The Slender Man

Meet a lifelong slender man: the energized 94-year-old Mr. Dick Metz. His ex-girlfriend once complained that he rolled out of bed directly to the floor every morning to crank out 200 crunches before coffee while urging her to do the same. Dick still kick-starts and rides his dirt bike. He habitually makes a sparse tuna sandwich for dinner every afternoon around four o’clock, declining any ingestion after that—except for a glass or three of wine—as a compulsive health-maintenance practice. 

Metz moved into Laguna Beach’s oceanfront village as a young child in the 1930s. His father opened and operated a café and bar on the Main Beach boardwalk. Dick worked, poured drinks, ran errands, and lolled on the sand and in the surf out front under the eyes of several close-to-the-edge eccentric lifeguards—hero figures who provided that service in return for a daily ration of his father’s burgers. Main Beach attracted all humanity’s natures, residents and visitors, including weekend playmates like same-aged Shirley Temple. 

His early years encompassed a period in which the offbeat cult of “surfing” ocean waves was just gaining substance as the eccentric, passionate pastime of the few who had found it. Metz also played and hustled, attended college, ran track, chased skirt, drank a bit too much, started businesses to sample that life, then traveled the world encountering those either of or attracted to his ilk, returning to interlink them in ways that nourished both ends. 

He enabled Hobie Alter to enjoy a thriving retail chain under his name, which laid the foundation for the surf industry. He also helped Bruce Brown travel to South Africa and “discover” the endlessly perfect waves of Cape Saint Francis and Jeffreys  Bay while filming The Endless Summer, a  film that exploded surfing worldwide. As neither purist nor whore, though certainly  as opportunist, Dick continues to move adroitly somewhere between the two as suits the occasion.

More recently, as in the last 20 years, Dick has become obsessed with doing something profound while entering the last quarter of his life. This has resulted in his recruiting a group of similarly inclined surfers to join in preserving the fast-disappearing, often-misunderstood, artful origins of wave riding and to celebrate that evolution in the form of the Surfing Heritage and Culture Center. Now with a mission broader than simply surfboard preservation, SHACC is dedicated to collecting, restoring, decoding, and sharing surfing culture’s various and often subtle incantations of discovery and coming of age. All of which inspired the formation and ongoing continuation of a global lifestyle and its unique expression of creative accouterments—not to mention a billion-dollar industry. 

The debate goes: Is the extension and monetization of the “surfing lifestyle” in itself a mercantile snapback compared to its escapist roots? Or maybe one can vary between the two extremes without care. Then again, maybe our venerated wave ride is merely a strain of flower that blooms between ice ages and then fades from view, reconstituting into something else, taking its esoteric transitions without any right or wrong, merely carving spontaneous tracks across a wave, as does our friend Dick.

[Feature Image Caption: Open for business: Dick Metz at Hobie’s Honolulu shop on Kapiolani Boulevard, 1961. Photo courtesy of Dick Metz/Surfing Heritage and Culture Center.]