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They dream of California as it used to be – but know the place they loved has changed forever. Sarah and Peter Dixon are an American couple, with recent New Zealand residency, who discovered Gisborne six years ago and have found a facsimile of their old Californian lifestyle here at Wainui Beach.
The Dixons are greying veterans of the ‘50s and ‘60s southern California surf scene. Contemporaries of Mickey Dora and his Malibu Beach cronies. Friends of people whose names echo out of the history of surfing. And they have left all that behind for Gisborne.
Calling Malibu Beach home for more than 50 years they had heard about Gisborne from Rick Hodgson, a neighbour and friend who has been coming to a summer house at Wainui Beach for over 20 years .
“So we finally came to take a look for ourselves in 2002. We took a campervan to see the country – looked around Northland, then turned south, went through Auckland without stopping, discovered Gisborne and never went any further,” says Sarah.
Meeting David Timbs at Wainui the couple were invited to a social gathering of the Moananui Longboard Surfriders at Owen Williams’ house, made some friends in the longboard scene and ended up renting a house in Gisborne for several months.
After a short time back in the States the couple returned in 2003 – saying goodbye to the congestion, over-development and pollution that had destroyed their beloved California. They bought a house at the seaward end of Lloyd George Road and set about establishing a new life for themselves at Wainui. Although both are in their late seventies, it was “never a retirement plan”, as they continue to work in various areas of creative and literary endeavour. “Retirement is not in our vocabulary,” says Peter who is busy writing and publishing enviro-fictional novels while Sarah is rejuvenating her passion for watercolour painting and environment-friendly lifestyle practices.
To tell the Dixon’s story we need to go way back to 1931 where Peter was born in New York City. His parents were involved in acting and radio script writing. His dad, Peter Dixon senior, wrote the first-ever, radio soap opera, “Raising Junior” for NBC in the 1930s.
This early venture into “show business” lured the creative couple to Hollywood. In 1937, with seven-year-old Peter junior in tow, they set out for California where his father found work as a script writer. Peter went to school in Hollywood and through World War 2 his dad was on service with the merchant navy. Here Peter took up the new sport of surfing. With a group of teenage contemporaries from Hollywood High they were among the pioneers of the Californian revival of the sport, surfing redwood and balsa surfboards.
At 14 his parents parted and he returned to New York to live with his mum’s parents (by adoption), who were Japanese. This was New York in the ‘50s. His grandparents, living in Greenwich Village, were at the centre of the leftist beat movement – an era of social and cultural revolution championed by poet Allen Ginsberg and writers William S. Burroughs and Jack Kerouac.
His aunt by adoption, “Aunt Toshi”, was married to left-wing folk singer Pete Seeger, who lived with the extended family in a three-storeyed New York brownstone. Seeger’s good friend Woody Guthrie would come to stay and Peter Dixon says it was Guthrie who gave him his first-ever guitar lesson. Pete Seeger and Toshi are now both in their 90s, Seeger just recently hosting an environmental benefit concert in celebration of his 90th birthday at Madison Square Garden. Pete Seeger is now an icon of American music history.
Peter Dixon spent five years travelling back and forth between New York and LA while still at high school. Lured by memories of warm sunshine and offshore breezes he departed from the beat culture of New York, drawn to the newly-emerging southern Californian surf scene. He stayed at first with his father’s parents spending all his spare time at Malibu, the centre of the surf movement. On leaving high school he at first studied forestry at the University of Idaho, but then transferred to the University of California (UCLA) to eventually master in education, with a special emphasis on “recreation”. While studying, and with competitive swimming skills, he found part-time work as a beach lifeguard. One day in 1952 while training on a surf boat off Venice Beach he chose to dive overboard and swim ashore. At the same time a 20-year-old off-duty Santa Monica City pool lifeguard, Sarah Daniels, was taking a swim out through the waves in the opposite direction. The two met head-on, literally crashing into each other in the surf.
They said “hello” again on the beach and eventually formed a lasting friendship that led to marriage in 1955. They discovered a certain intellectual curiosity in common, and most certainly a passion for the water. Through the early ‘50s they travelled, exploring the surf beaches around Southern California – Sarah being a natural water-woman and a stand-up girl surfer long before the Gidget craze hit the beach scene. At this time Peter was drafted into the Korean War effort but because of his water skills, he served as a swimming instructor, teaching other draftees to swim at Fort Hood in Texas.
Back at the beach in 1955 the couple married and moved into a small rented apartment under a house right on the beach at Malibu where they lived, worked and surfed for several years, members of the now famous early Malibu Beach surfing environment which was the nursery of today’s international surf culture.
First son Pahl was born in 1957, James in 1960 and Megan in 1964. Peter continued his studies, thanks to the GI Bill (which provided college education for returning war veterans) mastering in Public Recreation, based on a thesis he wrote on the use of scuba diving in forensic investigations including techniques for “body recovery”. Living on the beach, surfing, swimming and diving – he wrote a training programme for scuba diving which was adopted by UCLA – the Dixon’s life was all about the ocean. Their neighbour was Paul Stader, underwater diving director for the TV series “Sea Hunt”, starring Lloyd Bridges. Stader was aware of Peter’s scuba diving skills and while studying at UCLA Peter spent three years as a part-time stunt diver on the “Sea Hunt” series. While doing the stunt work he wrote a script for an episode of “Sea Hunt” which was accepted. This led to his writing the very first script for the “Flipper” series and several more “Flipper” episodes through the early sixties.
