![]()
Aloha and welcome to this chapter on Legendary Surfer DORIAN "DOC" PASKOWITZ.
(Link to "Surfwise" free view in its entirety, via HCC EduTube:
http://edutube.hccs.edu/media/SURFWISE+full+movie/0_dzw4x7n1/20676232 )
Few surfers had the kind of longevity in the world of surfing as Dorian “Doc” Paskowitz, who was born in 1921, began surfing when he was 10 and has surfed all his life, until he passed away at the age of 93.
Dorian was “Born and raised in Galveston, Texas,” he recalled at age 89, of his beginnings on GalvestonIsland, on the Coastal Bend of the TexasGulfCoast. “I stayed there until I was 13. And then a monumental thing happened in my life, something so striking it was incredulous. I learned to surf in the Gulf of Mexico[at age 10] with a contraption some guy made. By 13, I was a real surfer. It was April, I got bronchitis, I had terrible asthma. I just felt like it was the end of the world. One Sunday morning, I heard a thud on the porch. My mom brought in the [news] paper, I opened it, and the centerfold fell out. It was a Sunday magazine called Parade, I think. And so I opened it up to its centerfold. And there was a picture of something I had never even dreamed of. A magnificent wave that stretched across two pages, glistening, sparkling with sunlight, with three guys on the wave. Glassy water, sunlight, these beautifully shaped guys on these beautifully shaped boards. I’m not exaggerating – in an instant, my life changed. I felt like a million dollars. I said, ‘Momma! Momma! Look at that! You take me to where that wave is, I’ll get well tomorrow.’ She said: ‘You get well tomorrow, and I’ll take you the day after tomorrow.’
“Before the month of April was up, my entire family, with everything we owned, like the Joads of the
Grapes of Wrath, had piled into a 1934 Ford Model A, and we headed toward that wave. And I found that wave, and not only that wave, but those three guys, too.”
It was the Great Depression, and the Paskowitzes were struggling when they decided that if they were going to be poor in
Texas, they might as well be poor in
Mission Beach, California. “At the time, there were not many surfers there,” Dorian well remembers.
In 1935, surfers and surfboards were rare. Somehow he located a board and because it weighed more than he did, he had to drag it to the beach.
“Pretty soon people started coming up to me and saying, ‘Hey, can I try that?’”
Dorian was not only one of the first Jewish surfers ever, but went on to become “San Diego’s first Jewish surfer and probably the city’s first Jewish lifeguard, working as a San Diego City Lifeguard in MissionBeach in 1936 and in La Jollathe following year.”
He was once got kicked out of PointLomaHigh School because of his lifeguard work.
“I have asthma,” Dorian prefaced. “And asthmatics very frequently in the early morning get asthma just from breathing in the cold air. I had the early morning gym class. And I got asthma every morning. I really suffered from it. So I got a gym excuse from a doctor. That all went well for about a month and a half. But I’d lied about my age to become a lifeguard. And so I was stationed, even before my graduation from Point Loma [high school], at La JollaShores, where nobody swam and nobody was around.
“A woman comes running down the beach the second day I was there, screaming: ‘Help me! Help me!’ It was desolate. You can’t imagine what La Jolla was when I was 16, it was desolate, just sand dunes. She says: ‘My husband fell off the cliffs on the other side of the pier! He’s dying!’ I had my paddle board. I paddled it around the pier, picked him up and paddled him back. When I got back, the ambulance was there, but so was a newspaper reporter. The next morning, in the paper – may I show you the kind of picture that was there? I wanted you to see this (He pulls out a picture of him as a svelte young man).
“So the coach called me and said: ‘You dirty dog. How dare you! Here you are supposed to be a sick weakling! Look at that! And he kicked me out of school, three weeks before graduation.”
After high school, he enrolled at San DiegoState, but his dream had always been to get to Hawai‘i. When he got there, his first stay was not long.
“I transferred to the University of Hawaii, where I met another fellow like me who was struggling to get enough fried shrimp to keep body and soul alive. He went to Stanford. I had never heard of the school, coming from a poor family, but he said I should go there because Stanford was a rich school and they had lots of jobs for poor kids.”
Paskowitz went back to the U.S. Mainland and enrolled at Stanford, where he tutored to make ends meet; receiving an undergraduate degree in biology.
Like everyone of his generation, he remembered well the day the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor. He was at Stanford.
“I remember sitting in the Cellar, a place where everybody hung out to have doughnuts and coffee, tutoring two All-Americans so they could play in (college football’s) Rose Bowl, when a voice came over the radio and said that Pearl Harbor had been bombed.”
He enlisted in the Army Air Corps., but before he could report for duty, he learned that he had been accepted to Stanford’s medical school.
“So I joined the Navy and worked in the hospital and then aboard a ship,” he said. “I spent some time aboard the USS Ajax and went out to the atomic bomb experiments in the Pacific.”
Paskowitz continued his medical studies while in the Navy and received his degree from Stanford in 1946. When he got out of the Navy in 1948, he was already married and trying to start a family.
He and his first wife relocated to Hawai‘i, where he became head of the territory’s branch of the American Medical Association. “Doc, who concludes every phone call, with a warm ‘Shalom-Aloha,’ seemingly had it all as a doctor: professional, financial and social high-standing, complete with a home servant.
“But Doc was miserable. His second wife was cheating on him, he was no longer surfing and he was suffering from insomnia and anxiety. His life was a lie.”
