Pleasure Point Night Fighters

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PPNF on Wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pleasure_Point_Night_Fighters

NIGHT FIGHTERS:  Please send history stories with the year and details: harry@packyourtrash.org  in the comments:

Pivotal & monumental information in Santa Cruz surfing
history:  Duly Noted on 1/23/11

“Jimmy Phillips at the Helm”:  Jimmy Phillips and his 1961 Dodge sedan surf car are prominently posted immediately as you enter the Santa Cruz Surfing Museum. Stacked with 19 surfboards and filled with 19 surfers from 1962, and unofficial record holder for the Surfer Magazine surf car surfboard stacking photos of that year.  The surf car photo in question was donated from Jimmy’s personal collection – “Jimmy Phillips at the Helm”. Photographer -Bob Biddle – a speculation on Jimmy’s best memory and mostly based on the fact that the car was parked across the street from Biddle’s house for the photo.

The Pleasure Point Surfing Association – known for outstanding surfers, and known for great parties…but there is so much more surf history credit to their story that is due.   Jimmy, one of the original seven founding charter members, provided the original idea to establish the club, and also served as secretary for three years until a 1965 scholarship to California College of Arts and Crafts forced him to step down.

He provided the impetus for the 2003 reorganization of the club and remained an original charter and reorganized charter member and secretary to this day. Jimmy as art director provided the logo identity which is documented in photos of club members wearing their PPSA t-shirts in “Surfing in Santa Cruz” (page 90), a surfing history book by Tommy Hickenbottom in conjunction with the Santa Cruz Surfing Preservation Society, the Santa Cruz Suring Museum, and sold in the Surfing Museum and many tourist venues in the state.”

The fact of the matter was that the Pleasure Point Surfing Association was
the first well organized (with elected officers following Robert’s rules of
order) surfing club of Santa Cruz since many years of the then defunct Santa
Cruz Surfing Club of the 1940s, and with respect, the loosely organized 1961
Santa Cruz Gremlins Society, (Jimmy’s original idea) and included
historian Tommy Hickenbottom as member and who documents the club’s
existence in his book Surfing in Santa Cruz (page 42). To tell the short
story, the Gremlins’ activities mostly centered on surfing, wearing our
t-shirts emblazoned with the club logo with Jimmys hand drawn reproductions,
hanging out on a rock ledge at 38th avenue called “Gremlins’ Corner”, and
being featured on the front page of The Mid County News which centered on
the Gremlins’ apparently unseemly shenanigans.

The Pleasure Point Surfing Association was notable for spawning a plethora
of other area clubs and because of it’s tight “black ball ballot” membership
requirements based on high quality surfing ability and social activism.

Notably, PPSA established one of California’s and especially Santa Cruz’s
first environmental movements and especially targeted keeping beaches clean,
and a program (which again, was Jimmy’s brainchild). “This PPSA public service
worked in cooperation with the Santa Cruz Sheriff’s Department” which is
documented in the Sunday February 23,1964 Santa Cruz Sentinel article that
the club was “improving their public relations via the rake and shovel” and
thus helping promote surfing in a better light to the community. This
Sentinel article is also reproduced in it’s original stated text in “Surf
Skate and Rock Art of Jim Phillips”.

PPSA entered a float in the 1965 Miss California Pageant parade of a giant
PPSA trash can (under Phillip’s art direction), built over a Volkswagen Bug
emblazoned with “Keep your Beaches Clean”. PPSA won first place in the
amateur division as documented by the Santa Cruz Sentinel and Mid County
News. PPSA also organized the first county wide beach cleanups which
brought in and have now been overtaken by larger organizations such as
Surfrider Foundation and Save our Shores and several other powerfully
moneyed groups.

This PPSA beach awareness movement grew with the Pleasure Point Night
Fighters, a defacto version and branch of the PPSA, and again originating
with Jimmy’s idea. The PPNF under the 1981 leadership of Harry Conti (current VP of Save Our Seas) became highly organized and established the clean beaches program into Pack Your Trash a highly visible and productive movement (named by Jimmy and using his art images) until the current day with vast public popularity. PPNF member Jack O’Neill played an important part of establishing the Pack Your Trash visibility by printing the original batch of bumper stickers.

In 1965 the PPSA held the first and very well attended Surf Fair Trade Expo
in the Santa Cruz Civic Auditorium (again Jimmy’s original idea and using his
poster art). Every surf shop made a booth display, live surf music and
dancing, skateboard exhibitions and many other displays and features. All of
the PPSA members went on a one week surfing trip to Mexico with the Surf
Fair profits. For the record, the second PPSA 1966 planned Surf Fair event
was subsequently and unfairly superseded by the Santa Cruz Chamber of
Commerce who held offices in the Civic Auditorium at that time and were able
to schedule a competing event in a previous month, pulling the rug
out from under “our” feet, so-to-speak, by soliciting “our” sponsors and vendors
and thus killing “our” effort. Their “expo” effort failed and discontinued
without the grass roots surfing community and surf business connections as
PPSA had established and enjoyed.

