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A Jewish doctor, wife, and nine kids run San Onofre's oddest surf camp
Camp Awesome
Their lives are so innocent and free, one has to wonder why most people don’t live this way.
The small ad in the back of Surfer magazine has a simple, irresistible appeal: "The Paskokwitz 7-Day Surfari. An experience that will last a lifetime." For young beach rats, aching to get away from mom and dad and for landlocked wannabe surfers hoping to ride their first waves, the ad suggests magical images of long white beaches, cool ocean water, freedom, and adventure. To their parents, it offers seven days of relief from a moody, hyperactive adolescent who thinks the cruelest fate on earth is cleaning the garage.
Juliette and Dorian Paskowitz. “All I asked from her as a mother was that she breast feed the kids until they are at least two and a half, hold them constantly, and don’t send them to a babysitter.”
But nothing in the ad suggests how unique the Paskowitzes’ summer camp really is. Which is just as well. Until they’ve experienced the place for themselves, there’s no way to explain that the only surfing camp in California is run by a dropout Jewish doctor from Galveston, Texas, who, with his American Indian earth-goddess wife, spent the last 30 years raising a family of eight boys and one girl in a 12-foot camper.
“Surf camp without surf is hell.”
In terms of material assets, the surf camp doesn’t amount to much. Its boundaries — campsites 88, 89, and 90 at San Onofre State Park — are occupied by the camp for ten weeks each summer, and only then by the good graces of the State of California. There’s an old travel trailer that serves as a kitchen; eight dome tents, which the campers occupy two or three to a tent; and three old vans plastered with surf stickers, used for cruising the beaches in search of waves. There are perhaps 30 or 40 surfboards in all sizes and shapes. And that’s about it. Just a gypsy caravan that could pull up stakes tomorrow and head south or north or whichever direction the camp’s founder, patriarch, and retired director, Dr. Dorian Paskowitz, chooses to go.
The boys rebelled and began hoarding huge amounts of junk food.
As the kids begin arriving on the first day of camp, the scene is much like that at any other summer camp. Mom asks a hundred questions all at once — “Where do they sleep?” “Where’s the bathroom?” "Where do they keep their money?” Dad strolls suspiciously through the facilities, trying to figure out what is so special about this camp that it should cost $650 a week. Meanwhile, the kids nervously check each other out, worried about their status among the other boys, whether they’re wearing the wrong surf trunks or have brought the wrong brand of surfboard, worrying that they’ve brought the wrong parents.
Judging the surf contest.
Mom and Dad may have mixed feelings about leaving their kid for a week at a public beach in Southern California, exposed to who knows what corruptions. But eventually, after reassuring words from the director, Moses Paskowitz, they conclude that if the camp isn’t adequate for protecting their child, it’s too late to do anything about it now. Mom tries to work up a tear or two. Dad commits the horror of horrors by kissing his male child on the cheek, right in front of everybody, and then, sensing his son's embarrassment, quickly adds a macho high-five.
Moses Paskowitz. At six foot one and 250 pounds, the excollege football lineman gets instant respect from the campers.
Without exception, the boys are relieved when their parents finally climb back into their Broncos, mini-vans, and Maximas and drive away. One of the most serious obstacles on the path to becoming a professional surfer is the humiliation of having parents. Unless, of course, you happen to have been born a Paskowitz.
This is Moses Paskowitz’s first year serving as camp director, and it would be hard to find someone more suited for the job. Moses, who looks more Hawaiian than most Hawaiians, has the neck and chest of a buffalo and massive arms that can churn through the water like sidewheels on a river boat. At six foot one and 250 pounds, the excollege football lineman gets instant respect from the campers. On the other hand, even at 25 years old, he’s still more a kid than many of them. Like the entire Paskowitz family, he positively glows with happiness and good health, and when the time comes to surf or just frolic on the beach, chasing the corbina that come up to feed on sand crabs, he goes about it with a playful enthusiasm most people have jpst by the time they’re 10. He is simply doing what he was born to do, which is to hang out at the beach and radiate joy and love. “My family has been here at San Onofre now since 1975,” he says in a soft, gentle voice. “This is where we live, and if the kids didn’t come, we’d still be here doing exactly the same thing.”
Ht eight o’clock in the morning, Dr. Paskowitz, a cum laude graduate from Stanford medical school, stands on the beach at San Onofre, dripping wet. He’s just spent the first hour of the morning not just surfing, but, as wife says, “ripping!” Aside from the effects of the sun and wind on the man’s face, it is very difficult to believe he’s 70 years old. He modestly rates his own physical age as about 55, though there are many men in their 20s who would gladly trade physiques with him.
