- Photo: Larry Pope

Life is a wave; every wave is a life. Riding both well is the embodiment of style. To ride through life with a vibrant medium of expression that draws directly from the act: balance, spontaneity, daring, judgment, courage and timing. Always timing.

And then to ride each wave as if it were your life: the takeoff, with all its infinite possibilities, finding one’s proper footing, and the all important first turn, achieving optimum trim, negotiating sections both torrid and down tempo, milking the flow of energy to the last drop. Finally kicking out with a flourish.

To understand this…to know this…is the trick. It’s the intangible yet oh-so-obvious thing that separates the barefoot adventurer from what proto-Californian surf legend Phil Edwards once called, “the legions of the unjazzed”. The idea. The dream. Not just to live a surfer’s life, but to live life as a surfer. Gary Propper has been doing both for the entire length of his ride…both in and out of the water. On the beach during the birth of one of this century’s most aesthetically potent, pervasive subcultures, he was born along with it, carrying its spirit, its heart, along with him. But unlike subsequent waves of the merely faithful, Propper wasn’t satisfied with simple satiation…he knew he could never get enough unless the ride lasted forever. Unless the ride took him down paths that have never seen the track of a surfboard. Unless he took that indescribable feeling, that same heady rush of emotion, all that passion welled up inside of him every time he took off on a wave and applied not just to that ephemeral band of cosmic energy, but to the Real World and his place in it.

His approach to the heretofore unrealized life? Look no further than the 1966 East Coast Surf Championships in Virginia Beach. In four short years he’d had gone from a scrappy towhead whose single mom moved him from Miami to Cocoa Beach to one of America’s top surfing competitors…a Little Rascal in the body of a world-class athlete. And in 1966, on a single wave, he would show all the attributes that would come to mark his every endeavor.

At the time the sport of surfing, once the sole province of ancient Hawaiian kings, then fostered throughout the first five decades of the 20th century by California’s hybrid waterman/frontiersmen archetype, reserved little of its vaulted passion for Atlantic surfers, despite the fact that surfing hit these shores almost as early. After all, Duke Kahanamoku, the legendary Hawaiian prince of the surf, made little distinction between the swells he rode off his ancestral home in Waikiki and those in which he thrilled spectators along the Jersey shore in 1912. Duke knew what the following generation of East Coast surfers learned as the years and Atlantic swells and changing seasons passed: that passion came in waves. And that not all the pioneers headed west. If the Californians, those basking, preening sons of the Golden West, embraced surfing as a pastime, it was the Eastern surfers who really perceived it as a way of life. They had to. Given the Atlantic’s capricious surf conditions…seasonal swells, continental shelves and mercurial water temps…Eastern surfers learned not to count on the motivation and inspirations afforded their distant brethren. Their road to Nirvana led down an inner path. Surfing wasn’t simply something you did; it was something you were…24-7…for life.

And nobody embraced that ethic more than Gary Propper. Environment? Maybe. Consider his early tenure in Cocoa Beach, growing up in the shadows of the gantries at nearby Cape Canaveral, the surf and space race taking place simultaneously in his watery backyard. Different mediums, different adventures, same message: that anything is possible so long as you keep shooting for the stars.

- Photo: Gary Propper Archive

But Gary didn’t just aim for the stars, he became one. Throughout the early 1960s the sole representative of the Eastern surf ethic, bearing Atlas-like on his tanned shoulders the massive expectations of pioneers who came before him and the spindrift dreams of the sport’s next generation.

He didn’t disappoint. Establishing himself as one of the sport’s first legitimate pros, he was without knowing it taking his place in a time-honored lineage that included George Freeth, the Hawaiian-Irish beach boy who in 1907 was brought to Southern California for a series of development promotions…history’s first professional surfer.

With his surfer’s sense on timing and commitment, Gary threw himself into the Game, and became one of its best players. His signature model with Hobie Surfboards…the era’s leading manufacturer…was a first for an East Coast surfer, and for several years the top-selling model on either coast. He appreciated the value of brand promotion, especially when the brand was Propper. His subsidized his affair with the sport and the sea in a style 25 years ahead of the curve, setting a template of success that would later pay dividends to Eastern champions like six-time world champion Kelly Slater and four-time world champion Lisa Anderson, both from the shores of central Florida.

This was the fruit of Gary’s conscious choices, counter-culture though they might have been. These were quantifiable. His trip. Propper’s style, on the other hand, was instinctual. And never more in evidence than during the 1966 East Coast Championships held in Virginia Beach.

Already qualified for a talent-heavy final heat, fresh out of the junior ranks but already bearing the burden of performance that may have justified a conservative, cross-the-tees approach, Propper laid out his real rip on a single ride. Taking off on one of the better waves of the day, he trimmed his board then moved to the surfboard’s nose, crouched in a speedy, low-center-of-gravity crouch called a “cheater five.” With a section, or breaking crest of the wave, looming ahead, Propper didn’t back pedal…the safer approach…but stood up out of the crouch, still on the nose, driving his board through the concave wave face. This is the point where most surfer’s ride would end: forward momentum stopped, tenuously balance on the brink of a wipeout, a critical section waiting at the end of any decision.

Propper’s call? He deftly side-slipped his board, pulling the skeg from the water and drifting through the section with less resistance. Nice, but with no directional stability. In fact, Gary’s nine-six board began to spin out of control, pivoting 180 degrees, pointing skeg-first now. But what looked like a glorious end was actually playing right into Propper’s hand. An opportunity to put one of his most strident axioms into practice, one that would characterize his approach to myriad challenges ahead…go with the flow, but with attitude.

Gary simply stepped forward again, re-engaging the fin, completed the pivot and spun his board through the entire radius. A 360 degree turn. A truly space-age maneuver, completely unheard of in 1966.

Did it win him the championships? Naturally. Was it one of the many memorable performances to come, as Gary went on to become modern surfing’s first Eastern superstar? Without question. And would this same exhibition of balance, of verve, of commitment, blended seamlessly with a palpable sense of fun, serve Gary Propper on the ride that lay ahead? Say, his early days as a rock promoter, a behind-the-scenes career managing the world’s most in-your-face comedian, or teaching an entire generation of kids (with a little help from a foursome of talking turtles) the meaning of “Cowabunga, dude!”

The answer just might be found in these pages. A visual testament to the ride thus far of an extraordinary figure in popular history, a cultural pioneer who made passion his profession.

And in doing so Gary Propper did more than simply create a lifestyle. He’s created a life of style.