West of the 405 - Part Two
Jim Ganzer's Venice, Central America, and Garmento Years
This is Part Two of “West of the 405.” You can read Part One here.
By 1960, Jim Ganzer, Denny Aaberg, and Robbie Dick were members of Santa Monica’s North Bay Surf Club. “There were some remarkable guys in that club. Tony Kronman was a good surfer from the Palisades who would go on to become the dean of Yale Law School.” said Ganzer. “Another member, Stuart Bailey, who lived near artist and designer Ray Eames. His parents were the millers who made the wood for those beautiful chairs. Mark Neikrug’s dad, George, played the cello for the LA Philharmonic Orchestra and was one of the best in the world. Mark would go on to play with the New York Philharmonic.”
Mark Neikrug second from the right, Dave Stewart next to Mark; the blond guy in the white sweatshirt is Lloyd Knudsen; Ganzer in back row, far left; Jim Hine next to him (I think); Jerry Waco fifth from the left in back (the shortest guy in the row).
One day Neikrug and Ganzer were at the Aaberg’s house, and the Ray Charles song “What’d I Say” came on the radio for the first time. When the song ended, Neikrug sat down at the Aaberg’s piano and played the song, that he’d just heard for the first time, perfectly. “Someone asked him, ‘Mark, how did you do that?’ ‘I have perfect pitch,’ he replied. Just then a bus drove by and he said, ‘Hear that bus? That’s a D flat.’ It was amazing that he could hear something one time and then play it perfectly—anything!”
However, not all of the members of the North Bay Surf Club would go on to teach in the Ivy League or to play in an orchestra. Mike LaRae, one of the best surfers in the club, was a tiny, angelic-looking regular foot who rode a double stringer Lymon Surfboard. Although he could stand on the nose all day long, “he was just plain bad. His parents were full-on Nazis and supposedly owned Herman Goering’s yacht. LaRae would hand out racist pamphlets with titles like ‘N******! You can be J*** too!’ I thought they were ridiculous, so I brought one home to show my dad. ‘Where did you get this!’ he yelled. He was so fucking pissed off.”
Every fall, Ganzer and his friends would surf State and the Jetty, and when it got really big, they would drive up to Rincon. “Part of the pilgrimage to Rincon was stopping for breakfast on the way up. Sometimes we would go to the Bass Rock Café near Deer Creek where an old guy in an illegal homestead served scrambled eggs and sea bass,” said Ganzer.
“Other times we would go to the Colonial House in Oxnard.” Known for its “Old South ambiance,” the Colonial House would come under fire from the NAACP in the late 60s for its marquee, a black man in a chef’s outfit who stood on a platform next to Highway 1, ringing a bell and waving at passing cars.
“Steve Aaberg was driving me, Denny, and LaRae up to Rincon, and as we passed the Colonial House, LaRae stuck his head out the car’s window and screamed, ‘N*****!’ Steve slammed on the brakes and said, ‘What the fuck did you just say?’ Next, Aaberg backed all the way back to the black chef and stopped the car. ‘Now Mike, do you have something to say to this gentleman?’ he asked. By now LaRae was so humiliated that he was trying to crawl under the seat. It was so wonderful to see that little bastard squirm. He was silent for the rest of the trip. When you got ‘sounded’ by one of the older guys you shut up and took your bitter medicine.”
Each summer, Ganzer, Dick, Aaberg, and other friends made an annual pilgrimage to Solona Beach where they would camp in a friend’s yard and surf Solona Beach, Seaside Reef, and Swamis. “Don Hansen was a really generous guy who sponsored Doyle, so Mike got us on his team. Their shop was in Cardiff.”
The highlight of these trips was a nighttime excursion across the border to Tijuana’s “Zona Rosa.” “We would drop the guys who were minors off near the border, they would scamper across the fence, and then we would pick them up on the other side. Tijuana back then was kind of like the Wild Wild West. Drunk Marines were staggering down the street, there were fights, and a Mexican barker standing outside ‘The Blue Fox’ who invited you to ‘Come inside and eat the furburger.’”
