SURFING COWS 2-28-07
By Corky Carroll

So there I am happily tooling down the 405 on my way for an afternoon session at San Onofre not long ago with my wife, the muy bonita Karlita, at my side and a Jack Johnson CD cranked up on the stereo.  It is a nice day with a clean little swell running and we have a cooler with some food and drinks and are as happy as two clams at high tide.  All of a sudden a big milk trunk passes us on the right and there is this huge cow surfing on a wave and the word “Cowabunga” coming from it’s mouth.  As my board is airbrushed to look like a cow I am immediately stoked to see this.  So I catch up to the truck and honk at the driver and point to my board on the roof of our car.  But the driver probably thinks I am hassling him for going fast or something and just glares at me and floors it.   I didn’t want to risk having our boards blow off the roof by going too fast so I just slowed back down and the two of us had a good laugh about it.

Wow, a surfing cow ad campaign.  This is something that would have come out of my mind had I been a marketing dude for a dairy.  I realized that I had not noticed what Milk company the truck was from.  Nonetheless I thought it was pretty cool.  The muy bonita Karlita was happy to see that there are others who share my sense of humor and that it just isn’t me that likes cow art.  I think she has been concerned about this for awhile.  Coming from Mexico she really had not seen much cow art before she met me.  But, they do have this thing for putting big concrete cows in front of stores that sell dairy products.  I wanted to make off with one during a late night tequila tasting session one night but she talked me out of it.  And there was the fact that I did not have the faintest idea of how I was going to get the 1000-pound concrete cow into the back seat of my car either.   And then I would have felt bad about it the next day and would have wound up taking it back where I probably would have been arrested and put in a Mexican jail for cattle theft, a major crime down there.  You can steal a dude’s wife and that’s fine and dandy, but never mess with his cow.  

I had almost forgotten about the Milk truck and the surfing cow until this morning when I was reading my emails and got one from a dude who asked me if I had seen the surfing cow trucks in Orange County lately.  I emailed him back to find out if he knew what company it was from.  He emailed me back and said that it is Sunnyside Farms from Lathrop, California.  And they have a cowabunga website.  Now I am stoked and ready to find out more about this ad program.  Being the investigative marvel that I am I promptly went onto the website,  www.cowabungadude.com/ (you have to include the slash at the end).  

It turns out that they are having a contest to name the surfing cow.  This is too good to be true.  So I decide to enter the contest myself.  I ask the muy bonita Karlita what does she think would be a good name for a surfing cow. She doesn’t even think about it.  She just smiles and says “Corky.”  I am not sure how to take this, but then looking at the big picture (the one in my mirror everyday) I see what she means.   I have been riding cow surfboards for years and years and also have a habit of uddering “Cowabunga” more than one time a day.  Maybe she is right.  The surfing cow should be named Corky.

  
This is where you come in.  My loyal and extremely intelligent, if not literarily challenged readers.  If you agree with us and think that Corky would be a good name for the surfing cow I want you to hit that website and put in a vote for Corky the surfing cow.  I have been a lot of things in my life, but nothing quite as cool as a surfing cow.  Being Grubby Grouper on Spongebob Squarepants has been the highlight of my alter egos so far, but being Corky the Cowabunga surfing cow would have to be the icing on the cake of my surfing career.  It would be udderly moovelous folks.   So come on.  A vote for me is a vote for total absurdity.  And what is cooler than that? 

 

 

THE WOODY BROWN MOVIE, part 1

The Wave ~ 2-28-07
By Corky Carroll

Wow, where to even start when talking about Woody Brown?  This dude is the ultimate Legends Legend.  95 years old surfing pioneer who lives on the island of Maui in the Hawaiian Islands and the subject of a new film titled “Of Wind and Waves: The Life of Woody Brown.”  The Southern California premiere is set for Huntington Beach on Thursday, March 8th at 7:00 and 9:00 p.m. at the Pierside Surf City 6 Theatres.  The screening, a benefit for the Huntington Beach-Seal Beach chapter of Surfrider Foundation, is the March feature of “Surf Theatre” sponsored by Big Red Productions.

The just completed 63 minute version of the film recently premiered to huge acclaim at the Mountain film festival in Telluride, Colorado where it won the Inspiration Award. In 2004 the 35 minute version won the "Audience Award for Best Short" at the Maui Film Festival.  It took six years to complete the project which well documents Woody’s life from his early days as a glider pilot, surfing pioneer and inventor of the modern catamaran.  

To give you a brief overview of Woody Brown I am going to borrow the historical information from the films website http://www.dlbfilms.com/woody.html.  And as this is a huge story I am going to take this week and next weeks column to tell it instead of trying to make it short enough to fit here.

Woodbridge Parker Brown was born with a silver spoon in his mouth, with his family listed in the Social Register and charter members of The 400 – the roster of America’s most prominent and powerful families. Woody’s father had his own immensely lucrative brokerage. But somehow the life of privilege and prestige never appealed to Woody. He preferred to wander in the woods and on the beaches near the family’s Rye, New Hampshire retreat. It was there that his love of nature was born and it was from there that he ran away at the age of 16 in pursuit of his dream of learning to fly.

Woody virtually lived at New York’s Curtis Field where he became a protégé of Charles Lindbergh, helping prepare the Spirit of St. Louis for Lindy’s historic flight. But Woody soon discovered that his true passion was for the unique world of gliders, soaring silently on invisible currents of air. His goal was to acquire the finely tuned sensitivity required to read the air and wind with nothing to hold him aloft but his own skill.

Woody fell in love with an English beauty name Elizabeth Sellon (known as Betty) who shared his love of adventure and disdain for the trappings of society. In 1935, they spent their honeymoon driving across the country to start a new life in La Jolla, near San Diego. It was in La Jolla that Woody took up surfing, one of only a handful of pioneers in the new sport. He was soon designing and building his own boards. And as his love of soaring continued to grow, Woody became the driving force behind the design and building of Torrey Pines Flight Park, still in operation today.

In 1939, Woody set world soaring records for time aloft, altitude and distance. America was still in love with aviation and Woody became an instant national hero. But Woody found the wildly enthusiastic crowds that attended a parade in his honor in Wichita Falls, Texas to be frightening. Then, as now, he had no interest in being a hero.

After his record-setting flight, Woody hurried home to Betty in La Jolla who was expecting their first child, an event that provided a dramatic turning point in Woody’s life. Betty died giving birth to a baby boy. Woody was shattered. He recounts his own nearly suicidal depression that drove him to leave his newborn son, Jeffrey, with Betty’s family, turning his back on all his worldly possessions and fleeing to the South Pacific, hoping to reach Tahiti where he thought perhaps he could begin to build a new life.

Woody recalls his early wanderings around the undeveloped island of Oahu. First hitchhiking, then riding an old bicycle, Woody fell in love not only with the beauty of the island but also with the native people who took him in, sharing their lives and homes with him, showing him the ways of the islands with a reverence for the earth and sea that Woody had instinctively embraced since childhood but had never encountered before. The Hawaiians were ecologists before the concept existed and Woody soon came to realize that he had found his true home. The spirit of aloha had saved him.


Woody renewed his interest in surfing and was soon befriended by several island residents who were taking the sport in unprecedented directions. Men like Wally Froiseth, John Kelly and Rabbit Kekai were among the first in the world to brave the huge Hawaiian surf. Because of Woody’s fearless enthusiasm these surfing giants accepted him as a member of their elite group and took him on "surfing safaris" to Makaha and to Castles where Woody first experienced 25-foot waves.