The latest season of Dana Goodyear’s “Lost Hills” podcast tells the story of Miki Dora, a Hungarian-born surfer who dominated the Malibu waves in the 1950s-70s. He was known to be charming, attractive, with a Cheshire cat-like smile. But he also frequently scammed people.
“Rather than face the music, he went abroad and did sort of a ‘Catch Me If You Can’ – [he] was chased around the world by the FBI. So he was a bad boy, and I think that inspired some of the wannabe bad boys of the surf culture,” Goodyear says.
She ended up finding an old copy of Surfer magazine with Dora on the cover, using a surfboard with a swastika on its underside. She says the photo was probably taken in the 1960s or early 1970s.
“I think that it's a very pointed and deliberate and inexcusable symbol to use under any circumstances. But there was something broader happening in surf culture in the mid-century that he was part of. … It was this use of basically like iron crosses, swastikas, and it was widely accepted … in a way that really, really is bizarre when you think about how close in time that period was to the Holocaust, and to how many survivors of the Holocaust were in LA.”
And yet, people continued revering Dora. Goodyear recalls American pro surfer Kelly Slater telling her: “The reason Miki is an icon is that there is this rebel aspect to surfing, and people who will devote their lives ... at the expense of having a job or a family, in many cases, to this sport."
Still, she emphasizes that “Lost Hills: The Dark Prince” should not be considered a celebration of Miki Dora as a “cultural hero.”
“As a storyteller, my job is to follow a fascinating story that allows me to understand a culture better, and how he shaped some of the attitudes and ideas that became really baked into mainland surf culture and California surf culture … and it's a multibillion dollar industry now,” she says.
New Yorker staff writer at the New Yorker and host of the podcast “Lost Hills: The Dark Prince.” Credit: Gertrude & Mabel.