A worthy attempt by PPNF to hold a similar Surf Fair expo event at the Civic
in 1985 was sadly shut down early in the event morning by the SC Fire
Department because of a county wide power failure due to a terrorist bombing
at the Moss Landing PG&E plant. Power was restored at 8PM and the bands
played their sets to a handful of faithful supporters in an otherwise empty
auditorium.

No less important than these astounding historical facts was the fact that
the Pleasure Point Surfing Association won the title in the First Annual
Northern California Surfing Club Invitational organized chiefly by Steve
Scofield (president) Bob Biddle and Denny Moung officers, with the Santa
Cruz Surfing Association in cooperation with the Santa Cruz City Parks and
Recreation Department November 28 and 29th 1964. PPSA won the title over
many powerful California Clubs including East Cliff, Pedro Point, Hope
Ranch, West Wind, South Peninsula, North Side. On a side note, Jimmy tied with Stu Fredericks for Senior Men’s Division on the first contest day, but
failed to place in the top three places on the second day. Incidentally this
winter Steamer Lane contest is now unofficially run yearly as the O’Neill
Coldwater Classic.

This is pivotal & monumental information in Santa Cruz surfing
history.

Santa Cruz Surfing Museum:  Thanks everyone who has contributed time, art, items and money into keeping Northern California’s first Surfing Museum alive!

Ways to Help Preserve Pleasure  Point:

http://www.epa.gov/oaintrnt/stormwater/index.htm

http://www.epa.gov/oaintrnt/stormwater/best_practices.htm

Color-coded bathymetric (water depth) map of the region between Corcoran Lagoon and Capitola overlaid on a blank-and-white aerial photograph. The deeper regions are shown in purple (approximately 66 feet/20m water depth) and the shallower region in red (approximately 3 feet/1m water depth). The flat areas are primarily sand, while the shallower, irregularly-shaped areas are rocks outcropping on the seafloor. Note the correlation of these bedrock outcrops, or “reefs”, with the location of know surf breaks ( “A”-26th Avenue, “B”-Sewer’s, “C”-Pleasure Point, “D”-38th Avenue, “E”-the Hook and “F”-Private’s).

Individual LiDAR scan taken from the beach by the base of 36th Avenue. The location of the LiDAR scanner is marked by a white O; the stairs just to the east of 36th Avenue is marked by a white A and the intersection of East Cliff Drive and 36th Avenue is marked by a white B. Note the extremely high resolution of the data, and the scanner’s ability to resolve objects as small as telephone and power lines (marked by white C’s).

Brewer

Hamilton

Hanalei Surf

Pleasure Point Roadhouse
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/P…

Pleasure point.santa cruz, California
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/P…

Pleasure Point web page
http://geocities.com/pleasure_…
Look at history link

Roadhouse video 3min. clip:
http://vids.myspace.com/index….
Roadhouse video 6 min clip:
http://karrithygersen.com/movi…

The County’s update on Historic Resources
Jan 23
http://sccounty01.co.santa-cru…
March 27
http://sccounty01.co.santa-cru…

May 15
http://sccounty01.co.santa-cru…
Aug 14 Historic
http://sccounty01.co.santa-cru…
Aug 14 Park
http://sccounty01.co.santa-cru…
Wikipedia entry

The National Trust online has an article on the Roadhouse, Feb. 14, 2007
search for Margaret Foster,
go to Feb. 14, 2007
http://www.nationaltrust.org/M…

A history by Phil Reader of the Roadhouse
http://www.mcpost.com/article….

SC Sentinel Roadhouse story 11/20/06
http://www.santacruzsentinel.c…

Mid County Post story 3/6/07
http://www.mcpost.com/article….
Information on the update of Historic Resources.
http://www.mcpost.com/article….

Mid County Post story October 30, 2007
http://www.mcpost.com/article….

Roadhouse video
http://vids.myspace.com/index….

County of Santa Cruz Historic Resource
see page 70
http://www.sccoplanning.com/pd…

Santa Cruz County Code
16.42.080 Historic resource designation.
http://municipalcodes.lexisnex…

Ways to Fund Preservation
http://villadebranciforte.org/…

Google
http://www.google.com/search?q…:en-US:official&start=0&sa=N

https://www.facebook.com/PPNF1919/

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