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OAK ISLAND , NC
In fact, by now, there were several people on the island beside myself who had gotten into the sport of surfing and we would try to surf together whenever possible. I really think that they all looked at me as the Guru, or something, because I had become pretty damn good on a surfboard, and by the summer of 1963, I could make that thing sit up, beg, and sing opera, all at the same time.
Out of the surfers in our group, Wayne Spivey, Frank Barbee, Cheryl Coleman and myself, were the only ones that didn�t seem to mind surfing in winter water. In fact, I have been out surfing with an air temperature of eighteen degrees with a northeast wind of forty knots and would be able to reach up and crunch ice in my hair with my hand. On that day however, I was out there on the water quite alone, except for the cold sea and an occasional flight of Pelicans which seemed to gaze down and question my sanity.
During the next few months, I did a lot of serious surfing. This included one day when the sleet was so hard that it would sting my face as I was riding a wave in.
On May 22, 1963, I had been surfing over on the Caswell Beach side of the old Yaupon Beach steel pier. The surf had died out on the high tide around 1:30 in the afternoon, so I kicked-out of the surf and went up to the pierhouse to get myself a cheeseburger at the �Chew and Choke� for lunch.
I was eating my cheeseburger and talking to Bobby Toler, who cooked for Ozzie Lee at the grill, when I looked out front in the parking lot and saw a pink Chevy Corvair with a pink surfboard strapped on the roof, parked right in front of the pierhouse.
This was a car and surfboard that I did not recognize, so I had to find out whom this stuff belonged to. The owner was a guy named Bobby Smith. His dad was the pro over at the new Oak Island Golf Club that had opened the previous year, in 1962.
Bobby and I began talking about surfing and we hit it off right away as friends. In fact, we became best friends and we stayed that way for many, many years, through lots and lots of stuff that life tossed our way.
One advantage of being friends with Bobby was that he was a year older