C.R. Stecyk III

Steve Olson: When did you first pick up a camera?
C.R. Stecyk III: I grew up in a house where my mother was a ceramicist and a painter, and my father had been a professional photographer, specifically in World War II. So I had a darkroom.
SO: Did he shoot on the battlefield?
CRSIII: He shot before the War and after the War, as an occupational adjunct. He was early on the ground in Hiroshima, first wave Occupation Forces, and he shot it. He wouldn’t discuss anything pursuant to his military service, particularly where he went, what he saw, what he did. Nonetheless, I did see pictures from Hiroshima. Other people in his unit described that he and his commanding officer were the first people, that they knew, who went there.
SO: And you saw these photos?
CRSIII: I saw some of them, and then he destroyed most of them, probably when people started asking questions about them. So Lord knows what he was doing.
SO: Did that have any impact on you, as a kid?
CRSIII: Yeah, I think it was the access to tools and materials as much as anything. And then if I had a photography question, he would not answer it, which is a very good strategy because it encourages people to suss it out for themselves. He would give you just enough information that you could blunder into a conclusion.


SO: He would make you think.
CRSIII: Yeah, just like, “If you were gonna try to do that, you’d probably want a telephoto lens because that would make your effective distance shorter.” I go, “Where do you find those?” He goes, “Probably in your case, you either get a job—which doesn’t seem to be something you’re destined for—or you might try a pawn shop.” I go, “Like Louie Shell’s Pawn Shop, down on Second?” And he said, “I wouldn’t recommend Louie Shell to anybody…but that would be a pawn shop. …It’s interesting you came up with that.” Kent Sherwood, who was Jay Adams’ stepdad, for a time made a portion of his income patching all the boards for Louie Shell at the hock shop. That was probably the best surfboard pawn going. My father gave me a career in that sense, ’cause you could take your sponsored surfboards from Dave Sweet and go down and hock ’em at Louie Shell to pay for your social life. And that’s how you discover that Kent Sherwood, who also works at Dave Sweet, is patching all those boards. “Where’s your four-inch square tail, Craig?” “Oh, Dave…yeah, I left that over at my uncle’s house.” He goes, “Your uncle is Louie Shell?” [Laughs] “You think you can go pawn your board and I wouldn’t know about it?” I go, “Well...I had hoped that I might be able to take a loan out on my board and have it safely taken care of by those fine people, and you might not find out.” Kent Sherwood, later in his life, does the wings on the Pegasus Missile, the first winged vehicle to go eight times the speed of sound. That’s how Kent ends up in this story. And Jay, he went on to greatness of his own.


SO: So you got a camera. What did you start shooting?
CRSIII: Anything that moved. Same as now. I have no attention span, so whatever popped in front of me…I still tend to be fascinated by. I shoot every day, to some extent, with no particular reason or rationale. And I don’t look at most of the pictures ever again. Usually. Why would you?
SO: To see what you shot?
CRSIII: But trying to remember all the photos you took would be worse than trying to remember all the girls you’ve kissed. You might forget or devalue the immediacy of the experience and the honesty, the true fascination.
SO: I would love to argue with you, but I won’t, ’cause I agree with you.

What about writing? Your writing style is totally and completely different than almost everyone’s.
CRSIII: I grew up with more of a spoken-word idiom. Surfing had an oral tradition because it came out of Hawaiian culture, largely, and the Spanish corridos, the stories, the tales. That’s how people where I grew up recounted the history—all these amazing oratories, people speaking.


My writing was just something that happened because somebody put down something. I probably talked into a tape recorder. I’m not sure what the first published thing would’ve been. It might have been Steve Pezman at Surfer magazine or something. I don’t remember a lot of that stuff. I know that I was in a Dave Sweet Surfboards ad and that was probably some sort of pivotal moment.
SO: When you first picked up a camera, did you think that you would have something published?
CRSIII: No. I just like the activity of it, now. I think publishing and exhibiting and all that stuff is fine if other people appreciate it, but I think as an objective it’s entirely ludicrous. That’d be like sitting there trying to figure out making love. “I gotta get 36 pumps, and then bump.” How the fuck is that gonna turn out? You’re counting! It’s like a Lamaze class. [Laughs]