During this time, Doc met Alfred Kumalai and told this story about his friend:
“I had a friend, who was so modest and so mild that he changed the destiny of the world in shorts, barefooted and without a shirt. And nobody knows his name. He was the inventor of the double-hulled canoe that became a catamaran. His name was Alfred Kumalae. He had the most marvelous disposition of peacefulness and humanity. One day, we were working on a new boat, and I said, ‘Alfred, let’s go get a drink.’ We put down our tools, walked across the sand to the yacht harbor. On the way, I looked down, and there in the sand, bright as a star, was a 50-cent piece. We were going to spend a nickel apiece to get soda. I said: ‘Alfred, look! Look! My God, we’re going to get pancakes.’ I showed it to him, and his face turned melancholy. I thought, he thinks I’m being selfish. I could see his whole demeanor had changed. I said, ‘Tell me, what’s wrong.’ He said, ‘Uncle Dorian’ – he called me ‘Uncle Dorian’ – ‘I know you’re happy about finding that 50-cent piece, and I am too, but have you given any thought to the person who lost it?’
Doc choked up at the memory of this moment.
“Whew. It was no morality, no religion, no philosophy; it was just an expression of the human spirit that can become so powerful and so majestic as to think those thoughts. And I said, ‘No, Alfred, I haven’t thought about that. But if I live to be 1,000, I’ll never forget it.’ He was a great human being. That’s the kind of man I met.”
In 1956, following two failed marriages, Dorian went to Israelto fight for that country during the Suez Canal Crisis.
“And they laughed at me,” he said simply.
“Being raised at MissionBeach, there was only one other Jewish family. Our raising was never a traditional Jewish raising. So life went on. I went to school, I decided I wanted to be a doctor, I became a doctor, I fell in love with a crazy woman, she began (expletive) my friends in Hawaii, I lost my mind, much of my hair, then I got married again to another woman. With one woman I lost one child, with the other I lost two children. And by 1955 I was a sad sack. I really felt that I had failed at perhaps some of the most important things in the world: Being a man, being a lover, being a husband, being a father. Because when you get kicked in the ass by a woman who’s (expletive) your friends, there’s hardly another blow – whether it’s to your ass or twixt the eyes – that hurts more.
“... I went to a gathering of Jews, a retreat. And I met the Jewish consul general of Israel. He told me that Israel was in trouble, and why didn’t I come to Israel. He said, ‘I can see you have some problems. But when you come to Israel, and you go home, you’ll take the problems back with you.’ He couldn’t have been more wrong. I lost every (expletive) problem I had.
“I went to
Israel. I thought I’d become a paratrooper and get killed. So I took a surfboard with me. When the war broke out, I was teaching a surfing lesson in the ancient city of
Ashkelon. I rushed back to Tel Aviv to volunteer. (The army didn’t want him.) I didn’t become a soldier of fortune. By the time I came back to
America, I was a mensch. A man.”
“When I left, I was a rather well-recovering psycho with panic spells, taking phenobarbitol when I had to. Living in my car. I was a resident doctor at a Jewish hospital, helping out. Then I got to Israel, and I began to meet people who were menschen, men. Great personalities, great warriors, great statesmen, great (expletive).
“I lived in the desert like a Bedouin. I got my fish from the sea. I ate properly, exercised, because I did nothing but walk miles and miles. Rest at night, right in the sand, in the open desert, with bombs falling between Aqaba and the
Red Sea. The recreation, the re-creation of my body every day. In the desert, I learned a great phenomenal revelation. That you cannot fragment health. That diet, exercise, rest, recreation and attitudes of mind are all part of an amalgam you call health. And you can no more change that than you can take the steering wheel off a Cadillac (and expect it to work).
“In 1956,” wrote reporter Rob Davis, “Doc gave up what he calls a life of ‘profiting from dying people’ and spent a year of self-realization in
Israel. He introduced the sport of surfing there to a small group of zealous Tel Aviv lifeguards, and enjoyed an amorous liaison with an Israeli woman who taught him how to be a capable lover...”
“And then, I came home an entirely new man,” Doc emphasized. “The consul general was wrong.”
In the process of finding himself again, Dorian brought surfing to Isreal.
It all begun at the time of the ‘Kadesh operation’ – a.k.a. Suez Canal Crisis. Along with fighting for Israel, Doc had a dream to create an Israeli surfing team which would represent Israelin the world championships. So, he brought with him 6 Longboards, which were partly made from Balsa wood, each with drawings depicting the Israeli flag, a “Star of David” with blue lines on either side.
When the Israeli army wouldn’t take him, he started cruising the coast in the hope of finding someone who would help take responsibility for his dream project; somebody local. Eventually he came to ‘Frishman’ beach in Tel Aviv, where he bumped into local lifeguard Shamai ‘Topsi’ Kanzapolski. He told Topsi about his idea.
Nir Almog, Topsi’s son, said: ‘It was love at first sight, my father decided to take on the project and be responsible for getting it started.”
At that time the lifeguards only caught waves with the “Hasake,” a flat wide board that had been designed for near shore fishing by Arabs and later adopted as a vehicle for the lifeguards.
Dorian gave them lessons and slowly the locals who hung out by the lifeguard station started to surf.
At that time the waves on Tel Aviv’s beaches were very high and used to break right on the beach, curved like a real beach break. The reason for this was that the beach was open shore with no piers and the golden sand that came drifting up from the river Nilehelped to shape the sea floor. To enter the water and go surfing then was thought of as pure madness and daring. The waves broke in sections, the first being a beach break, the second break was 500 meters away.
