Read Oh, Beautiful: An American Family in the 20th Century Online
Authors: John Paul Godges
She and her girlfriends skateboarded from beach to beach, taking turns towing each other along the bike path, from Avenue C in Redondo Beach all the way to 7th Street in Hermosa Beach about two miles north. The skateboarding girls wore homemade seashell necklaces and shouted the words of a Beach Boys tune between gasps for air:
Well she got her daddy’s car, and she cruised through the hamburger stand now.
Seems she forgot all about the library like she told her old man now.
And with the radio blastin’ goes cruisin’ just as fast as she can now.
And she’ll have fun, fun, fun ’til her daddy takes the T-Bird away.
The girls congregated with the locals at good surf breaks in search of truth and the perfect wave. When the waves went flat, Mary Jo and the others bobbing in the water chanted to the kahuna, the traditional priests of Hawaii.
“
Ka-HOOOO-na!” they beseeched the spirits. “Ka-HOOOO-na!”
On the way home, Mary Jo and her girlfriends ran out to the edge of the Redondo Beach pier and jumped off, even though it was illegal, because the tourists threw dollar bills into the water whenever the kids jumped. As soon as the girls collected a few bucks apiece, they swam away from the pilings, bodysurfed to shore, retrieved their skateboards, and hopped back onto the bike path.
The girls resumed pushing and pulling each other and shouting and gasping as they rolled south toward the Topaz Street jetty:
Well the girls can’t stand her ’cause she walks, looks and drives like an ace now.
She makes the Indy 500 look like a Roman chariot race now.
A lotta guys try to catch her, but she leads ’em on a wild goose chase now.
And she’ll have fun, fun, fun ’til her daddy takes the T-Bird away.
Once at the jetty, the girls clambered over the rocks and jumped off the calm side, facing north. To mark the end of a perfect day, they would snorkel for seashells from the ocean floor for the sake of making more necklaces.
Mary Jo then skateboarded the rest of the way home, salty and sandy and sunbleached, to be met by a surreal quietude. Nobody at home hassled her for taking up the boys’ sport of surfing, and nobody heralded her for outsurfing the boys.
She joined the swim team in high school to make herself a better surfer. Leaving home early in the mornings for workouts before school and coming home late in the evenings from workouts after school, she bulked up her shoulders and biceps. She set a school record in the 50 freestyle. Best of all, she caught bigger waves.
Her goal in life was to surf in Hawaii. So she worked at a mom-and-pop bakery for sub-minimum wage at the sub-legal age of 15 and then moved up to minimum wage at Kentucky Fried Chicken at the age of 16 so that she could buy a better surfboard and pay her way to the islands. By the age of 17, she was working as a county lifeguard.
She listened to surfer music, read surfer magazines, and went to surfer movies. But none of her surfing-related exploits, extracurricular activities, employments, or entertainments elicited either praise or scorn from her otherwise highly discriminating parents or, for that matter, from anyone else at home.
“
Nobody cares about what I do,” the teenage Mary Jo sometimes remarked with a tinge of bitterness. “Nobody even notices.”
But that was her ticket to freedom. Compared with her brothers and sisters, Mary Jo grew up largely unencumbered by the weight of judgment on her victories or defeats. She wasn’t assigned a lofty standard to meet, so she was free to set her own standards. She didn’t receive much grief when she failed, so she was free to learn from her mistakes. She didn’t exhibit behavioral problems, so she was free to behave as she pleased. And she didn’t openly disagree with her parents, so she was free to think for herself.
Mom and Dad were just relieved that Mary Jo was turning out to be normal. Stan was overly stressed. Genie had a chip on her shoulder. Geri was going crazy. Joe was losing his athletic career. Thank God Mary Jo had nothing wrong with her.
“
Don’t push your luck,” Mom reminded Dad. “Just let her be.”
As her graduation from Redondo Union High School approached in 1977, Mary Jo didn’t know where her life could lead beyond surfing. She couldn’t imagine finding any sense of belonging anywhere beyond the waves. Even though she’d been a member of the swim team throughout all four years of high school, she could feel only a limited sense of belonging on the team, because her teammates all seemed to be oddball outcasts like herself.
“
The swim team girls were
way
not like the other girls in school,” she recalled. The swim team girls were rowdy, loud-mouthed, pizza-partying, beer-drinking girls. “They were not ladylike girls like the girls on the track team.” The girls on the swim team were far more independent.
Mary Jo found herself mildly intrigued by one or two of the other girls on the team, maybe even physically attracted to them. But she didn’t know what, if anything, the feeling meant. “I didn’t feel that I had a crush on any of them. I just felt very close to them as friends.” The attachment was more emotional than physical.
Even if she had a romantic feeling for any of her teammates, she wouldn’t have known what to make of it at the time. Nobody talked about things like that back then. There were no prominent women who dated other women and dared go public about it, at least not to Mary Jo’s knowledge. Even Billie Jean King, the feminist tennis champion of the day and one of the first openly lesbian major sports figures in America, was still in the closet in 1977. Homosexuality among women was simply not yet part of the national discussion. “When you don’t have the words to explain what you’re feeling,” Mary Jo asked in retrospect, “how can you articulate it? We had nothing to compare it to.”