The Blue Fox was a multi-level strip club/brothel that had a horseshoe-shaped stage on the ground floor, where totally nude women would gyrate in the faces of the young Marines at crotch level stageside. “One night we went to the Blue Fox and it was quiet and empty, totally dead. We heard someone playing the piano and looked up on the stage, and there was our friend, Mark Neikrug, banging out a Ray Charles song. Suddenly, people came in off the street, strippers and pimps came pouring out from these catacombs behind the club, and everyone started dancing. In a few minutes, the club was packed! It was magical the way Neikrug breathed life into the club. The Mexican hookers mobbed him, he was lucky to get out of there with his clothes on.”
Jim Ganzer’s status in the surfing world was elevated significantly when Lance Carson got him on the Jacobs surf team. After Hap Jacobs and Dale Velzy closed Velzy Jacobs Surfboards in Venice, Jacobs opened his own shop in Hermosa Beach. “Having that diamond shaped logo on the back of your team jacket was a big deal back then. Hap had one of the best teams, he sponsored Lance, David Nuuhiwa, Miki Dora, Mike Doyle, Robert August, Paul Strauch, Johnny Fain, Henry Ford, Kemp Aaberg, John Baker, and many other greats.”
Next, Jacobs hired Ganzer as a salesman to replace Robert August after he left to film “Endless Summer.” “Like Velzy, Hap was an excellent carpenter and craftsman and another very generous man who taught a whole generation how to shape. He always took time to show me how to do things,” said Ganzer.
As Jim Ganzer began to come into his own as a surfer, he drew the attention of Miki Dora. However, it wasn’t due to his skill in the water. When Dora learned that Ganzer worked as a parking valet and had a line on the Hollywood parties, he began to ply him for intelligence. While the 1950s were the era of the “Rat Fuck” (elaborate, often mean-spirited, practical jokes), the 1960s were the era of “the caper” and “the scam.” Surfers were now looking for ways to work as little as possible to keep their days free for surfing. “Miki was the guy who influenced all the beach people on that caper mentality of ‘What can I get away with?’ I remember when ‘To Catch A Thief’ came out and Miki started wearing turtlenecks. Dora definitely thought he was Cary Grant.
Miki would show up at some of the parties where I was working in a tux, wearing a Beatles wig. He would infiltrate the party, mingle long enough to find out where the coats and purses were, rifle through them for valuables, then make his exit.”
Late one winter afternoon Ganzer ran into Dora at State Beach.
Dora turned to him and said, “‘Would you like to go over to Ted’s and get something to eat?’ I’m thinking, ‘Oh my God! Miki is inviting me to go out to dinner tonight!’” They sat down at their table and Dora turned to him and said, “‘Anything you’d like, just go ahead and order. Don’t worry.’ I ordered a burger, Miki had a steak and a salad.”
“As we are finishing up the meal, Dora says, ‘Excuse me, I’m going to the bathroom’ and gets up, walks past the bathroom. Just before he walks out the door, he turns, looks at me, points to his foot, and says, ‘Tennis shoe it!’ Then Dora sprinted down the street leaving me with the bill.”
After graduating from Palisades High School in 1963, Jim Ganzer went to work for Surf Guide Magazine. Bill Cleary was a former Marine from San Marino. Before he moved to Topanga Beach, he was one of the first people to surf in France and the Canary Islands. Cleary started the magazine with lifeguard, All-American swimmer, and founder of Makaha Skateboards, Larry Stevenson. “Surfer Magazine wouldn’t run Makaha’s ads,” said Ganzer, “so he started Surf Guide and for a short time it was competing with Surfer.”