Nir Almog continued: “My father, who loved the sea, decided that I too, his first son, should learn to surf. He took me and put me on the board’s nose with him, while the surf was up. He instructed me to stand up, I did so, and that was the moment I caught the surf bug...”
Dorian later returned to
Israel and brought more boards with him that were distributed to the local surfers.
“Returning to California,” wrote Kate Meyers for AARP Magazine, “he took a job running the hospital on Catalina Island, still concerned that a doctor shouldn’t prosper from others’ misery. One evening he followed two women into a restaurant. He asked the hostess to make an introduction, and when he felt the conversation was going nowhere announced, ‘It’s obvious that I’m making very little progress here.’ To this, the tall one, a stunning telephone operator named Juliette, remarked, ‘You may be making more progress than you think.’
“Before the evening’s end, Dorian declared she’d give birth to his seven sons. Juliette thought that was ‘the sexiest, most wonderful idea’ she’d ever heard. (Nine years later, with the arrival of Salvador, the prophecy came true.)
“Their adventures together began with a trip. ‘I told her I had just returned from Israel, and I don’t think I ever would have been a whole person had I not understood my roots,’ Doc recalls. He fixed up a ‘49 Studebaker with a water tank and platform bed and they drove 5,000 miles through Mexico.
“They lived off the sea and built bonfires at night. In a peaceful spot in Guaymas, with David already in Juliette’s belly, the couple were married by a justice of the peace. It was at this same spot that Doc had an epiphany: ‘A very charismatic caballero and his son galloped up on stallions and joined our campfire. This boy looked up at his father with such adoration, and I thought, “That’s what I want more than anything else.” His bag was the horse; mine was surfing. And when I took my kids out, I wanted them to look at me in the same way.’”
It was 1958, and Doc “concluded that when you have your health you really do have everything. So off he went with his bride to pursue a vagabond life of surfing, lean eating, and (after a while) raising nine kids in a camper built for four… He has no regrets.”
“We had a bunch of kids, eight boys and one girl, and spent most of the time in Hawaii,” he said. “My wife’s family was from Southern California, so from time to time we would go back there and visit. But most of the time we spent in the islands.”
Juliette explained what she feels is the secret to staying happily married for so long: “You have to find someone you want to make love to for the rest of your life.”
“This would make Doc Paskowitz incredibly proud. In his half-century pursuit of the perfectly healthy life, there are three things he’s found that make life worth living—surfing, lovemaking, and parenting—and from the day he met Juliette, all three have been the objects of his outsize zeal. Dropping out of the traditional working world in 1958, this Stanford-educated Jewish doctor and his six-foot Mexican American bride raised an eight-boy, one-girl pack of water people, a wandering tribe of surfers swept up in their father’s obsessive experiment in achieving ‘superior well-being.’”
“Talk to the Paskowitz progeny and they tell tales of their father’s iron will as well as their outlandish freedom growing up. ‘It was like the Lost Boys and Lord of the Flies combined,’ says Abraham, who treasures memories of ‘the greatest childhood that could ever be lived.’
“‘Every day we’d get in the camper and we’d go to some amazing place with a beautiful beach and great fishing, and you’d have all of your brothers with you and go exploring.’
“Given the dangers of the wild and the clan’s itinerant existence, ‘it was required that we follow certain rules,’ recalls David, who as eldest was saddled with herding his siblings. And Doc was unbending. ‘A lot of times he resorted to force. He would beat us all into one corner with a T-shirt or a bungee cord.’
“It was a decidedly masculine scene. ‘My dad, God love him, is the most chauvinistic man that ever walked on the planet. I didn’t know I was a girl until I was, like, 16,’ says Navah, the only daughter, who got down to 7 percent body fat in her youth. ‘I’ve had eating disorders my whole life. Every single thing we put in our mouths he would scrutinize.’ Navah considers her robust father anorexic.
“There are only glimmers of awareness in Doc of the tyranny he imposed,” Kate Meyers surmised, “perhaps because he considers his precepts nature’s laws rather than his own. In Surfing and Health he dedicates a section called ‘Motivation’ to himself: ‘I don’t know anybody who WANTS TO BE HEALTHY more than I do. Or (is) more scared NOT to (be). When I skip a day of walking or when I gorge too much, I feel guilty—very guilty.’”
“During their years in campers each child had a three-by-three-foot cubby for stowing belongings. Everybody had a chore. Jonathan (child number two) was in charge of tying surfboards to the top. Navah was on dish patrol. They surfed, they explored. Juliette sang Bach arias to the children, and they had projects—reading, drawing, fixing the car. This was homeschooling before the term existed. They survived on the seven-grain cereal—the kids called it quicksand—and peanut butter on whole-grain breads that Juliette baked in the camper’s tiny oven. They ate plenty of rice, beans, and fish. When they could afford it, there was chicken and challah on the Sabbath.”
“Our life was so existential,” said Juliette. “We’d wake up to the sun. The waves are good, the waves are not so good. It’s not that we didn’t read books or listen to classical music. We had all of that. We didn’t have a beautiful home. We didn’t have a washer and dryer. But we had kids that were close to us, and they were our dream.”
“It was the life Doc wanted, and society’s norms didn’t apply. ‘Our day-to-day job was to parent our children in a way that they emerged from childhood as strong, wonderful adults,’ he says.”
“All the children except Abraham now live in California, with occupations that run from movie producer to rock singer to surf instructor. At the Paskowitz apartment the phone rings constantly, always one of the children checking in. But the passage to adulthood was often rocky, and their lack of formal education cost them. Only one of the kids went to college: Moses (number five) won a football scholarship but didn’t graduate.
