[Baz]

TODAYS COLUMN IN THE OC REGISTER

MISSING DOC
By Corky Carroll

In November of 2014 the surfing world lost one of it’s most unique and colorful characters in, then 93 year old, Doctor Dorian Paskowitz. Through the years there have been zillions of stories and tales about Dorian and his surfing family, some with a degree of fact and some with whatever “facts” that were needed at the time if it had something to do with putting money in the kitty and food on the picnic table. Dorian was a true surfing vagabond, a gypsy if you will. Even though he had a degree in medicine from Stanford he choose packing his wife and nine children into a used camper van and spending his life surfing and generally avoiding steady work and refusing to subject his kids to any kind of formal education. “Home schooled” to the ninth degree would be putting it lightly. I loved the dude.

Let me regress a little bit. I first met Dorian when I was a young kid coming up in the surfing ranks. I think Mickey Munoz introduced him to me at Malibu one day when I was a young teen. Over the years we grew to be good friends and he in fact became my family doctor. When ever I, or my first wife Cheryl or our son Clint, would get sick we would send out smoke signals to alert “Doc” Paskowitz. They hardly ever had a phone. He would pull up in the family camper and the whole crew would come in while whoever was sick was getting tended to. He was a very good doctor. He would never take money as payment from us so I would pay him in used clothes for this kids. I was always one of those clothes hoarders who never would let go of something I liked even if it was in rags. So there was always plenty of stuff to pass along to the Paskowitz kids. For years I would see them around town, this was in the years I was living in San Clemente, wearing my old shirts or pants. He always gave me the best health care and would come over at a moments notice.

But my favorite memories of Doc were the afternoons I would spend hanging out with him on the beach at San Onofre Surfing Beach during the 1970’s and 80’s. I was working at SURFER magazine at that time and was also doing a lot of music. My neighbor was a great musician who turned surfer named Chris Darrow. I was helping Chris with his surfing and he was working on my musicianship. Most afternoons we would head to “Sano” to surf and maybe barbeque. Doc was almost always there with is family and we would spend hours chit chatting on the beach about all kinds of things, although mostly surfing. His kids were all good surfers; some of them grew into great surfers. He had a beautiful wife named Juliette who was the ultimate surf family mom. Every one of those kids was really smart and really talented in different ways. With no real schooling it is amazing at how great they all came out in the end. There is some controversy over this that came from some movie done about them, but I knew them through all those years and I can honestly say that they were living a pretty cool, different yes, but cool none the less, life surfing and learning about the world through day in and day out practical experience. Doc wanted them to see life through the eyes of surfers and they did. Is that good or bad? I don’t know, but they are all super good human beings.

One of my favorite “Doc” stories was when he was the official Doctor for the San Onofre Nuclear Plant. His job was to be on call in case somebody got hurt working at the plant. He got to hang out on the beach all the time surfing and being with his family. I guess he had a beeper in case they needed him. From what I understand they paid him a really solid amount of money for that. Juliette had an air horn or something to get him out of the water if he was surfing when he got a beep. I thought this was a great gig and one afternoon I mentioned that to him. He reaction surprised me. “I hate it,” he claimed.

“Why? Do you get beeped a lot?” I replied.

“No, never.”

“Then what’s the problem?”

“They might beep me. It’s way too much stress and I hate it.”

You can see that this dude was a kindred spirit to me. Coming from the Alfred E. Newman school of “What, me worry?” I had to love that about Doc. He eventually bailed on the Nuclear Plant job to get some peace of mind. I am not sure if he ever actually treated anybody or not during the years that he had that gig.

So today I was thinking about him, I think a saw a post on Facebook from his daughter or something and it triggered some good memories. He always made me feel like an honorary Paskowitz.