“Surf Guide had an amazing staff: John Van Hamersveld, Kemp Aaberg, the Calhouns, Peter Cole, Corky Carroll, Bob Cooper, Peter Dixon, Buzzy Trent, and many others wrote for them. I had worked on the high school yearbook so I helped out with layout and design, then they had me manage their skateboard team. Bob Feigel, a Malibu surfer, wrote an excellent satirical column called Feigel Fables (which proved to be the magazine’s undoing, after Surfer Magazine’s John Severson sued Surf Guide for libel and defamation). Bill Cleary was a great mentor who helped me navigate life as it was getting much more complex.”
The first event that shocked Jim Ganzer to his core occurred in November, 1963. “It was a regular Friday, I was packing boxes at the ski shop where I worked when the radio announced that President Kennedy, whose youthful energy I’d witnessed and admired at State Beach just a few years earlier, had been shot and killed in Dallas.”
“We all shed a few tears and as I made my way home, I noticed that a deafening silence had come over the entire town. For many of us, it wasn’t just Kennedy who had been killed, it was also our innocence. It totally freaked me out. I couldn’t figure out who killed him or why anyone would want to kill him. It was the beginning of my disillusionment with America.”
By 1964, Jim Ganzer realized that there was a growing gap between the America he had been taught about in school and the images on the evening news of blacks getting attacked by dogs and knocked down by firehoses.
“My grandparents were German immigrants and my grandmother, who I was very close to, worked on the assembly line with black ladies. She lived her Lutheran values and taught me never to judge people by their appearance and to be good to others. When she rode in the back of the bus with her coworkers, it really pissed off the driver.”
The next rude interruption in Ganzer’s idyllic life came in 1964 when his draft notice arrived, and he went to his pre-induction physical exam in Los Angeles. “I saw Johnny Fain at my physical, he was wearing a ballerina’s tutu and pretending to be gay. I took speed to get my heart rate up, and then intentionally failed the hearing test. It wasn’t enough, even then, the draft boards in LA were onto all the tricks.”
Although Ganzer was drafted, a friend of his father’s was a high-ranking officer, and got him transferred to the Naval Reserves.
This close call, coupled with his growing disdain for the direction that surfing was going, forced Ganzer to think seriously about his future. By 1965 the scene at Malibu “had gotten really aggro—the Vals against the coastal guys. There was a fight every hour on the hour. Somebody was always getting whomped and walking away with a black eye or a bloody nose.”
“I wondered what happened to the beautiful times we had laughing and playing together in the waves, doing go behinds, riding with two or three guys on a board. It was about brotherhood, friendship, love. It went from everybody being friends and knowing everybody in the water, to something more aggressive and territorial. I just thought, ‘Fuck this! I don’t need this aggravation. I’ve got nothing to prove to anyone.’”
After his experience at Surf Guide, Jim Ganzer decided to go to art school. For him, the path to becoming an artist was a natural one. He, Robbie Dick, and their friend Rich Wilken had all taken drafting together at Palisades. Rich Wilken and his brother George had started shaping and glassing surfboards in high school. They opened Wilken Surfboards in 1966 where Robbie Dick was a shaper and Ganzer was a glosser.
“We also went to school with Mike Hastings whose father owned Hastings Plastics on Colorado Boulevard in Santa Monica,” said Ganzer. “On any given day at Hastings Plastics, you would find surfboard builders, car customizers, and artists seeking guidance from Morry Hastings on how to use, what were considered then, space age materials.”
On the East Coast, there was a much clearer line of demarcation between artists and craftsmen. In Southern California, there was what Rayner Banham best described as “a freemasonry of talent” that moved comfortably between art and industry because “artists, craftsmen, and sportsmen shared a common admiration for high finish and high style.” “I never saw myself as an ‘artist’ as much as a craftsman. I had as much in common with Skip and Robbie as I did my artist friends,” said Ganzer. “They knew as much about soft subtle curves and working with resin as any of the artists in Venice. There was never a firm line in my mind between artist and craftsman.”