“During my rebellious teenage years of course I cursed my dad for not sending me to school,” said Navah, a mother of three. “I would have been a great student. That, to me, was the only real thing that stands out as a negative.”
Doc tried to ease their way into the world in 1972 by starting the Paskowitz Surf Camp in California, a summer surfing school over 40 years old. He says he hoped “the allure of money and a new board would keep the kids hanging around.”
But the plan backfired. “The summers gave us a peek into what we were missing, and that sparked a lot of brothers leaving the fold,” says Navah. Jonathan (a producer of Surfwise) was the first. He took off at 14 after getting a taste of freedom at 11, when he went to Israel to visit David, who was studying for his bar mitzvah there. Almost all the children left in their teens, usually staying with a friend or an older brother, working whatever jobs they could find to get by.
“‘We should have at least learned the basic strategies of walking out the front door,’ says David. ‘When I left, I still believed whatever adults said was true. I had never written a check or paid a bill. I didn’t have a Social Security card.’”
“Doc’s strengths and limitations go hand in hand, says Doug Pray, the director of
Surfwise, a surf film that tells the Paskowitz family story. “He’s the classic charismatic leader, somebody who’s very dominant and used to getting his way. And there’s always a price to be paid for that. He’s inspired thousands of surfers. I’ll go places and people just worship him. But it does have to be his way.”
All during the time of raising his family with Juliette, Doc spent the years as a “missionary doctor” and charged few people for his services.
“I always felt bad taking money from sick people,” he said.
His work has taken him from the South Pacific to the Middle East.
“I was there during Operation Desert Storm and saw Scuds flying over,” he said. “We took our gas masks, hung them on a tree and went surfing while those bombs were dropping.”
Doc and his family had few material possessions. His kids were homeschooled, and the family often traveled throughout the United States in a motor home. He would work from time to time where other doctors didn’t want to go: Indian reservations, migrant camps and the emergency rooms of inner-city hospitals.
“I always felt that we had enough,” he said. “We had our surf boards and the fish in the sea. But even better, we had each other.”
“… the feeling that I get when I am out on the water, that feeling of being part of something much bigger than myself, is the same feeling that I get when I look at all my children and grandchildren.”
“My son summed it all up once. ‘Eat clean, live clean, surf clean.’”
Most of his kids went on to pursue careers in various aspects of the entertainment industry. He was once asked about that.
“Well, I never sent my kids to school so they are not going to be able to argue a case in court or do a surgery or sit down as an architect and design a building. They have to choose a profession where personality [is] the profession.
“I always tell my wife that we have nine only children. They grew up to be personalities. In many ways, the entertainment business is like a magnet that draws such people like that. In the early days of the movies, the days of Clark Gable and Bill Holden, these guys really were what they portrayed themselves to be in the movies. They really were real personalities. Like Clark Gable, he was the King of Hollywood. When war broke out, he became a bomber pilot. My children grew up all together in the water without a formal education in an atmosphere of love and companionship. Because of this, their personalities grew very strong. And so now each one has followed his own persona and I’m all for it. I think it is easy to be a doctor. There are a hell of a lot more doctors than there are guys riding big Pipeline.”
Through the years of working and raising a family, Doc consciously maintained a high level of fitness through surfing. “Outside of playing a little football at San DiegoState, surfing has always been my one and only sport,” he said. “But you have to remember that in my day, surfing was much more than just surfing.”
He reminded anyone that does not know, that the surfers of the ‘30s, ‘40s and ‘50s prided themselves on being all-around watermen.
“The first thing was, you had to be a good body surfer, and you also had to be able to row a Nova Scotia surf dory out through the breakers. Then you had to not only race paddle boards but be able to play water polo one on one. You also had to be a good skin diver and, of course, surf.
“I wasn’t a great waterman. But I was a good one.”
There was also another activity that Paskowitz said kept him “buff.”
“I used to love to stand around on my hands,” he said. “I would walk all over the place, stand on the edge of a 15-story building. I used to love that. I even got an offer to join the circus.”
In his prime, Paskowitz could stand on his hands and drop down to touch his nose to the ground 15 times. That skill came in handy, especially on the beach, where weightlifters congregated before there were fitness clubs.
“I remember seeing some big-city champion working out, and I went over and lifted the weight three times over my head as if it were nothing,” Paskowitz said. “I was strong because I was always working out with my own body weight.”
Doc said many times that there is no secret to good health.
“If I were going to address a group of young people on the subject, I would tell them that you just can’t beat good nutrition. You can’t think that because the body will take anything, you can give it anything. A proper diet, day by day, for the rest of your life, has to be coupled with enough exercise to burn off the excess.
“Diet and exercise should give you a body fat percentage of 14 or 15 percent. You can’t be a tugboat and think that you are going to sail the seven seas gracefully and safely.”
But that’s not the end of it. Doc was quick to emphasize not only the physical benefits of surfing, but the spiritual benefits, as well.
“I don’t have the vocabulary, nor am I that literary gifted, to even try to express in words the emotional or spiritual benefit of surfing. I think there is something primordial about it. All the great forces in the universe – heat, light, electro-magnetism – they all impinge upon the water to make waves.
“So when you ride a wave, you are tapping into something much bigger, something that is cosmic. It is like skiing down a mountain. Gravity takes hold, and the skier becomes part of that cosmic force. In surfing, the mountains move themselves.”
