially the time immediately following the attack on Pearl Harbor. If I get lucky and live to be a hundred years old (who knows, by then 125 years might not be unreasonable), I could be the last surviving San Diegan with memories of that period. And then the newspapers and magazines would seek me out for interviews, all of which would be bothersome for such an old man.
  • By Gerald A. Shepherd, Dec. 15, 1983
Frye was number two in the Unite States Surfing Association rating in 1966 and '67.

  • Skip Frye Is Still Stoked

  • His is a style of surfing that he helped to create in the 1960s when the sport caught its first full blaze of attention. He goes for grace and smoothness and distance. Corky Carroll, one of the top-rated surfers in Frye's heyday, said Frye was always a gentleman in the water, not aggressively territorial as some surfers are in a sport where more often than not there is literally no room for beginners or strangers.
  • By Joe Applegate, April 14, 1983
“You got the whole month planned already!” he would lecture me. “You ain’t alive." (David Diaz)

  • When opposites attract

  • Thirty-eight years old now, medium small, sweet looking, of Sicilian-English-German descent. An evident but not debilitating limp. Living alone in the wild mountain chaparral east of San Diego, in a plain cabin without utilities. Supported by teaching calculus half-time at a technical college in the city. This is me. By age thirty-four, when I met him, Ignacio had accumulated fifteen years in the prisons of Arizona, New Mexico, and Mexico,
  • By Francesca Da Leo, Feb. 10, 1983
Crocodile. Animals make intercession between man and his origin.

  • At the San Diego Zoo there is more than the beast you see

  • The Big Storm of the day before (30 November) marked the first time in its sixty-six-year history bad weather closed the San Diego Zoo. Fifteen large trees blew down. Several animals panicked, crashed into concrete walls and wire fences. The Arabian oryx “yesterday had a shade tree, and today, a log,” the tour bus driver told passengers. “The oryx are delighted. They've been chewing eucalyptus leaves all day."
  • By Judith Moore, Jan. 27, 1983
Evelyn received the check for one and a quarter million dollars (Lewis got the other half of the award) more than a year ago. Yet in many ways she acts as if the money isn't real. (Craig Carlson)

  • The final analysis

  • It wasn’t a life-and-death decision; she needed a psychiatrist because she was depressed. But ultimately she made his name famous, first in San Diego when she sued him for malpractice (he had lured her into a destructive sexual relationship), then nationally, when a jury ordered him to pay her $4.6 million, the most money ever ordered in a psychological-injury case.
  • By Jeannette DeWyze, Jan. 13, 1983
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