He has the silvery hair of a patriarch, clear blue eyes that seem to look through and beyond the surface of things, and a quick intelligence that is constantly putting order to a disordered world. The only thing he can’t make any sense of is where all the time has gone. “My God, it seems like just yesterday I came here,” he says. “And now look at me — I'm 70 years old!”
Juliette, the doctor’s wife, is equally impressive. She’s tall and thin, with dark, sun-streaked hair. After giving birth to nine children, she still has the figure of a model. She too glows with vitality, and nearly every sentence she speaks is in praise of her children and husband, whom she calls, without a trace of sarcasm, “the world’s most perfect man. The epitome of health, cleanliness, and joy.”
Dr. Paskowitz first learned to surf in Galveston, but in 1934, when he was 12 years old, his family moved to San Diego. There had been other surfers at Mission Beach before Dorian arrived with his redwood slab, but they’d all quit surfing by then. For a while, young Dorian had every wave to himself.
Dorian describes himself in those days as being almost impossibly physically fit. “I was so strong and healthy, so full of life. I could stand on my hands and do 13 pushups.” Photos of the doctor during that time prove he’s not exaggerating. When he was 15 years old, Dorian got a job as a lifeguard at Mission Beach. (He had to lie and say he was 18.) He rescued more than 300 people from drowning — “The only thing in my life greater than being a physician,” he says.
After graduating from San Diego State, he went to Stanford University’s medical school, a transition he says is perfectly logical for a devoted surfer. “Medicine is about being healthy, which to me means surfing.” For a period of several years and two bad marriages, he lived the life of the wealthy doctor. He had a successful practice in a high-rise in San Francisco, owned an art gallery, and other investments. By the time he was 40, his life began to take its bizarre and rather creative turns. “I had grown disgusted with the business of taking money from sick people,” he says. “I had learned that people will pay a doctor to tell them why they are sick but not how to get well. And the more painful the examination and the more expensive the equipment used, the more they will pay.” Though he still wanted to practice medicine, he swore off taking money from patients and was determined to serve only those who otherwise couldn’t afford medical care.
At the same time, Dr. Paskowitz concluded that “civilization was probably the most dangerous possible thing for a person’s health.” His solution was to avoid the patterns of civilization, at least to the degree that is possible by a prisoner of the 20th Century. He refused to work at the drudgery of a permanent job or own real estate — and to this day, he and his wife do not own a home. He refused to accumulate wealth. For the next 30 years, he took his family on surfari, which is mostly what he’s been doing ever since. The world-wide odyssey began and ended at San Onofre.
There are several different versions of when and where the surf camp was started, depending on which Paskowitz you ask. One version says the camp was started in Tel Aviv, Israel. Another is that the camp was started while on the road in Baja California as a way to pay for the family’s traveling expenses. And yet another has it that the camp was started at San Onofre when Dr. Paskowitz was trying to come up with a way to keep his oldest boys occupied for the summer. But the most romantic and perhaps most accurate version is that the surf camp was started the day Dr. Paskowitz met Juliette, at the Chi-Chi Club Bar and Grill on Catalina Island in 1956.
To hear both the doctor and his wife tell the story, it was love at first sight. The handsome, athletic doctor and the exotically beautiful woman agreed almost immediately to have as many children as they could. “All I asked from her as a mother," Dr. Paskowitz recalls, “was that she do no less for her children than a chimpanzee mother would do: breast feed them until they are at least two and a half, hold them constantly, and don’t send them to a babysitter.”
At the time, Juliette had a promising singing career with the Roger Wagner Chorale, which had just been invited to sing at the coronation of the Queen of England. The next thing she knew, she was living with a twice-divorced doctor in a $25 car on the beach at San Onofre. And the car was for sale.
“Our first home was a '49 Studebaker Dorian had converted to a camper,” Juliette says. “Most of our life was outside, at the beach; and if it got cold, we moved south like the birds. Everything was on impulse. When we left a place, Dorian might say, ‘Wait a minute, something’s wrong. We're going in the wrong direction.’ So we’d turn around and go in the other direction.”
“I went on the road because I wanted to live like a real human being, not a rich doctor,” Dorian says. “I wanted my kids to grow up coping with poverty, cold, insecurity. I wanted my kids to learn that.” The Paskowitzes took their family across the United States, stopping for months or even years at a time while Dorian earned money working for health clinics, mostly on Indian reservations. Moses Paskowitz, their fifth son, says of those years, “We lived in a camper 6 feet wide and 12 feet long. Each of us had one square foot of space and a small cubbyhole for our things. But never a lot of toys.” Moses doesn’t speak fondly of most of the places where they lived — Martin, South Dakota, where the temperature was once 70 below zero; Portales, New Mexico; Eagle Butte, Montana — but he is still proud of the reason his father took them to those places. “My father was a real doctor, a missionary doctor, someone whose job it was to heal people, not take money from them.”