“There’s something in the wave. I said in my book, there’s a wisdom in the wave, high-born and beautiful, for those who would but paddle out. When you understand what a wave is, and you understand that you can connect with that, you ask yourself, how does man and his emotional firmament hook into that? When it’s winter in the Bering Straits, giant storms arise that push waves as high as 80 to 90 feet between crest and trough. The powerful cosmic forces of gravity, light, electromagnetism come to bear on the surface of the earth and create, in their conflicts, storms. And those storms create an energy that goes down into the water. It’ll come up 80, 90 feet, and by the time it gets to
Hawaiiit’s 10 feet. And by the time it gets to
MissionBeach, it’ll be 6 feet. Here’s 6 feet of star power. Is there something special when you grab onto that power and try to manage it? Something happens that gets into your system that absolutely captivates you. I have learned the beauty of dancing on a wave. If you’ve ever surfed, you know that feeling. For that instant you’re on the wave, you’re totally, instinctively, connected to the stars.”
“I consider myself a religious man, but I have nothing to do with religion. I don’t go to a synagogue, but I pray every day, several times a day, in fact. I put on the tfillin, the phylacteries of the ancient Orthodox Jews, but I have no truck with that stuff.”
Dorian said that through the sea, surfing and his relationship with the people of Hawaii, he forged his spiritual beliefs.
“I talk to God personally. I don’t want to sound like a kook, but I get out on my surf board and sit alone atop the deep blue sea and look around and just give thanks for being part of God’s great world.”
For Doc, taking care of one’s spirit is every bit as important as diet and exercise in relation to overall health.
“Every morning,” wrote Kate Meyers, who spent a good deal of time interviewing Dorian, “Doc spends an hour and a quarter doing deep breathing, squats, flexibility exercises, balance and agility exercises, and some work with a ten-pound barbell. Every morning he prays and converses with those no longer here—Jews who died in the Holocaust, fellow surfers he loved. ‘I pray for wisdom every day. I pray for the ability to be a good doctor.’”
“The first thing I do when I get up is to honor my [departed] Hawaiian friends, who were great men. After I say a prayer for them, I put on tefellin –leather straps that observant Jews wrap around their arms – and I say my prayers, but I wouldn’t call myself religious.”
“When I say my prayers in the morning, I stretch out my arms, like a person gathering in wheat, I grab all the sunshine and fresh air. I try to fill myself with good things. Everything I do is an effort to align myself with the great vitality of life.”
Doc said that he feels at home praying with Catholics or kneeling with Muslims.
“The God that I have found is in all those churches. I have no sense of fraternity when it comes to God.”
Doc once told the story of how he started wearing the teffelin:
“After surfing one day, I realized two of my boys, Abraham and Jonathan weren’t bar mitzvahed. So I went to the Fairfax area of L.A. and found a little hole-in-the-wall Bnet Knesset [synagogue], barely bigger than a hot dog stand run by a Russian rabbi, a man by the name of Naftali. I told him I had no money.”
“‘Bring in a nice bottle of schnapps, then I’ll bar-mitzvah your boys.’
“During the bar mitzvah, I was dovening [rhythmic praying; rocking back and forth] and out of the corner of my eye I could see a dapper-looking man coming closer. He wore a straw hat, a hounds-tooth coat, white pants and shiny black and white shoes, and of course a tallis [prayer shawl] and yarmulke.
“‘Do you put tefellin on?’
“‘No I don’t. I’m sorry.’”
“After chanting ‘Baruch Ata Odenai Elohainu…,’ the dapper worshipper said to Doc, ‘I’ll make you a deal. If you put on tefellin, I’ll pay you $25 a month for the rest of your life.’
“‘You’re going to give me $25 a month for the rest of my life for putting teffelin on?’
“‘Okay … I’ll make it $35,’ countered the dapper one.
“‘I’ll make you a deal,’ Doc counter-offered. ‘I don’t want your money but there must be Jews that were killed in the Holocaust who never got a chance to wear tefellin. In your name, for their honor, I’m going to put on tefellin for the rest of my life.’
“For the last 40 years, Doc has put on tefellin every morning, in addition to performing deep-breathing exercises he learned from surf icon, wind-gliding innovator and former San Diego resident and trailblazer Woody Brown.”
Later on, “In the depths of
Mexico,” Doc recalled, “I’m riding waves too big for me. I was getting nervous and thought about paddling in, but all of a sudden, I saw somebody knee paddling on a longboard coming towards me. It was the guy who offered to pay me. His sheitel (wig)-wearing wife was on the beach waiting for him. I couldn’t believe it!”
A family practitioner for more than half his life, Dorian Paskowitz also specialized in sports medicine. He had a keen interest in asthma and wrote a book titled The Air Beneath Your Nose.
“I am a very bad asthmatic, and my whole life has been spent trying to prevent asthma attacks,” he said.
“The book has nothing to do with treating attacks but everything about keeping them from happening.”
Paskowitz applied that philosophy to another book,
Surfing and Health, which he considered his best. The book “offers advice and philosophy in equal doses,” wrote Kate Meyers. “Weaving in surf-soaked parables and tales from his life, he makes the case that care of the body is not merely the key to physical happiness but a moral imperative, the foundation of ethical conduct and love.”
“‘Health is more than just not being sick. In fact, it is more than just preventing disease,’ he said. ‘All healthy men are fit, but not all fit men are healthy.’
“‘Diet, exercise, rest, recreation and attitude of mind, all working together, can make the human body superior in form and as a result, better enable it to fight disease naturally. Your immune system can be in top form and so will the mental and spiritual aspects of your life.’”