Like the previous generation of Southern California surfer/artists before him—Bob Irwin, Ken Price, and Billy Al Bengston—Ganzer had been making sophisticated, aesthetic decisions about automobiles and surfboards since he was a teenager. Would he lower or rake (setting the car up with an upward slope front-to-rear) the suspension on his candy apple red 1950 Ford Woody (the car would later become the icon for his company Jimmy Z)? Was a forged crank preferable to a billet crank? Would pigment displace resin and diminish the strength of thick-threaded Volan-treated fiberglass cloth?
Jim Ganzer enrolled at Chouinard Art Institute in 1965. At that time, the school’s recent alumni—Bob Irwin, Larry Bell, John Altoon—formed the core of Irving Blum’s now mythic Ferus Gallery.
At Chouinard, Ganzer met classmates Chuck Arnoldi, Laddie Dill, Ron Cooper, and Tom Woodle and found the camaraderie that he felt was now missing from surfing. Whitney Museum curator and Southern California native, Barbra Haskell, best described this second generation of California surfer/artists as “a brotherhood.”
The artists that had the biggest impact on Ganzer were Larry Bell, Bob Irwin, Ken Price, Billy Al Bengston, and Ed Ruscha. “Larry Bell was a great friend and mentor. Irwin was a no-bullshit guy, but also very supportive,” said Ganzer. “Kenny Price taught me about color and painting. He was also a really good surfer who did flamboyant kick-outs. Ken had a great sense of humor, I can still hear his laugh. Ed Ruscha was also a big influence, he made me think.” What Jim Ganzer remembers most about his artistic mentors was their generosity and work ethic. “I was a wild child, but they were alway helpful and generous,” recalls Ganzer. “They led by example because they never rested on their laurels and never stopped working. Above all, they all had a lot of fun and the people from New York didn’t like that very much because they were so self-serious, but in reality, I think they were jealous.”
Next, Jim Ganzer, Guy Dill, Allen Ruppersberg, and Ron Cooper built studios at the abandoned Pacific Ocean Park (POP). From 1965-1969, Jim Ganzer largely checked out of surfing and focused on his career as an artist.
Ganzer preferred fishing for perch from the pier rather than surfing there, “Miki used to surf there, so did Sarlo, and all the Dogtown kids. There was too much shit in the water. You’d take off on a wave and suddenly an I beam would emerge from the ocean like a sea monster.”
What Ganzer liked most about POP were all the free materials that were lying around the abandoned amusement park, “We were using everything we could from POP because it was all free.” Reyner Banham visited Ganzer’s studio and “thought that it was a metaphor for the way we lived our lives and made our art. Banham told me that I had ‘an amusement park attitude towards art.’” This was a very productive period in his artistic career. “I loved the process of making art, it wasn’t so much about the object as the experience,” said Ganzer. “At one point I was painting balloons that would wither and die in a month. They were my version of the sand drawing.”
Jim Ganzer’s ideas about surfing had been forever redefined by Patrick McNulty’s 1966 Surfer Magazine article, “Down Ocean Way.” The story was about a now famous trip Bill Fury, Ron Stoner, and Chouinard alumnus Rick Griffin took to San Blas, Mexico.
It featured Griffin’s drawings of the Huichol Indians, peyote buttons, and surfing.
To Ganzer, it was “like an ad. Go to Mexico! Get good waves! Bring back a kilo of weed and you will be a hero in your town!” In 1970, Ganzer, Dick, and Cooper drove a VW bus down the Pan American Highway from Southern California to Panama. Much more than a surf trip, they visited museums in Mexico City, drank tequila, and entered an entirely new world that would become an important part of all of their lives. “Ron was another big influence on me,” said Ganzer. “He is a very smart guy and a very positive person. We shared a great interest in indigenous people and their traditions.”
While they got great waves in Mexico and Panama, it was a remote peninsula near Quepos, Costa Rica, that captured their hearts. Although the waves were more fickle and tempermental than the famous points of Gulfito, they were all alone.