For a while, Dr. Paskowitz joined the Israeli Army, and they lived on a kibbutz. This was followed by Dr. Paskowitz’s stint as a lifeguard in Tel Aviv. He, in fact, brought the first surfboard to Israel and taught the first Israeli surfers how to ride waves on the Mediterranean. Today, he says proudly, there are more than 10,000 surfers in Israel, and the sport is thriving.
For several years, the Paskowitz family lived in Hawaii, where six of their children were born. They were friends with Duke Kahanamoku, Wally Forsythe, George Downing — all legends in the world of surfing. Eventually, Dr. Paskowitz opened a health clinic, where he hoped to practice the principles of health that he had been studying and thinking about over the years. “The sign in front of the clinic said, ‘Dr. Paskowitz — Clinic and Ding Repair,’ ” he says. “After one full year, I hadn’t had a single patient, and if it hadn’t been for the ding repair, we would have starved. I suppose I’m the only Stanford doctor who went bankrupt twice.” Eventually, after having nine children in 16 years, the Paskowitzes found themselves back where they’d started, at San Onofre, living in a small travel trailer and wondering how they would survive. The answer, they concluded, was to keep doing what they’d always done — surf every day, hang out at the beach, stay as healthy and happy as they possibly could — but to share their lifestyle with other people for a few weeks every summer. “What I was looking for,” Dr. Paskowitz says, “was a way to live every day with my kids around me — what every father dreams of.”
The reason they chose San Onofre is part mystery — “It’s like a big magnet that keeps drawing us back” — and part practicality; “We decided that the stretch of beach between San Onofre and Cottons [to the north] is probably the best place to teach surfing in California. It has everything from slow, rolling waves, to fast pro-quality waves.”
Of the 20 or so kids at this session of camp, about half are already skilled surfers. After breakfast they put on their orange vests so they can be easily spotted from shore, pick up their boards, and head for the water. Some of the other boys, however, require instruction, and for this, the camp has employed four expert surfer-counselors.
Sean Spencer is the senior counselor and has worked at the camp for seven years. With his crew cut and innocent grin, he too, seems like an endless adolescent on an endless summer. “No matter how inexperienced the novice surfers may be,” Sean says, “we always get everybody up. We paddle out with them, we work on their wave judgment, we help them overcome their fear — a lot of people come with that.” One area of the beach with a long, gentle section of white water is known as Goon Lagoon. That’s where the novices go to work on their skills until they’re ready to try a real wave.
“About three weeks ago,” Sean says, “we had a guy who weighed about 300 pounds. He was a beginner, and we tried and tried, but we couldn’t get him up. So we went and borrowed a 14-foot windsurfer, six inches thick — a real boat — and we finally got him on his feet.”
The majority of the campers are boys between 8 and 18, but there are others too. “Just last week we had a woman, a 28-year-old accountant, who just decided she wanted to surf,” Sean says. “I really thought it took a lot of balls to come to surf camp and hang around with a bunch of boys.”
There’s a wealthy doctor from Florida who comes to the camp every year with his daughter. He could afford any luxurious vacation he wanted, but he likes to sleep on the beach with a bunch of surfers. In fact a small but predictable percentage of the camp’s clientele consists of middle-aged people who just never had the chance to go on a surf safari when they were teen-agers. It’s almost as if they’re taking a vacation back to adolescence, only this time, they’re living it the way they would have liked to the first time around. “What’s really funny,” Sean says, “is that they aren’t at all self-conscious about being grown-ups here. They get totally goofy, eat Cap’n Crunch for breakfast, don’t shave, and act just like the other kids.”
One of the boys in camp this week is from Minnesota. He’s an experienced skateboarder and has subscribed to Surfer magazine for years, but he’s never surfed. On his second day out, he catches a wave and stands up — an impressive achievement for a beginner. But with Midwestern modesty, he downplays its importance. “It was no big deal, really,” he shrugs, smiling though his chapped lips. “Near as I could tell, though, it was better than skateboarding. When you wipe out on a surfboard, you don’t hit asphalt.”
Seeing the Minnesotan ride his first wave makes Sean’s day. “I surfed professionally for five years,” he says, “and after a while surfing got to be almost a task. I almost got to where I hated it. Now to see a kid stand up for the first time and be stoked all day, it gets me stoked all over again.”
Surprisingly, except for a few minor scrapes, none of the camp’s surfers has been injured. "The closest we ever came to an accident was the week this kid we called Tex was here,” Sean says. “He was from Texas, of course. The surf was huge that week, and we told him to just go ride the inside whitewater. We went to help some of the others, and when we looked back just a few minutes later, Tex and his board had been sucked out about a half mile. All we could see were his orange vest and two arms waving. We paddled out to get him, and he had literally shit in his pants. He thought he was dead.”