Doc does not advocate radical diets for good heath and is not even a vegetarian. Instead, he eats what he considers to be a variety of wholesome, whole foods.
“Kooky diets are very dangerous. Man is a hunter-gatherer. That is how I live my life.”
“Doc’s way is unsparing,” wrote Kate Meyers for AARP Magazine. “As self-help gurus go, he’s Old Testament. You reap what you sow. Eating fat begets fat. His five pillars of health are nothing you haven’t heard: diet (lots of fruits and vegetables and a little meat, what he calls the universal meal), exercise (to burn off what we eat), rest (eight hours daily), recreation (joyful play that re-creates you), and positive attitudes of mind. But his passionate advocacy for making health your first concern is extraordinary.
“‘Can I tell you something,’ he not so much asks as commands. He is sitting at the breakfast table of his one-bedroom apartment in Honolulu, surrounded by photos of ancestors and offspring. Bare-chested, he’s staring down at the plastic tray, a replica of a Gauguin painting that holds his unvarying breakfast of fruit and seven-grain cereal. Then he looks up. ‘People are digging their own graves with their knives and forks. If a bird is 50 percent overweight, do you think it can fly?’
“Our biggest enemy, he never tires of saying, is fat. ‘Eighty-five percent of all life-threatening diseases come from eating too much fat,’ he pronounces. ‘The richer a society is, the more difficulty we have staying lean.’
“Men should work to be around 17 percent fat, Doc believes; women, around 22 percent. ‘If you ground up the average American, you wouldn’t be able to sell him over the counter for hamburger,’ he notes. ‘He’d be far fatter than the law allows.’ Then there are the standard charts of healthy weight, which allow us to gain a bit as we age. Paskowitz calls them malarkey. ‘Show me one wild animal that as it gets older, it gets fatter,’ he says. ‘If an animal gets fatter, he’ll get eaten.’”
“Doc was before his time in his observations, and everyone else is catching up,” said Honoluluneurologist Tom Drazin, a friend and fellow surfer. “He lives what he preaches. He practices it every day. Doc’s cholesterol is 170—lower than mine at age 48.”
By all accounts, Doc didn’t have a candy bar or butter in 50 years. He usually consumed two meals a day, cooked and served by his wife Juliette. Although a hip replacement in January 2006 marked a hiatus in his 74 years of surfing, in six weeks he was back standing on his board, riding waist-high curls at Waikiki. For five years before that, he had surfed on his knees.
“Doc’s proud because even though he’s got complaints (an enlarged prostate, can’t hear all that well), unlike most 86-year-olds he takes no medication, can swim a mile, and can hold his breath for a minute. And, he’ll be very happy to tell you, he’s making love three times a week. ‘You can be a very old car and still be in the race,’ he says smiling, looking a bit like Gandhi.”
“Surfing, of course, is Doc’s preferred fourth pillar,” wrote Kate Meyers for AARP Magazine. “It was literally how he re-created himself in the 1950s after two marriages had failed and the feeling that he wasn’t helping his patients enough left him rudderless. Weekends surfing with boyhood chums on the Californiacoast at San Onofre was his only joy. Even when he went to Israel in 1956, still grappling with how to turn himself, at 35, from “a spoiled, pampered, over-protected boy” into a man, he brought a surfboard and stowed it on the coast before going on a walkabout in his ancestral desert.
“What began as a soul-searching last resort became his chosen lifestyle. ‘He lived as a nomad,’ says Abraham Paskowitz, Doc and Juliette’s thirdborn. ‘He traded fish for drinking water. He believed money was the root of all evil.’ And when he got back to surfing, he got enough locals excited about the sport that he’s now known as the father of Israeli surfing.”
(image courtesy of Alohadoc)
In the summer of 2007, “Surfing 4 Peace” was founded by Doc, Israeli surfer Arthur Rashkovan, Dorian’s son David Paskowitz and world surfing champion Kelly Slater,
who is of Syrian descent. The project is aimed at bringing
Middle East surfers closer together through surfing.
The group’s first project was the donation of fourteen surfboards to Palestinians following a July 27, 2007 Los Angeles Times article entitled “Gaza Surfers Find Freedom in the Sea,” which pointed out the difficulties of Palestinian surfers on the Gaza strip.
“The Paskowitzes masterminded a plan to get 12 surfboards to
Gaza through the famously secure Erez Crossing. They put together a team of supporters that included surfing legend Kelly Slater, pro-peace organization OneVoice, and Tel Aviv surfing activist Arthur Rashkovan, who convinced Israeli surfing companies to donate the boards. They then managed to garner the approval of the Israeli military to secure safe passage.”
An Associated Press article of August 21, 2007
described then-86-year-old Dorian in-action: “An 86-year-old Jewish surfing guru from Hawaii donated… 12 surfboards to Gaza’s small surfing community, in a gesture he hoped would get Israelis and Palestinians catching the same peace wave.
“‘God will surf with the devil, if the waves are good,’ retired doctor Dorian Paskowitz said... ‘When a surfer sees another surfer with a board, he can’t help but say something that brings them together.’
“Paskowitz emerged shirtless at the Israel-Gaza crossing after handing over the dozen boards to Gazan surfers waiting on the other side. He said he was spurred into action after reading a story about two
Gaza surfers who couldn’t enjoy the wild waves off the coast because they had only one board to share between them.”
What the AP article didn’t mention was that it took Doc “two-hours of cajoling an Israeli border guard at
Gaza’s Erez crossing” to be able to to take “the surfing t-shirt off his back” and hand it over the fence, along with the dozen surfboards.
