story by peter dugré • portraits by fran collin

Past Portraits
STORY B Y PE T E R DUGRÉ •
Crank that rotary telephone back a few spins and dial
up 1975. That’s ’round about when this trio of extreme
sports athletes—Peggy Oki, Wade Nomura and Kim
Mearig—began carving out their place in sports history.
Theirs was not a game of fields and balls. Style and culture played as big a role as athleticism when the sports
of BMX, skating, and women’s surfing were blowing up.
On the front lines of a youth movement that spanned
the late 1970s and early 1980s, the three subjects of this
Past Portraits have since retired from their thrill rides
COPYRIG
HT C.R.ST
ECYK
2013
RA PHOTO
WADE NOMU
KIM MEARIG PHOTO
POR T RA I T S BY FRA N COLLIN
and settled into more tranquil Carpinteria lives. Without
knowing it at the time, these locals were trendsetters, cultivating a look and lifestyle that was packaged and exported to a generation of alternative athletes.
Spotting them on Linden Avenue on a weekend stroll,
you would never suspect that they enjoyed the fluorescent pink and neon green limelight at the stylized beginnings of extreme games as we now know them. So strap
on your helmets and sign on the dotted line, this trip
down memory lane comes at your own risk.
ABOVE CLOCKWISE FROM LEFT, circa October 1981. Wade Nomura test runs one of his newly developed 26-inch cruiser bikes in Stow Park
in Goleta. The test run was for equipment set up for the Nationals. Today, Nomura serves on the Carpinteria City Council.
One of the early signs of Kim Mearig’s surfing success is her OP sponsorship. Her professional surfing career lasted nine seasons.
Peggy Oki, front row, second from left, with her Zephyr, aka Z-boys, teammates at the big Del Mar contest in the late 1970s. According to the history books of skateboarding, Oki wowed judges and spectators alike and was part of a new era in the sport.
SUMMER2013 33
CarpMag_2013Summer.indd 33
6/11/13 4:06 PM
PEGGY OKI
The first Z-boy to win a national skateboarding contest was a girl. Now a woman and 2012 Skateboarding Hall of Fame inductee, Peggy Oki calls Carpinteria
home and is decades separated from when she and fellow Zephyr team skaters revolutionized the sport of
skateboarding in the late 1970s.
Known as the Z-boys, the rebellious and gritty Zephyr team skated the concrete jungle of paved schoolyards, steep hills, and emptied swimming pools in the
rundown slice of Venice and Santa Monica called Dogtown. Their raw image and hard-cutting, free-flowing
style of skating launched an entire industry.
Oki reflects on her time as a Z-boy still amazed that
her teenage energy somehow snowballed into a national movement. Simply put, she says, “It was really
a great time.”
Skateboarding was something to do in the afternoon
when the surf was not good. During the same period,
surfing was getting a makeover from Larry Bertleman,
who crouched on his board and carved out the face of
the wave while skimming a hand on the water.
The Z-boys wanted to surf like that, and they wanted to skate like that. The group ditched conventional
skateboarding, then a dormant sport known for its upright, stiff tricks, and planted the seeds for the highflying aerial tricks and speed of today’s extreme sport.
Oki says the Zephyr team discovered her by chance
– barreling downhill—and asked her to skate with
them. “I was a tomboy at heart. I would go out and
play in the dirt,” she says. “I didn’t care that girls were
supposed to do certain things. I just wanted to go out
and have fun.”
At the now-famous 1975 National Championship
held in Del Mar, the Z-boys took the sport by storm.
The boys placed high in the slalom and freestyle events,
but Oki, a hard-turning, energy ball squatting on her
board, won first place in the women’s freestyle event.
“Visually it was kind of cool that I had super long
hair. It would almost drag on the ground,” she says.
The freestyle event was kind of like a gymnastics floor
routine. None of the other girls skated anything like
Oki.
Zephyr teammates Tony Alva and Stacy Peralta
became the international faces of skateboarding. Oki,
who wasn’t a fan of the pace of organized skating competitions, where days crawled by sitting and waiting
for turns, dropped the sport pretty quickly.
“I’m not a spectator,” she says. She moved on to college at UCSB and has lived in Carpinteria for 33-plus
years.
