Surf Nazis, Flexy Flyers & Surfers - WindanSea Beach, La Jolla

Back in the late 1950s and early 1960s, every surfer in California knew there was something different about La Jolla’s WindanSea crowd like Pat Curren, Mike Diffenderfer, "Tiny Brain" Thomas, Carl Ekstrom, Chuck Hasley, Billy Graham, and Butch Van Artsdalen, just to name a few.

La Jolla, a sleepy little beach community at the time, gave birth to world famed beach gangs like, The Pump House Gang and Mac Meda Destruction Company, but it was the surfing crowd at WindanSea beach who coined the infamous phrase, “Surf Nazis.”

So what were these surfers thinking a few generations ago? It wasn’t seen as sympathy for what Nazis did and what they stood for. Wrong, it was a manifestation of their anti-establishment rebellion.

“An insane asylum where the walls fell down and nobody left,” someone once said about the WindanSea beach crowd.

“The most rebellious group of people I ever met,” said legendary big wave surfer Fred Van Dyke. “They were like wild animals!”

Out of this new generations of surfers that didn't give a rats ass about dropping out of the High School football or basketball teams and instead gave the one finger salute to social Bull Shit and just wanted to go surfing.

With said, these rebellious beach rats would dress up like Nazis (Mel Brooks/Hogan's Hero's style), cruise La Jolla and ride down the storm drain on their Flexy-Flyers that started at the top of Bonair Street and ended up at WindanSea beach right in back of the Shack.

The La Jolla “Surf Nazis” were kids who grew up in this community of hypocrisy. Their parents were “The Greatest Generation,” at the time because they were victors of the War Against Fascism. In 1950, according to the US census of 10,000 residents, La Jolla was a town with practically no Jews, 1% blacks, and only a handful of Hispanics. La Jolla was as effectively as segregated as Selma, Alabama. But that all started to change way before the 1964 Federal Civil Rights Act became law.

They threw the hated Nazi symbols back in the faces of their hypocritical parents. Later on their satire Mel Brooks style Nazi parties they would burst into local restaurants, cruise downtown La Jolla, have Nazi parties in the abandoned military bunkers up on Mt. Soledad and even become invited guests at the Jewish fraternities at U.S.C.

SS Storm Troopers (a.k.a.,local surfers) erupted from a storm drain on flexi-flyers at Windansea Beach and were captured between 1957 and 1961 in several movies,“Search for Surf,” used to promote Greg Noll surfboards. Suddenly, Swastikas and iron crosses appeared on surfboards, T-shirts, and woodies around the world.

Greg Noll, the legendary big wave surfer of that era, added to Fred Van Dyke remark, "WindanSea crowd was the most Radical of all Surfers ... It was just another way to flip off society!" - http://macmedadestruction.com/la-joll...

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