SO: What was it like in the ’60s?
CRSIII: If I had a good time, why would I even remember the ’60s?
SO: [Laughs] Good, then you’re telling me you don’t really remember?
CRSIII: I liked the ’60s because I paid for my first camera. My father wanted me to get a job—it was a “learning experience.” He was big on that.
SO: What about the whole skateboarding scene in the mid-’60s?
CRSIII: Mid-’60s I thought were pretty good. Larry Stevenson and Hobie and those guys had come into 1964, had made it to ’66, and then the whole thing basically imploded. There were so many skateboards that had been made, you didn’t have to go out and steal rollerskates and turn them into skateboards. And I think the great thing about the merchandising of skateboarding was then there was all this equipment you could just pick up, particularly when skateboarding was out.
SO: To make your own custom board.
CRSIII: What’s better than an obsolete sport? If the industry went away right now, people would be skating for 200 years off the dregs. And it’d be fat and luscious.
SO: And probably better than ever.
CRSIII: I think it would be better ’cause there’d be absolutely no reason to do it. There’s no financial support for it, there’s no mercantile imperative, so what’s better than just honest, pure transportation?

Herbie Fletcher, he goes as hard at those things as he ever did. I probably met him about ’65 at Huntington Beach. Typical skateboard thing. When you’re a kid with a skateboard and you see another kid skating three blocks down—
SO: You skate over to him.
CRSIII: He ends up being your friend for life. It just happened that it was Herbie, a guy who was completely overlooked. He’s been doing stuff for so long, at such a high level, people just ignore it ’cause he’s been there the whole time. He was a great pool skater. But, you know…like he gave a mad fuck. Instead of being a surf star he decided he could ride mini guns on the North Shore.


SO: So where did the Zephyr thing come from?
CRSIII: Skip Engblom, Jeff Ho, and I were sitting on the beach and we had all worked at different surfboard factories. I had been with Dave Sweet and Jeff had worked, I believe, at Roberts in Playa del Rey for Dewey Weber, and Skip had branded Makaha skateboards—the Phil Edwards models in Venice, for Larry Stevenson—and he’d worked in a variety of surfboard factories. We were trying to figure out why we couldn’t get good surfboards made. We thought that was the point of building them, to make equipment you wanted to ride. So we decided to go into business together. This skateboard thing was something all three of us had in common. There was another guy involved briefly up front named Dana Woolfe who was an artist of significance. We were trying to build surfboards and we tried to make ’em look different and we tried to make ’em work different, and I think for a while we succeeded. Since we all three had skated, it made sense to us that skateboards would be made also, and that Jay Adams was a team rider and Kent Sherwood—who was another materials, construction guy—was around. And that was the genesis of the Zephyr skateboard. Tony Alva was there, Stacy Peralta, Jim Muir, everybody that was a Z-Boy. All those guys were principally riding the surfboards.
SO: When did you start painting the surfboards?
CRSIII: There’s a painted surfboard that I did in about 1966 in the Smithsonian. It’s a stringerless Dave Sweet, and that’s an early painted, kinda artsy-looking board—at least for me. We started with resins and stuff. I grew up in a house that had spray paint. Between ceramics and the hotrod thing, you get sprayed color because it’s common to both of ’em. My parental unit had airspray technology. Skipper was a low-rider, and Jeff and I had grown up in a family with what you now call “custom cars,” or hotrods. They were low and slow and big and bold and iridescent paint and metalflake and pinstriped and all of that. So it made sense to paint surfboards in a similarly personalized manner so they didn’t look like production things.

SO: What about the DogTown thing? Where did you create that from?
CRSIII: I don’t think I created anything. I might’ve made some comment. Several people were there and apparently I said, “It’s a dog’s life in a dog’s town.” I was painting surfboards for people at that point. Somebody said, “Paint ‘DogTown’ on the bottom of my board,” and that would be how that went.
SO: No Mexican affiliation at all?
CRSIII: Well I think the padres—Father Sur and those guys—had come through some time before that. I grew up in occupied Mexico. All of California was stolen from the sovereign Mexico government, so yeah, there was a Mexican influence.