Dick and Ganzer would return the next year and buy 14 acres where they built minimalist grass shacks, discovered a variety of breaks, and surfed by themselves.
Ganzer returned to California after the trip and participated in a show called “New Painting in Los Angeles” at the Newport Harbor Museum. “I got on a skateboard and dragged a piece of wood by the recent Malibu fire down the 40-foot-long white wall like you would drag your hand in the face of a wave.” He also made a smaller charcoal drawing of a 90-degree arc that one critic described as “directionally forceful,” and “subtly topographical.”
After his POP studio got condemned and torn down, Ganzer rode his bike down Venice’s dirty streets looking for a new studio space. Many of the buildings had fallen into disrepair and were virtually abandoned. “Venice in the 1970s was a very rough place,” recalled Ganzer, “a touch of evil was upon it.”
He found a 12,000 square foot building on Westminster Boulevard and Main Street and knocked on the door. “A strung-out lady opened the door, the sash of her dress was tied off around her arm, she’d just shot heroin.” She took Ganzer to a parapet on the top floor where she lived, and pointed to a hole in the floor. “A 20’ ladder went down to a 33,000 square foot building,” said Ganzer, “It was full of old Jaguars that junkies were living in.” The junkies rented Ganzer the garage and he transformed it into his studio. One day an old man showed up and informed him that he owned the building, and that he had been paying rent to squatters. Ganzer asked him if he was interested in selling the garage and the old man replied, “Sharpen your pencil.”
In order to evict the junkies, the artist had to homestead the property. When Ron Cooper arrived to check out the building for the first time, Ganzer opened the sliding door with a baseball bat in his hands. Jim Ganzer got friends and fellow artists, Ron Cooper and Peter Alexander, to pool their money. With Cooper’s buffed out 4x4 as a down payment, they bought the building for $60,000.
After the artists got rid of the cars and degreased the floors, they transformed the space into three gigantic studios.
Venice was now at the forefront of American contemporary art. “Light and space artists” Robert Irwin, Larry Bell, and DeWain Valentine lived there, as well as pop artist Ed Ruscha, painter Billy Al Bengston, and many others. It was a hive of creative activity, and Ganzer’s studio was an important part of it. In addition to making art, he also rented his studio to other artists like Robert Irwin, Linda Bengalis, and Brian Hunt.
Ed Ruscha shot his art film “Miracle” at the studio, and Ganzer starred in it opposite Michelle Phillips of The Mamas & The Papas.
The revenue he generated from the studio enabled Ganzer to travel to the property he owned in Costa Rica, stay for month, surf, and make art. “It wasn’t just surfing, the jungle environment was totally foreign to me. It fascinated, inspired, and energized me for decades.”
In California, he surfed Topanga with his old friends Robbie Dick and George Trafton, and even began surfing Malibu again.
Although the scene had changed, when Ganzer paddled out at Malibu for the first time in many years, “I was filled with waves of well-being by the connection I felt. Malibu was home.”
Jim Ganzer’s carefree life changed forever when he met Susie Boykin, a beautiful, strong-willed Texan he married in 1976. A daughter Sandy, and son Beaux, soon followed. Now with a family to support, he and his friends sold their Venice studio to Jack Nicholson. While Ganzer still made art, he also began to make tables and work in Larry Bell’s studio, who he cites as one of his greatest teachers.
“I liked to do it all! I considered every part of everything I did art. But showing art, storing art, seducing patrons and gallery owners, listening to pretentious critics,” sighs Ganzer, “I’d much rather go surfing.”