Doc considered the boards a kind of seeding in Gaza.
“From a board comes a group of guys who ride. From the group comes a business, then an industry, then a fantastic amount of money. I’m talking about billions, all from one board.”
“Upon transferring the boards to the Palestinian surfers, Paskowitz reported: ‘There were tears in their eyes.’ And we know that passion promotes possibility, which is what peace is all about.”
Several months later, in October 2007, Kelly Slater gave surfing lessons in Israel and a benefit concert was planned: “Slater… spent one day helping others into waves, and then spent the evening jamming with a local band all in an effort to raise the level of ‘peace consciousness.’
“‘My father (Dorian) asked him if he was ready to be not only a great surfer but a great man as well,’ David Paskowitz said…
“Kudos to Kelly Slater for following his heart and using the power of his stature to pursue a cause that promotes peace,” wrote Scott Bass for
Surfer. “In an era in which larger than life sports champions walk the marketing tight rope and rarely take a social stand, Slater’s actions are refreshing and have the stamp of true world champion – in the greatest sense of the phrase.”
“With several members of the Paskowitz family themselves experienced musicians, it was clear that with the addition of Kelly Slater and Big-Wave rider Makua Rothman, both of whom are also musicians, the S4P Concert could be a real hit,” described the Surfing 4 Peace website. “The S4P crew teamed up with One Voice for a concert on October 19, 2007 that would be held the day after the planned One Voice peace concerts in Jerichoand Tel Aviv.” Surfing 4 Peace felt it had great momentum, as the surfboards donation several months before had had international coverage.
“When the One Voice Concert was cancelled just 48 hours before its scheduled opening due to security concerns, the Surfing 4 Peace Concert became the only show in town and the pressure was on. Kelly arrived just in time to fit in a surfing clinic for young Israeli Jewish and Arab children in the town of Hertzilia before heading down to Tel Aviv to kick off the concert. Before the music began, the S4P team led a paddle out and surfer’s circle in the waters off of the Dolphinarium beach in Tel Aviv, with hundreds of supporters joining them in the water.
“Shortly thereafter, Israeli Surf Band Malka Baya kicked off the show, which included performances by Josh and David Paskowitz, Kelly Slater, and Makua Rothman. With over 3000 people in attendance, Doc used the opportunity to greet the crowd and remind them what Surfing 4 Peace was all about and, as anticipated, was warmly received as the Godfather of surfing in Israel. It was a spectacular night of music with a message of peace, and hopefully the beginning of an annual event that will help to change hearts and minds throughout the Middle East.”
“Meanwhile, on the other side of the world, Seweryn “Sev” Sztalkoper was busy gathering a massive donation of brand new surfboards and equipment to send to Gaza. Sev had read the same LA Times article as the S4P crew and answered it by starting a project calledGaza Surf Relief. With Sev’s dedication to the cause, the donations quickly began to roll in. In Gaza, a team fromExplore Corps, led by Matthew Olsen, an old friend of Arthur’s, was meeting the locals and working on setting up a Gaza Surf Club.
“A partnership was quickly formed between Gaza Surf Relief, Surfing 4 Peace, and Explore Corps to insure the successful transport, import, and distribution of the donated equipment from Gaza Surf Relief, based in Santa Monica, California to the waiting surfers in Gaza. With S4P handling shipping and Explore Corps working on local distribution, the donations eventually made their way, free of charge, to Israel, courtesy of DHL, Flying Cargo and The Peres Center for Peace. During the summer of 2008, the majority of the shipment was delivered and distributed to the surfers in Gaza but a ban on the import of surfboards to Gaza by the Israeli army meant that only 4 of the surfboards could be delivered.”
“In August of 2010, after two years of negotiations, Explore Corps was able to secure permission for the boards to enter Gaza. With shipping into Gazaprovided by the UN, the surfboards were delivered in late August to the grateful members ofThe Gaza Surf Club. For the first time, every surfer in Gazanow has his own surfboard, including the newest addition to the Club, Gaza’s first female surfer.”
One of Doc’s interviewers remarked that “One of the ironies in your life is that you went to the Middle Eastto fight, and now you go back for the opposite reason, to plant the seeds for peace.” Dorian’s response was this:
“Sometimes we talk about things that we imagine, that we dream of, that are still just tiny thoughts. And then they become empires. We started with the idea that these two Hamas Arabs in Gaza we’d seen featured in the Los Angeles Times, these two lifeguards with one (beat-up) surfboard between them needed new boards. We just took (new surfboards) to the Arabs, not making any big fuss over it. But when we came back from the Arab-Israeli border, waiting for us was every major news outlet in the world. From the Australian Broadcasting Corporation to Al Jazeera. A billion people saw us do that.
“… There is no peace in the [Israeli-Palestinian] conflict. There’s no peace between hot and cold, slow and fast, husband and wife. It’s all one big fight. But there is one human condition called peacefulness. You don’t say, ‘These bastards have been fighting for 6,000 years, let’s get them together.’ Peacefulness is not tranquility of spirit, it’s streets that are not muddy, it’s enough to eat on, it’s enough clothing to wear or covers at night. It’s a little clinic to take your kids to. It’s the mechanics of survival we all want. That’s peacefulness. And surfing is peacefulness. When you go out in the water with your enemies, they are peaceful.