By far the worst tragedy that can befall the surf camp is for there to be no waves. “Surf camp without surf is hell,” Sean says. “These kids have the energy level of little hamsters. They’ll go hard for an hour, collapse for five minutes, then get up and go for another hour. And that goes on all day. If there’s no surf, it drives the counselors crazy. Sometimes we just break down, load them all in the vans, and take them to a movie.”
Every week the camp has its own surf contest, awarding prizes of $10, $7, $5, and $3. And at least once during the week, the kids get to meet professional surfers. Moses knows a lot of the pros, and when they’re in town, he’ll pay them 50 bucks or so to stop by the camp.
Last week the kids went to a professional surf contest at Oceanside, where they got to meet Martin Potter, the top surfer in the world right now; Christian Fletcher, a 19-year-old who recently won $27,000 in a contest; Matt Archbald, a legend with young surfers; and Hans Hedeman, one of the all-time surfing greats. “I’d almost forgotten what it was like to see your heroes outside of a magazine for the first time,” Sean says. “One kid almost threw up because Martin Potter walked behind him. ‘Did you see that! Martin Potter just walked right behind me.’ ”
Another camp counselor is Taku, a 22-year-old surfer from Shonan, Japan. He says he came to California to work on his surfing as well as his English. He’s a good-natured fellow who wears his baseball cap backwards, just like American surfers, and will patiently teach the Japanese F-word to anybody who asks. He’s only been in California a few weeks, but so far his impression is a good one. “California is very big country,” he grins. “Every house, every car, very big. The people here very kind to me. Beaches very clean. Every beach has good bathroom, good shower. I very impressed with that.”
“So, Taku,” one of the boys challenges, “you know any karate or what?” Taku shakes his head no, and the boy looks away, disappointed.
At the end of the day, when it’s time for dinner, Moses puts his fingers in his mouth and lets out a tremendous whistle that turns heads up and down the beach. The youngest surfer at the camp, eight-year-old Kevin, has been riding the shore break all afternoon. As he comes walking up the beach with a surfboard he’s barely big enough to carry, his attention is focused very seriously on Moses. And Moses knows instinctively what it is the boy wants. “You were rippin’, Kevin!’’ he says. And the boy breaks into a big grin.
In the evening, while everyone is waiting for dinner, the campers sit around the picnic tables, munching on pretzels and cheese fish. Except for the freeway, which is visible from the camp, and the Amtrak, which rattles by every few hours, the atmosphere of the camp is pretty much like any other summer camp. At one time, the Paskowitzes thought of buying an old motel near the beach to serve as camp headquarters; but they abandoned that idea, and not just for reasons of economics. “This is summer camp,” Moses explains. “You’re supposed to sleep in a tent, on the ground, take cold showers, and use johns that may not always be perfectly clean.”
To pass the time, the boys assign nicknames: Lucky Charm to a boy who looks like a leprechaun; Mule to a rather slow fellow; and Grown Man to the oldest of the bunch. One kid from Florida makes the mistake of admitting he owns a surfboard made by an East Coast company named Clubber, and this immediately becomes his humiliating nickname.
Southern Californians dominate the group, both in numbers and in social hierarchy. They’re more aggressive than the other boys, more style-conscious, and more sexually precocious. “Get that stick out of your ass and learn how to walk,” one of them tells an East Coaster.
Most of the chatter revolves around the typical adolescent obsessions: homosexuality (“You homo!”); masturbation (“Colin says he’s got a shaved, lubricated gerbil”); fecal matters (“One of life’s simple pleasures”); and fashion (“Josh’s hair’s gonna fall out cuz he’s dyed it about seven times”). When older girls walk by the camp, the boys whistle and hoot obnoxiously, suggesting obscenities they can barely pronounce, let alone perform. But when girls anywhere near their own age appear, they become remarkably quiet and flip their long blond hair aside with carefully practiced poise.
If there is even the slightest lull in the conversation, one of the boys will begin reciting, word for word, long scenes from a recent video. It’s almost as if each of the boys has a video library and a VCR in his brain, and at any moment he can push the “play” button.
A good deal of the conversation is concerned with surf sponsors. Nowadays just about every surfer who can paddle out beyond the shore break has half a dozen surfboard and beachwear manufacturers supplying him with free goodies. “I’m gonna quit Astrodeck,” one boy says, “see if I can get on with Rip Curl.” “Jason says he’s gonna set me up with Victory,” another boy responds. And so on, for hours at a time.