After sliding into third base during a Malibu softball game, Jim Ganzer noticed that the built-in belt in his baseball pants magically held them in place. Then an internal voice asked, “Why didn’t some surfer think of this? The same voice replied, ‘He just did.’ Throughout my life, I’ve always listened to that voice.” Ganzer had never liked the way laces and buttons felt when he was lying on his surfboard, “I’d always wanted trunks with a side Velcro closure. I mentioned this to my art dealer’s husband who was in the garment industry. He said, ‘Do a drawing.’ He liked the drawing and then said, ‘Get someone to make them.” Ganzer found a Hispanic seamstress in Boyle Heights. She and her friends began sewing mens and womens shorts out of different sample fabrics that he bought.
The first Jimmy’Z trunks were a cross “between the shorts the British military wore in India and the really long shorts that Duke and the old Hawaiian beachboys wore to prevent rashes.” Ganzer distributed the first pairs to prominent friends in the Malibu surfing hierarchy like Jay Riddle, George Trafton, Jeff Higgenbotham, Skip Engbloom, and Robbie Dick. “It all happened very organically. In the beginning, I sold them out of my station wagon in the parking lots at Topanga and Malibu. They were functional, each batch was different, and people liked them,” he recalled.
Jimmy’Z took a much more serious and lucrative turn in 1983 when he showed them to his old friend, Sepp Donahower, whose company Pacific Productions was, at one time, one of the biggest concert promoters in America. “Sepp touched his nose and said, ‘I smell a hit.’ Sepp really understood marketing.”
One of their first successful ads was a photo of surfer Randy Carranza taken at Los Flores beach. “Higgy was working for photographer Phillip Dixon who shot the really successful Guess Jeans ad campaign,” said Ganzer. “Dixon had a beautiful young model pull the velco tab of Randy’s pants as if she was taking them off.”
The first ads appeared in the inside cover of the LA Free Press. Soon Jimmy Z’s ads featured some of the wild men surfing and skating—Christian Hosoi, Steve Olson, David Hackett, Vince Klynn, and many others. “Jimmy’Z was much more of a scene than a clothing company. We were having fun and doing what came naturally to us,” recalled Ganzer.
The brand really took off after NBC news filmed Jim Ganzer at Surfrider Beach holding a pair of Jimmy’Z trunks. He turned to the camera, ripped open the Velcro, and said, “The mating call of the 80s.” By the end of their first weekend trade show, Ganzer and Donahower sold $300,000 dollars worth of merchandise. Over the next five years, Jimmy’Z rose like a meteor and their headquarters expanded from a garage to a 55,000 square foot building in Los Angeles. Ry Cooder and Stevie Ray Vaughn modeled their clothes in ads that appeared in The Rolling Stone.
At a trade show in New York City, Ganzer hired a dancer from the Wayans Brothers television show “In Living Color” named “J Lo” to dance to the music of a reggae musician he met playing on the street in Times Square. “I have always enjoyed doing unpredictable, spontaneous things. We outraged some people and inspired others,” said Ganzer. Soon, however, supply, demand, and the day-to-day pushing and shoving of the garment industry stopped being fun. After a series of business miscues, Ganzer and Donahower sold Jimmy’Z to OP. “Could I have made more money and maximized my profits better? Sure! Could I have had more fun? I doubt it.”
After Jim Ganzer sold his company, he spent more and more time in Costa Rica surfing, and at 65 was surfing better than ever. When asked about his life today, 77-year-old Ganzer’s eyes twinkle as he shrugs and says with the smile of a Cheshire cat, “I never set out to become a business tycoon, or ‘The Dude’ in the Big Lebowski. I was just living my life the only way I knew how to. Wealth and fame were much less important to me than fun and creative satisfaction. Surfing shaped the way I approached life. I remember Kemp Aaberg used to tell us ‘to keep it Sano.’ This meant keep it sanitary, keep your shit together, stay within the lines. That was what I meant by ‘The Dude Abides.’ I might have stepped over the lines of society’s rules, but I always abided by my own natural law, my own sense of right and wrong.”
Ganzer might really be the Buddha. Thanks for writing this piece. I’m still trying to figure out if my generation has/had such figures. It seems to be slim pickings these days.