She knew that she was
supposed
to have crushes on guys, but for some reason she didn’t have any. She went out on dates with a few guys but never felt any of that famous tingling feeling. She just couldn’t relate to the guys in the ways that they wanted to relate to her. She got along much better with them when they were just hanging out or surfing.
“
What’s wrong with me?” she asked her big sister Genie one night. “I’ve gone out with these guys, but I just don’t really care. I don’t feel anything negative toward them. But I just don’t bond with them.”
“
Maybe you just haven’t found the right guy yet,” said Genie, who was then a teaching assistant at Loyola Marymount University.
“
Maybe. But why am I so different?”
“
What do you mean ‘different’?”
“
I just don’t feel like I belong.”
The sense of not belonging extended to how Mary Jo, as well as her best friend from the swim team, felt about the larger educational institution. “We felt more connected to the earth and to the ocean than to the school.” They watched the sunsets at the beach, asked older people to buy them six-packs of beer or just bought them themselves, watched the waves, got stoned, and tried to figure out what was “wrong.” They listened to the radio play the Pink Floyd song, “Welcome to the Machine.”
Mary Jo and her friend knew what they didn’t want, but they didn’t know what they did want. “School felt like a waste of time. It was boring. We had no interest in football games, pep rallies, or proms. There was nothing to get excited about. Everyone told us those years were supposed to be the best years of our lives. No way. There had to be something better. We just couldn’t relate to the hype.”
Mary Jo had no desire to go to college. Her grades had been so poor during her sophomore year in high school that she had almost dropped out. By the end of her senior year, her grades and test scores were “just okay.” Either way, she believed that it would be a colossal waste of money for Mom and Dad to send her to college.
“
I knew they’d pay my way only if I went to an expensive Jesuit school. I didn’t see the point.” She preferred to learn a trade, like most of the other surfers she knew.
One evening around this time, Mom knocked on her bedroom door. “Mary, we don’t have a lot of money. But we’d like you to go to college.”
Silence.
“
I never had the opportunity,” Mom continued. “Mary, you’ll never regret it.”
Genie wrote the essay for Mary Jo’s application to Loyola Marymount University. “I want to make friends for life in a Catholic university community,” the essay stated.
“
You’ve gotta be kidding!” Mary Jo rolled her eyes. “It’s so sappy!”
“
Don’t worry,” Genie coached. “Believe me. They love this stuff.”
They gave Mary Jo a scholarship.
At freshman orientation, she saw an advertisement about a campus radio station and filed the information in her memory bank. As classes began, her reservations about attending college persisted.
Early in the semester in October 1977, she heard the music cranking from the third floor of a campus building. The larger-than-life macho voice of Freddie Mercury, lead singer for Queen, cut through the stifling serenity of the campus with a new release, belting out a passionate anthem to perseverance as a victory in itself:
I’ve paid my dues
Time after time.
I’ve done my sentence
But committed no crime.
And bad mistakes
I’ve made a few.
I’ve had my share of sand kicked in my face,
But I’ve come through.
And we mean to go on and on and on and on.
We are the champions, my friends.
And we’ll keep on fighting till the end.
We are the champions.
We are the champions.
No time for losers,
’
Cause we are the champions of the world.
“
Holy shit!” Mary Jo followed the music up the flights of stairs.
“
Oh,” she glanced around the third-floor office. “Is this that radio station that’s looking for people?” she asked the students working there.
“
Yes.”
“
Oh. Okay,” she set her books down on a table. “Here I am.”
As a child, she had felt the vibrations of paradise emanating from the plastic turntable. In junior high, she had dripped in rapture beneath the headphones. In high school, the only thing other than surfing that had spoken to her directly was the alienation of the songs on the radio. In her first few weeks of college, she discovered a place where she could immerse herself in music like she had never dreamed possible.
As a freshman, she trained on the AM station. It broadcast only to the dorms and recreation rooms on campus. Cool. She taped a news story about the Special Olympics, which had been founded by Eunice Kennedy Shriver just nine years earlier to give people with intellectual disabilities an opportunity to share their gifts with others. Mary Jo then ran downstairs to the recreation room to hear her own voice—her own gift—on the radio. “It was the first time in my life that I felt really proud of myself.”
She learned to make smooth segues from one song to the next, to create her own mixes of songs, to put stories together, to put commercials together, and to mix them all with the music. Her voice over the air sounded as comfortable and breezy as her voice in the playroom at home.
She was promoted to the FM station, KXLU 88.9 FM, which broadcast from Hollywood to Redondo Beach. In a move that brought the geographic extremes of her audience into a whole new kind of harmony, she started a “surf wave” music show, airing songs that were a cross between surf tunes and new wave. She rose to the top tier among campus deejays, from production director as a sophomore to music director as a junior to program director as a senior.
Along the way, she made multiple discoveries in tune with the musical ones.
When she took a journalism class, she was assigned by the editor of the student newspaper,
The Loyolan
, to interview the representatives of a student gay group. University leaders had claimed the right, based on freedom of religion, to prohibit the gay group from meeting on campus.
“
We just want to be acknowledged as a group,” the gay students told Mary Jo.
That was it. She didn’t think the story she wrote was particularly provocative. She just wanted to finish her assignment. Just the facts, sirs.