Cultural Icon Passes Away

Our major feature this month is “Newsmakers: The Year’s Top 10 Stories.” You’ll see retrospectives ranging from the Clark Foam circus to Dean Randazzo’s second comeback from Hodgkin’s. What you won’t see is one of the biggest headlines to hit the San Diego surf community. Jack Macpherson is dead at age 69.
Macpherson’s life was the type people tell stories about – literally. From Tom Wolfe’s “The Pumphouse Gang” to Jamie Nay’s history of the Mac Meda Destruction Company that adorns the wall at London’s West End, where Macpherson tended bar, stories of Mac’s exploits ran far and rang true.
Macpherson’s legacy, though, will always be synonymous with the Mac Meda Destruction Company, which was vaulted into celebrity and cemented into local surf lore with Wolfe’s 1966 story for the New York World Journal Tribune’s Sunday magazine, “The Pumphouse Gang” about a band of teenage surfers in the 60’s whose hangout was the sewage pump house at Windansea. The piece was later selected as the title work for Wolfe’s 1968 book. And though neither Mac nor his partner in crime Bob “Meda” Rakestraw, were never named specifically in the story, the two were indelibly written into the fast developing history of Southern Californian surf culture.
Similar to when C.R. Stecyk opened the world’s eyes to the Z-Boys of DogTown in the pages of Skateboarder in the 70’s, Wolfe’s glamorization of the lifestyle and antics of the Mac Meda Destruction Company manufactured folk icons. Most who knew or knew of Macpherson consider him at least a local legend, but his image, the one immortalized by Wolfe’s writing, is what gave birth in part to our own cultural self-concept and most certainly shaped how surfers are perceived by outsiders looking in.
Now 40 years after Wolfe’s story was first published, it’s evident that the cultural elements embodied by the Mac Meda Destruction Company had an enormous trickle down effect. From our trouble-making groms to underground groups like the Windansea Rats (WSR) to the party scene, Macpherson’s influence is at least moderately evident. Sure, kids will be kids, localism is one of surfing’s constants, and hell, everybody enjoys a good drink now and again, but Macpherson’s contribution and, in turn, his cultural significance is felt in each.
What Mac represented, the image of the reckless, rebellious, free, individualistic surfer evolved into a cultural tenant. As surfers we ascribe those same qualities onto ourselves; we take them as a given. I can remember being a punk kid with a smart mouth who loved getting into trouble for no other reason than that’s what I’d seen kids a few years older than me doing at my age. Playing follow the leader was part of growing up. When we all got heavy into partying in our late teens and early twenties, it was for the same reasons. Yeah the girls and beers were fun, but moreover the whole thing was a rite of passage. It was something that as surfers we just did, probably subconsciously because of men like Jack Macpherson who’d come before us and done the same.
Macpherson’s mark on Southern California’s surf culture is unmistakable. He was an icon in what has since shifted from surf culture to Americana. He is survived not only by his family, but by a population of surfers who walked his line and sought to mimic his spirit.