Young surfers have come to accept the fact that surf fashion is the fashion of America, or at least will be in a year or so. This means that the surf trunks surfers wore last year are now worn by every fat, middle-aged Barney on the beach. (The current example is anything neon, which any style-conscious surfer wouldn’t touch.) But the current year’s beach fashion isn’t left to surfer whimsy. Beachwear manufacturers intentionally “sponsor” young surfers by giving them free clothes in an attempt to manipulate fashion. The surfers don’t mind being used this way; in fact they relish the notion that they’re so bitchin’, all they have to do is wear a certain brand of surf trunks and somebody gets rich. But it takes a lot of thought and energy for the young surfers to stay on top of which beachwear manufacturer’s star is on the rise and which is on the wane.
One has to wonder if these young surfers find the same purity and nearly spiritual exultation that has kept Dorian Paskowitz in the sport for almost 60 years. (“For athletic artistry, ballet is the only thing that comes close to surfing,” he says.) Aside from the immediate thrill of the sport, which is the same regardless of age, the boys are mostly concerned with surfing as a status symbol, as a way of drawing attention to themselves, and possibly as a lead-in to a career — if not as a professional surfer, then somewhere in the surfing industry.
In all fairness to adolescents, though, maybe their need for self-gratification is just a part of being 14 years old. Most likely, many more years will be required before they’re able to understand that the real value of surfing, as with any solitary outdoor sport, is the way it can unite a person with the physical world and almost magically rejuvenate the soul. For those campers who are ready to learn, Dr. Paskowitz is there — not so much to teach in the traditional sense, but as an example of one person who has spent a lifetime seriously studying the discipline of surfing.
While waiting for dinner, boredom sets in. Somebody suggests they shave off Loren’s huge red mohawk, and a lynch mob quickly begins to form. Loren darts for cover, but too late. They drag him squealing for mercy from behind the van. For a moment or two, it looks as if things could turn vicious. Somebody screams, “Texas Chainsaw Massacre!” and they begin scanning their video libraries for the perfect scene to re-enact.
But then Moses appears at the door of the kitchen trailer, his massive chest muscles bulging from the sides of his cook’s apron, and he bellows, “There will be no shaved heads in this camp, men.”
There is only one dissenting voice. Tiny Kevin screams out, “Bullshit!” But the others know better than to cross Moses, and they quietly return to their seats.
Dinner that night consists of ravioli, green salad, and rolls. There are no complaints from the boys. When Dr. Paskowitz was director of the camp, the diet was much more severe: no sugar, little fat, little meat. But the boys rebelled and began hoarding huge amounts of junk food from the nearby market. In the end, it was impossible to explain to them the benefits of a simple diet. Now the camp serves Sugar Frosted Flakes and sugar donuts for breakfast, but there is always a bowl of fresh fruit on the table as well.
After dinner Moses hands out chocolate chip cookies, a job very much like a farmer slopping his hungry pigs. As soon as he steps from the trailer with two large boxes of cookies, a stampede is started. “Back to your chairs, men!’’ Moses orders. “I have plenty of cookies! I have thousands of cookies! Everybody — will get cookies!’’
The boys stuff their pockets with the first few handfuls, then stretch out their empty palms and plead for more. Moses notices their deceit but delivers just one warning. “There will be no cookies in the tents tonight, men! The skunks are hungry.’’ The bluffs behind the camp are thick with the cunning little beasts, and in the past, campers who have taken food to bed with them have awakened to find the skunks rooting through their gear.
As the sun is about to set, Moses hauls a TV and a VCR from the back of the van and sets it up on a table in front of the boys, who are still stuffing fistfuls of cookies into their faces. As he fires up a small generator, there’s a short but intense argument over which video they should watch: Wave Warrior, Bust Your Buns, Wave Warrior Two, Caligula, Wave Warrior Three.... The argument is settled, at least temporarily, when they decide to watch the video Moses made of them surfing that day.
It’s hard to appreciate how seriously the boys take their surfing until you’ve watched them watch themselves surfing on tape. The evening could have easily turned into a ridicule session as the boys made fun of each other’s silly wipeouts or awkward attempts at an off-the-lip. But instead they’re too absorbed in studying their own flaws to even notice another’s failures or successes. The only exception is a short section of the video that shows the boy from Minnesota standing up on a surfboard for the first time in his life. The boy has been quiet all evening, and maybe he’s feeling just a bit homesick, surrounded here by noisy and aggressive California surf rats. And just maybe the other boys have noticed his discomfort. At any rate, for just a moment they drop their armor of too-cool-to-care sarcasm and give the Minnesotan a round of wild and goofy applause.
As evening sets in and the campers begin retiring to their tents, Moses makes one last appearance — the end of his 12-hour day. Without embarrassment he says, loudly enough for all to hear, “God, men, I love you so much.’’