“When you guide your commitment, your resources and your skills to peacefulness, the seeds of peace are there. When you start the other way around, it’s bullshit. You cannot have the Arabs walking around like poverty-stricken bag ladies and Israelis driving around in a Porsche. You can’t have that. Because there’s no peacefulness in that. It showed me that that’s what we have to offer in our surfing. The merest snippet of peacefulness.”
The same year that Surfing 4 Peace got going, the documentary film Surfwise was released, based on Doc, his beliefs and his family. However, his status as portrayed in the film was a farce, he told an interviewer.
“I’m no icon. It was the people and personalities that shaped me into who I am and molded my reputation; I’m just a nice little Jewish boy from
Galveston, Texasthat fell in love with surfing and lifeguarding…
Rabbit Kekai is a legend.
Woody Brown is a legend.
Duke Kahanamoku is a legend.”
“Doc’s desire to not be treated as a surfing icon is true and well-intentioned,” Doug Pray, documentarian of Surfwise, said.
“He’d be the first to tell you that he’s not a world-class athletic surfer and hasn’t ridden any giants. Instead he is known and loved for being a surfing advocate and a great doctor to surfers everywhere.”
Pray said that when he began putting the film together, Doc was mortified that
Surfwise would be a tribute film, placing him on a pedestal that would seem self-aggrandizing to his peers, the ones he looked up to.
“Well, to tell you the truth,” Doc told Surfer magazine in 2011, “I didn’t want anything to do with the movie. In fact, I was so pissed about it that I still haven’t even seen it, and I will never see it. I don’t want a movie about me – I mean I’m Hawaiian.
“The idea of being Hawaiian reminds me of when this interviewer asked Makua Rothman why was he so hesitant to talk to people and be interviewed. He said because he was ‘Hawaiian.’ He said that being Hawaiian made him very low key and unlike anything other people made him out to be when he was interviewed. It was wonderful the humble way he put it. And you know, I grew up and lived my whole life in Hawaii, and I have learned that Hawaiian style of just saying ‘It is US – not me.’ So when this guy asked to make a movie about me I said, ‘Buzz off.’
“But then my son Jonathan and wife Juliet said, ‘Please do this.’ Jonathan said ‘This is my chance to get into the movie racket’ and my wife said, ‘This is my chance to have a chronicle about my family.’ But once I got on it then it was go for broke. There was nothing in it that I wouldn’t do.”
For instance, at one point Doc was asked, “How do you exercise?”
“… and so I got myself stark naked and got on my exercise bicycle. I hear that’s in the movie.”
About the movie, Doc was asked: “What would the one message you would like people to have after observing your family and the decisions you have made?”
His response:
“That love really makes the world go round, but sex makes love go round. That would be my mark on the movie.”
He added: “I wanted so much, as a surfing doctor, to speak to my surfing audience as well as the audience of the film about the book that I wrote, which was the basis of the film. Not many people know that my book ‘Surfing and Health’ is the basis of the film. I wanted it to have its play because the book can save lives.”
Toward the End
Shaun Tomson, 1977 World Surfing Champ and author of several books on the surfing lifestyle said that when it comes to money and surfing, “Certain people would rather chase waves than a dollar, and Doc is one of those people.”
A perfect illustration of this was the time Doc “turned down a $40,000 inheritance from an aunt for fear that the money would ruin the family’s nomadic odyssey and stress-free lifestyle. He truly believed money was the root of all evil.”
The money Dorian scraped together wandering with his family does not come along so easily or casually anymore. He used to work in emergency rooms for a few days and make enough to provide for his family for a month. Or he’d spend a few months as the on-set physician for TV’s ‘Gunsmoke,’ the camper parked nearby. Today, he and Juliette mostly get money from the surf camp, run by their fourth child Israel, their monthly Social Security checks, and a few of their other kids who can afford to help.
For years Doc didn’t worry about the future. On their travels in
Mexicohe was the “orange doctor,” so named for the only form of payment he took. Somehow they always got by. But now he would like to have a cushion to leave his wife, which was part of the motivation for his writing
Surfing and Health and going along with the
Surfwise project.
In 2007 and $50,000 in debt, Doc referred to himself simply as “one of the few dumb Jewish doctors.”
One interviewer candidly asked Doc if he regrets not having strived for financial success.
“It’s been very hard,” he replied. “No matter what, though, I have no regrets that I’m stone broke. At the end of the day only one thing matters: That I’m happy I did not have to make my living out of charging other people while they are in misery.”
Yet, “As his kids point out in the movie so clearly, the great irony,” said
Surfwise’s Pray, “is Doc’s self-avowed hatred of money and insistence on leading a poor lifestyle forced his family to constantly worry about money.” Not only that, Pray said, now “Doc is consumed by the need to acquire money so that he doesn’t leave Juliette – who for 10 years straight was either pregnant or breast feeding – in poverty.”
Their daily life is as Doc wants it to be:
“Nearly every afternoon he and Juliette visit the sea. Juliette attends to ‘Poppa,’ takes digital photos of him in the surf, and sends them off to friends and family. ‘She’s the real hero of the story,’ Doc says, worried that perhaps the listener didn’t get that, didn’t realize that she is the calm to his storm, and that her love and devotion made it all work. And sometimes, when he’s talking, she will just stand and walk over and plant a kiss on her man. It’s clear she’s still pretty mad about the Doc. ‘I’ll pencil him in,’ she explains of their afternoon romps. ‘He’ll allow me a little champagne, and we’ll have a lot of fun.’”
“Forty-eight years – all for him. Sometimes I get a little claustrophobic and think ‘What if?’ But then I think of my children. I have no regrets. I would do it again in a second.”