After his graduation he started a full-time job working as a “human factor scientist” for the System Development Corporation at Santa Monica. He was a faceless spook in the Cold War, training radar teams sent to spy on the Russians in eastern Europe. Peter hated the job and was eager for escape. One day in 1965, while driving to the office, he saw a friend out surfing alone at Topanga Beach. “I need a job where I can go surfing and hang out at the beach all day? Then I had one of those ‘aha!’ moments. I was a writer and a surfer. I could write a book about surfing!”
He wrote the book. It was called “The Complete Book of Surfing” and it sold 60,000 hard cover and then 300,000 paperback copies. Other books followed. “Men and Waves” in 1966, “Where The Surfers Are” in 1968 and “Men Who Ride Mountains” in 1969. These almanacs were the Bibles surfers carried through the sixties.
Peter says he remembers a special day: “April 27, 1967 – 3.30pm to be precise – the day I left full-time employment and never returned.”
Through his writing and publishing Peter Dixon had established himself as a literary guru of the emerging surfing movement. For a while he edited Walt Phillips’ “Surfing Illustrated”. In ‘66 he and surfing photographer, Dr Don James, returned from an epic trip to Hawaii for the Duke Contest at Waimea Bay to provide eight historic pages of stunning photographs and an account of the event for “Life” magazine, a first for surfing in mainstream media. In ‘71 he wrote a novel called “Wipe Out”, a fiction about a boy learning to surf at Malibu Beach. The “Complete Guide to Surfing” was revised and republished in 2001 and a French edition was published in 2003.
As a partnership they wrote more books, wrote scripts for television shows and produced their own documentary movies. Some of the more well-known television series Peter wrote episodes for were: “Sea Hunt”, “Flipper”, “High Chaparral”, “The Waltons”, and “Bionic Woman”.
He has written and co-written scripts for several motion pictures, including an Alain Delon 1977 French production of “The Children Are Watching Us”, adapted from the novel he co-wrote with Laird Koenig, which won France’s best mystery novel award in its day. With fellow author Koenig, Peter also co-wrote “The Baby Sitter” for Carlo Ponti, “The White Lions” for Alan Landsburg, an Evel Knievel biography starring George Hamilton and a 1970s cult-horror movie involving mutant piranha fish.
As well the Dixons have created several of their own documentary television productions including “In The Land Of The Grizzlies” focusing on the natural status of bears across North America, co-produced with Liam O’Brien for the National Audubon Society.
Through most of their creative endeavours the Dixon’s have maintained an over-riding concern and passion for protecting the natural environment, particularly the ocean. During their Malibu years, Sarah became known for her delicate water-colour paintings and her involvement in eco-politics, notably the establishment of the Santa Monica Mountains National Recreation Area, serving as a commissioner for Southern California. An advocate representing the Malibu Coalition for Slow Growth her plein-air paintings of the coastal areas of the then proposed national reserve were politicised for the cause and earned her a certain celebrity. She also served a term as president of the Malibu Town Council.
One of their favourite husband-and-wife projects was the publishing of “Children, Families and the Sea”, a series of five, photo-illustrated books they wrote and published together in 1978-79. The books are eco-studies of coastal people in various parts of the world; Japan, Mexico, Trinidad, Canada and the state of Maine. Other books they’ve written include “Hot Skateboarding” (with son Pahl) and “Vasectomy, Sex and Parenthood”, as well as several works of fiction, focusing on a genre Peter calls “eco-thriller”.
The latest project is “Hunt the Lucky Dragon”, a fictional eco-thriller, about a surfer who, with help from a dolphin, seeks revenge on an unscrupulous tuna boat crew after he and the dolphin are left adrift at sea. The book has been published successfully in France (Coulez Le Lucky Dragon) and is about to be published in America by Disney.
Recently, in New Zealand, they produced a documentary with local cameraman Mark Chrisp called “Lost At Sea”, an account of Rob Hewitt’s four days adrift off the Kapiti Coast. The documentary was first shown on TV3 and is now on the National Geographic channel.
The Dixon’s, and son Pahl, have recently moved from Wainui Beach. After several years here, they have bought a new home on an acreage in Darwin Road above the Waimata River where they can create an orchard and try organic gardening. It’s a long way from Malibu, Topanga Beach and all the lost magic of Southern California. Like many Californians they are nostalgic for the way things used to be – before the ocean became polluted, the coastal land “gobbled up” by millionaires, and the beaches overcrowded. “When we were married the population of California was four million, today it is 40 million,” says Peter.
Sarah says: “In many ways Gisborne, particularly Wainui Beach, is very much like California back in the ‘50s and ‘60s. Gisborne is such a special place to live. California is gone for us now.”
The Dixon’s have travelled a long way through defining eras, being witness to, and often commentators on, nearly eight decades of modern times. Retirement is not on their agenda and age has not yet wearied them. With computers humming on their laps, they sparkle with enthusiasm for projects still to be worked. They work, swim and they ride waves on their surf mats with a love for each other shining bright in their eyes. An inspiration to all who know them.