According to Dr. Paskowitz, the surf camp has never been profitable. “We’d like to make enough money to take a nice, long vacation someday, but it’s never gonna happen,” he says. It’s hard to tell if he’s serious or not. The camp has been in operation for more than 15 years, so it must have some degree of financial success. On the other hand, if his intentions were to make a lot of money, he would probably go back to practicing medicine. Possibly he cries poor to discourage competition, and possibly he’s trying to disguise his embarrassment for the camp’s cost — $650 per week — which just about eliminates all children whose families are below upper middle class.
In fact, the majority of the kids come from very wealthy families. Some of them stay at the camp for two or three sessions at a time and bring with them more spending money than some of the counselors earn in a week. Oddly enough, these “poor little rich kids” may be the very ones who need the camp the most. Some of them come from broken families or from families with parents too wrapped up in their careers to provide a family life. (One kid’s mother refused to accept a collect call from him while he was at the camp, apparently because she was on vacation — from him.) Some of the kids are bounced from boarding school to summer camp to yet another summer camp, and then back to boarding school. If you choose to look at it in that way, Dr. Paskowitz is providing a refuge for kids who come from exactly the kind of lifestyles he abhors.
The camp counselors are full of tales of bratty rich kids: One 16-year-old from Venezuela stayed at the camp three weeks, then talked his father into having the Venezuelan government sponsor him on the pro surfing tour, even though he could barely surf. Another camper conned kids into believing he was a counselor and eventually had them all running errands for him. Yet another tried to throw people over the bluff, tried to run away, and then called his parents to say, “You dumped me off with a bunch of dirty Jews.’’ But there are also stories of kids for whom the camp has had a deeply emotional effect. “There was this kid, 10 years old, whose parents were both college professors," Sean says. “His brother was 13 and already in college. His parents were trying to make him into a little genius, but all he wanted to do was surf. On the last day of camp, he came up to Moses and pleaded, 'Can’t you hide me or something? Please don’t let them take me back!’ ’’
One camper confided his deepest, darkest secret to Sean: that he’d burned down a bungalow at a hotel where he and his parents were staying in Hawaii; he was never caught, and he’d never told another soul.
And another kid, 12 years old, intentionally left his suitcase at the camp so Sean would have to bring it to the airport and the kid could see him one last time. After buying Sean lunch on his father’s hotel tab, the kid finally left to catch his plane. As Sean was walking across the parking lot, he heard the kid cry out mournfully, "I love you!”
“I think that's probably the worst thing about this camp,” Sean says. “You spend a week with these kids, and it’s just like being in camp yourself, and then they go.’’ Though the kids don’t know it at first, and it’s not mentioned in the magazine ad, what Dr. Paskowitz is providing at the camp is not so much surf instruction as love instruction.
“This place is love camp,” Moses says. "We’ve called it that for years. I hope that doesn’t sound too mooshy, but it’s true."
There are times down on the beach, mostly in the morning, when all the campers are out surfing, that the Paskowitz family has time to sit down in the sand under one of the umbrellas and enjoy the day. Breakfast is over, and it isn’t time yet to start lunch. Their beautiful daughter Tara, now 21, is combing out her wet hair. The sons have stopped by to be with the family and share news of their lives. Most of them live near San Clemente and work at least part-time at the camp. Nobody is wearing much more than a swimsuit.
These are the times when it seems as if Dorian and Juliette Paskowitz have defeated the 20th Century. They live just steps away from the ocean, surrounded by their children, and now their grandchildren. There’s no dull, grinding job to drain away their joy for life. There’s no rent to pay, no bank to pay, no gas and electric company to pay. Their lives are so innocent and free, one has to wonder why most people don’t live this way.
If people must choose between family and career, the Paskowitzes chose family. Between health and success, they chose health. Between wealth and happiness, they chose happiness. They may be the rarest of all oddities in this modern world — two people who made all the right choices.
Here's something you might be interested in.
A Jewish doctor, wife, and nine kids run San Onofre's oddest surf camp
Camp Awesome
A Jewish doctor, wife, and nine kids run San Onofre's oddest surf camp
Camp Awesome
Their lives are so innocent and free, one has to wonder why most people don’t live this way.
The small ad in the back of Surfer magazine has a simple, irresistible appeal: "The Paskokwitz 7-Day Surfari. An experience that will last a lifetime." For young beach rats, aching to get away from mom and dad and for landlocked wannabe surfers hoping to ride their first waves, the ad suggests magical images of long white beaches, cool ocean water, freedom, and adventure. To their parents, it offers seven days of relief from a moody, hyperactive adolescent who thinks the cruelest fate on earth is cleaning the garage.
Juliette and Dorian Paskowitz. “All I asked from her as a mother was that she breast feed the kids until they are at least two and a half, hold them constantly, and don’t send them to a babysitter.”
But nothing in the ad suggests how unique the Paskowitzes’ summer camp really is. Which is just as well. Until they’ve experienced the place for themselves, there’s no way to explain that the only surfing camp in California is run by a dropout Jewish doctor from Galveston, Texas, who, with his American Indian earth-goddess wife, spent the last 30 years raising a family of eight boys and one girl in a 12-foot camper.
“Surf camp without surf is hell.”
In terms of material assets, the surf camp doesn’t amount to much. Its boundaries — campsites 88, 89, and 90 at San Onofre State Park — are occupied by the camp for ten weeks each summer, and only then by the good graces of the State of California. There’s an old travel trailer that serves as a kitchen; eight dome tents, which the campers occupy two or three to a tent; and three old vans plastered with surf stickers, used for cruising the beaches in search of waves. There are perhaps 30 or 40 surfboards in all sizes and shapes. And that’s about it. Just a gypsy caravan that could pull up stakes tomorrow and head south or north or whichever direction the camp’s founder, patriarch, and retired director, Dr. Dorian Paskowitz, chooses to go.
The boys rebelled and began hoarding huge amounts of junk food.
As the kids begin arriving on the first day of camp, the scene is much like that at any other summer camp. Mom asks a hundred questions all at once — “Where do they sleep?” “Where’s the bathroom?” "Where do they keep their money?” Dad strolls suspiciously through the facilities, trying to figure out what is so special about this camp that it should cost $650 a week. Meanwhile, the kids nervously check each other out, worried about their status among the other boys, whether they’re wearing the wrong surf trunks or have brought the wrong brand of surfboard, worrying that they’ve brought the wrong parents.
Judging the surf contest.
Mom and Dad may have mixed feelings about leaving their kid for a week at a public beach in Southern California, exposed to who knows what corruptions. But eventually, after reassuring words from the director, Moses Paskowitz, they conclude that if the camp isn’t adequate for protecting their child, it’s too late to do anything about it now. Mom tries to work up a tear or two. Dad commits the horror of horrors by kissing his male child on the cheek, right in front of everybody, and then, sensing his son's embarrassment, quickly adds a macho high-five.
Moses Paskowitz. At six foot one and 250 pounds, the excollege football lineman gets instant respect from the campers.
Without exception, the boys are relieved when their parents finally climb back into their Broncos, mini-vans, and Maximas and drive away. One of the most serious obstacles on the path to becoming a professional surfer is the humiliation of having parents. Unless, of course, you happen to have been born a Paskowitz.
This is Moses Paskowitz’s first year serving as camp director, and it would be hard to find someone more suited for the job. Moses, who looks more Hawaiian than most Hawaiians, has the neck and chest of a buffalo and massive arms that can churn through the water like sidewheels on a river boat. At six foot one and 250 pounds, the excollege football lineman gets instant respect from the campers. On the other hand, even at 25 years old, he’s still more a kid than many of them. Like the entire Paskowitz family, he positively glows with happiness and good health, and when the time comes to surf or just frolic on the beach, chasing the corbina that come up to feed on sand crabs, he goes about it with a playful enthusiasm most people have jpst by the time they’re 10. He is simply doing what he was born to do, which is to hang out at the beach and radiate joy and love. “My family has been here at San Onofre now since 1975,” he says in a soft, gentle voice. “This is where we live, and if the kids didn’t come, we’d still be here doing exactly the same thing.”
Ht eight o’clock in the morning, Dr. Paskowitz, a cum laude graduate from Stanford medical school, stands on the beach at San Onofre, dripping wet. He’s just spent the first hour of the morning not just surfing, but, as wife says, “ripping!” Aside from the effects of the sun and wind on the man’s face, it is very difficult to believe he’s 70 years old. He modestly rates his own physical age as about 55, though there are many men in their 20s who would gladly trade physiques with him.
He has the silvery hair of a patriarch, clear blue eyes that seem to look through and beyond the surface of things, and a quick intelligence that is constantly putting order to a disordered world. The only thing he can’t make any sense of is where all the time has gone. “My God, it seems like just yesterday I came here,” he says. “And now look at me — I'm 70 years old!”
Juliette, the doctor’s wife, is equally impressive. She’s tall and thin, with dark, sun-streaked hair. After giving birth to nine children, she still has the figure of a model. She too glows with vitality, and nearly every sentence she speaks is in praise of her children and husband, whom she calls, without a trace of sarcasm, “the world’s most perfect man. The epitome of health, cleanliness, and joy.”
Dr. Paskowitz first learned to surf in Galveston, but in 1934, when he was 12 years old, his family moved to San Diego. There had been other surfers at Mission Beach before Dorian arrived with his redwood slab, but they’d all quit surfing by then. For a while, young Dorian had every wave to himself.
Dorian describes himself in those days as being almost impossibly physically fit. “I was so strong and healthy, so full of life. I could stand on my hands and do 13 pushups.” Photos of the doctor during that time prove he’s not exaggerating. When he was 15 years old, Dorian got a job as a lifeguard at Mission Beach. (He had to lie and say he was 18.) He rescued more than 300 people from drowning — “The only thing in my life greater than being a physician,” he says.
After graduating from San Diego State, he went to Stanford University’s medical school, a transition he says is perfectly logical for a devoted surfer. “Medicine is about being healthy, which to me means surfing.” For a period of several years and two bad marriages, he lived the life of the wealthy doctor. He had a successful practice in a high-rise in San Francisco, owned an art gallery, and other investments. By the time he was 40, his life began to take its bizarre and rather creative turns. “I had grown disgusted with the business of taking money from sick people,” he says. “I had learned that people will pay a doctor to tell them why they are sick but not how to get well. And the more painful the examination and the more expensive the equipment used, the more they will pay.” Though he still wanted to practice medicine, he swore off taking money from patients and was determined to serve only those who otherwise couldn’t afford medical care.
At the same time, Dr. Paskowitz concluded that “civilization was probably the most dangerous possible thing for a person’s health.” His solution was to avoid the patterns of civilization, at least to the degree that is possible by a prisoner of the 20th Century. He refused to work at the drudgery of a permanent job or own real estate — and to this day, he and his wife do not own a home. He refused to accumulate wealth. For the next 30 years, he took his family on surfari, which is mostly what he’s been doing ever since. The world-wide odyssey began and ended at San Onofre.
There are several different versions of when and where the surf camp was started, depending on which Paskowitz you ask. One version says the camp was started in Tel Aviv, Israel. Another is that the camp was started while on the road in Baja California as a way to pay for the family’s traveling expenses. And yet another has it that the camp was started at San Onofre when Dr. Paskowitz was trying to come up with a way to keep his oldest boys occupied for the summer. But the most romantic and perhaps most accurate version is that the surf camp was started the day Dr. Paskowitz met Juliette, at the Chi-Chi Club Bar and Grill on Catalina Island in 1956.
To hear both the doctor and his wife tell the story, it was love at first sight. The handsome, athletic doctor and the exotically beautiful woman agreed almost immediately to have as many children as they could. “All I asked from her as a mother," Dr. Paskowitz recalls, “was that she do no less for her children than a chimpanzee mother would do: breast feed them until they are at least two and a half, hold them constantly, and don’t send them to a babysitter.”
At the time, Juliette had a promising singing career with the Roger Wagner Chorale, which had just been invited to sing at the coronation of the Queen of England. The next thing she knew, she was living with a twice-divorced doctor in a $25 car on the beach at San Onofre. And the car was for sale.
“Our first home was a '49 Studebaker Dorian had converted to a camper,” Juliette says. “Most of our life was outside, at the beach; and if it got cold, we moved south like the birds. Everything was on impulse. When we left a place, Dorian might say, ‘Wait a minute, something’s wrong. We're going in the wrong direction.’ So we’d turn around and go in the other direction.”
“I went on the road because I wanted to live like a real human being, not a rich doctor,” Dorian says. “I wanted my kids to grow up coping with poverty, cold, insecurity. I wanted my kids to learn that.” The Paskowitzes took their family across the United States, stopping for months or even years at a time while Dorian earned money working for health clinics, mostly on Indian reservations. Moses Paskowitz, their fifth son, says of those years, “We lived in a camper 6 feet wide and 12 feet long. Each of us had one square foot of space and a small cubbyhole for our things. But never a lot of toys.” Moses doesn’t speak fondly of most of the places where they lived — Martin, South Dakota, where the temperature was once 70 below zero; Portales, New Mexico; Eagle Butte, Montana — but he is still proud of the reason his father took them to those places. “My father was a real doctor, a missionary doctor, someone whose job it was to heal people, not take money from them.”
For a while, Dr. Paskowitz joined the Israeli Army, and they lived on a kibbutz. This was followed by Dr. Paskowitz’s stint as a lifeguard in Tel Aviv. He, in fact, brought the first surfboard to Israel and taught the first Israeli surfers how to ride waves on the Mediterranean. Today, he says proudly, there are more than 10,000 surfers in Israel, and the sport is thriving.
For several years, the Paskowitz family lived in Hawaii, where six of their children were born. They were friends with Duke Kahanamoku, Wally Forsythe, George Downing — all legends in the world of surfing. Eventually, Dr. Paskowitz opened a health clinic, where he hoped to practice the principles of health that he had been studying and thinking about over the years. “The sign in front of the clinic said, ‘Dr. Paskowitz — Clinic and Ding Repair,’ ” he says. “After one full year, I hadn’t had a single patient, and if it hadn’t been for the ding repair, we would have starved. I suppose I’m the only Stanford doctor who went bankrupt twice.” