These are the interviews I did with Pat, back in 2013. Each interview consists of a pretty large file that I'm in the process of uploading to YouTube for viewing. I will attempt to get this done as soon as possible, but it's going to take some time.
Each file listed below will have a very brief description, but will contain much more than what I might write for the description.
Pat's recollections interrupt themselves time and time again with digressions that take us off into side-trips involving the greatest names in surfing, the greatest places in surfing, and multiple bygone worlds populated by no end of fascinating and wonderful characters. People like Greg Noll (for whom Pat shaped, long-term), Miki Dora, Dewey Weber, Rick James (of "finger" fame), and too many others to get into, here. Places like Manhattan Beach, California, Barbados, Cocoa Beach, Florida, and the list goes on and on. The sense of these interviews was to produce a chronology of Pat's life, but over and over and over again, Pat would bring up things that were just too good to let get away, and we'd laugh and marvel down no end of winding paths before bringing ourselves reluctantly back to the main narrative of time and place. This stuff is almost too good to be true, and I simply cannot believe my astounding good luck in being able to sit down with Pat, endowed with limitless time and in no hurry whatsoever, and listen to him relate the worlds he lived in. Surfing is what it is today, as a direct result of what it was yesterday. Before surfing settled down into the more or less mainstream corporate-sponsored activity it has become, the wild and wonderful people who wound up having to do every last bit of it for themselves were simply making it up as they went along, with nothing more than their own wits to guide them. Pat was right there in the thick of it with them, at the dawning of a world that none of them could have guessed would wind up taking shape, with their own hand-prints all over it.
This remains a work in progress.
2013 01 01 Interview 1, Test Shot Questions, Where were you born? Earliest days. Run time: 2m 19s
2013 01 01 Interview 2, Early life, early surf craft, early surfing. Run time: 24m 27s
2013 01 10 Interview 3, Early life, surf craft, and surfing, review and expansion upon, up to Manhattan Beach, CA. Run time: 17m 37s
2013 01 10 Interview 4, Growing up in Manhattan Beach, high school, wrestling, surfing takes over. Run time: 24m 17s
2013 01 11 Interview 5, Early days surfing in California, people, places, and things, '59, '60, turn of the decade. Run time: 33m 15s
2013 01 11 Interview 6, '59 & '60, Mazatlan surf trip with Rick James, a day at big Haggerty's, Rick James loses a thumb and Greg Noll gets it and dunks it in resin. Run time: 32m 07s
2013 01 15 Interview 7, Early 60's, learning to shape, working with Rick James, moving to Florida. Run time: 37m 13s
2013 01 15 Interview 8, MacLaren almost knocks over the goddamned camera. Run time: 0m 10s
2013 01 15 Interview 9, Setting up shop in Cocoa Beach, interrupted by phone call. Run time: 1m 54s
2013 01 15 Interview 10, Early days in Cocoa Beach, Barbados, back home to Cocoa Beach, mid to late 60's. Run time: 27m 20s
2013 01 18 Interview 11, Back in time for a bit, 7 year-old Boy Hero. Run time: 9m 19s
2013 01 18 Interview 12, Back in time again, California, Noll, Weber, Dora, and others. Run time: 35m 39s
2013 01 18 Interview 13, The old crew. Run time: 9m 12s
2013 01 23 Interview 14, Barbados, back home to Cocoa Beach again, shaping for Oceanside, starting a family. Run time: 32m 22s
2013 01 23 Interview 15, Settling down in Cocoa Beach (sort of), New York, California, Costa Rica. Run time: 36m 15s
2013 02 01 Interview 16, Early 70's digressions, cut short by an incoming phone call. Run time: 15m 9s
2013 02 01 Interview 17, Pat returns to Cocoa Beach permanently, shaping and tending bar, excellent long and diverse discussion about shaping, shapers, and surfboards. Run time: 37m 13s
2013 02 01 Interview 18, Balsa, and a Bar Story. Run time: 14m 14s
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