SCOTT STARR PHOTO
ABOVE, peace portrait, from about eight years ago. Today, Peggy Oki
puts her skateboarding stardom to use in her role as an activist. She is
regularly invited to skateboarding events, and agrees to attend usually
under the condition she can speak about the international plight of whales
and dolphins.
OPPOSITE PAGE, present day portrait. Along with her skateboarding
superstar status, Oki is a well-known watercolorist. Her paintings often
depict ocean themes and local landscape themes.
Now she is an activist dedicated to whales and dolphins—
and protecting endangered species from over-fishing. On
how her skateboarding days are connected with her mission
today, Oki says her “passion” remains constant.
“We climbed over fences to go skating,” she says, adding that with skating, “You hit concrete, it hurts and you get
back up.” On the international stage when Oki encounters
resistance from the Japanese government, she keeps fighting.
“That’s the Dogtown spirit,” she says.
34 CARPINTERIAMAGAZINE.com
CarpMag_2013Summer.indd 34
6/10/13 5:36 PM
“I was a tomboy at
heart. I didn’t care that
girls were supposed to
Make-up by Lanete
do certain things.”
CarpMag_2013Summer.indd 35
6/10/13 5:37 PM
WA D E N O M U RA
In the early 1980s, BMX bike tricks were currency on
the youth street cred market. The BMX scene, “was getting hot and heavy,” says Wade Nomura, who was in the
center of it all. Then in his mid-20s, he hopped on a bike
and rode it all the way to three national racing championships and to being recognized in five sanctions. Nomura
not only mastered the rugged dirt racetracks, he created
the “Nomura bike,” a model that squeezed every possible
ounce of performance from a BMX frame.
Nomura, a sharp-featured, fit man, slightly less enthusiastic than a personal trainer, remembers how he stumbled upon the BMX scene by accident. Working on a landscaping job in the late 1970s, he happened upon a group of
underprivileged teens with big BMX dreams. “When you
walked around, you didn’t see a road bike. Everybody
had BMX bikes,” Nomura says. That encounter morphed
into the Nomura Racing bike shop in Santa Barbara and a
team of racers.
That’s when Wade went to work redesigning the bikes.
Looking back on the labor of love, he says, “The technology I saw had not evolved for 20 years.” Working in his
shop, Nomura designed a bike out of aircraft aluminum,
knocking about 10 pounds off the weight, and altering
specs to get more leverage out of racers’ legs. “People
learned how to race my bike,” he says. The Nomura team
pedaled to nine national championships in its first season.
His bikes sprung off the blocks. “Ninety percent of the
race is the start,” he says.
Then, Nomura remembers, came the day when he
flirted with the idea of racing. He was an old fogey in
the sport at 26, but a big opportunity came at an ama-
teur National Championship event in 1979. Organizers
announced a new race in a new division, 26 and up,
and he seized the opportunity to take his first national
championship. For the following two seasons, he won
the amateur national crown and carried three national
championship distinctions over a three-year period in
five sanctioned circuits. BMX Magazine called him “the
winningest amateur,” calculating that he’d won 85 percent of his races.
Still his shop and racing weren’t that glamorous. “People asked: ‘When are you gonna get a real job,’” he says.
At age 30 in 1982, he went pro. “I don’t think anybody
has ever turned pro at 30,” he says. At his professional
peak, he ranked 12th in the world. Nomura smirks recalling when he turned down an offer to play himself in the
movie “Rad,” an industry-driven feature about a conflicted teenager making a difference with his BMX. His
career-ending race was in Las Vegas in 1984. At full speed,
he remembers shooting up a 10-foot jump. At the top, his
bike sank in a soft patch of dirt; his body, an object in motion, flung 16 feet into the air. He landed on his shoulder
and sustained serious damage.
He tried to race again, but “lost the edge,” he says. “I
was competing against teenagers, and those guys come
back in an instant.” Nomura quit cold turkey. He stopped
manufacturing bikes and settled into family life and his
landscaping business.
In 2001, he got an affirming trip down memory lane
as part of the Japanese American National Museum’s exhibit “More Than a Game: Sport in the Japanese American
Community.”
Wade Nomura, fourth from left,
in Bicycle Motocross Action
Magazine, Sept. 1981. Nomura
placed first in the JAG BMX
race in Costa Mesa. The other
“news factor” in the magazine
was the new “26 and over
class” for BMX races, which
had been solely for a younger
set.
OPPOSITE, present day portrait. Today, Councilman Nomura’s focus is on serving his
community. He rode to victory
in last November’s Carpinteria
City Council race.
WADE NOMURA PHOTO
36 CARPINTERIAMAGAZINE.com
CarpMag_2013Summer.indd 36
6/10/13 5:37 PM
He was an old fogey in
the sport at 26, but a
big opportunity came
at an amateur National
Championship event in 1979.
CarpMag_2013Summer.indd 37
6/10/13 5:37 PM
Time slows down when Kim
Mearig rides a wave. The 198384 World Champion of surfing,
who is regularly spotted in the
lineup at Rincon, glides and
turns with a dancer ’s grace.
When Mearig was wowing
judges, she made her pioneer
repertoire of maneuvers look
easy while the herky-jerky
competition had trouble keeping up. She also took the coveted Surfer Magazine “Surfers
Poll” in 1984, a vote of confidence from peers that meant
as much to Mearig as the ASP
World Championship title.
Now a mother of two with
warm cheeks, curls less sunbleached than before and a
self-deprecating
sincerity,
Mearig remembers how it all
ABOVE, riding a Hawaiian wave. Kim Mearig was featured in Surfer Magazine in the
almost never happened. Reearly 1980s.
wind two years from the championship, she recalls, and her
OPPOSITE PAGE, present day portrait. Today, Mearig is a familiar face in the lineup at
Rincon. She makes her home in the foothills of Carpinteria.
career nearly fizzled out before
it got off the ground. At age
18, Mearig sputtered so greatly
saw another girl in the water, you knew them,” Mearig
she lost her sponsorship. Even her parents, who had been
recollects of the sport once dominated by men. “Off the
driving her to competitions since she was 14, told her to
Wall” and “Off the Wall 2” surf films featuring Mearig
call it quits.
alongside Tom Curren and other big names of men’s pro
“My dad was like, ‘Go to school or get a job,’” Mearsurfing showed that women could keep up.
ig says. “And I was thinking, ‘I’m not through with this
Of her style, Mearig says, “It’s like putting someone on
yet.’” She had saved some money from her first year as a
the
dance floor. Everybody has their own inner rhythm
pro, and without a big sponsor, she supported her own
…
It’s
nothing you necessarily work on.” Mearig and
travels to start her sophomore season.
Frieda
Zamba,
her primary rival, were the first women to
In the first two events of 1983, she finished in second
pull
360-degree
turns.
place. Then came the big event, the Huntington Beach OP
Mearig’s
pro
career lasted for nine seasons, and she
Pro. She claimed first place. “It was like my dreams didn’t
was
runner
up
for
the World Championship in both 1985
get shot down,” she says. “I went against the odds.”
and
1987.
She
had
her son after retiring and spent more
Sponsorships started rolling in, including from event host
time
in
Carpinteria
where she has lived since 1980. Then,
Ocean Pacific, setting Mearig off on the odyssey of her
when
it
all
seemed
like it ended, she says, her career
iconic career. She treasured traveling to events with huscame
full
circle
in
1993,
when she entered the Huntingband Brian Gruetzmacher and sticking around to see the
ton
Beach
OP
Pro
and
won
again, for only the second
sights. “We’d say, ‘what do we want to see in this corner
time
in
her
career,
making
her
the OP Pro champ twice,
of the world,’” she says of Australia, Europe, and wher10
years
apart.
Mearig’s
monumental
surfing career was
ever else surfing brought her.
recognized
at
the
Huntington
Beach
Surfing Walk of
Mearig’s aggressive yet graceful style stoked the growFame
in
2002.
◆
ing flame of women’s surfing. “Back in the day, if you
KIM MEARIG PHOTO
KIM MEARIG
38 CARPINTERIAMAGAZINE.com
CarpMag_2013Summer.indd 38
6/11/13 4:07 PM
MakE-Up/HaIR BY RYaN COLkET
She had saved some money from her first year as
a pro, and without a big sponsor, she supported
her own travels to start her sophomore season.
SUMMER2013 39
CarpMag_2013Summer.indd 39
6/11/13 9:49 AM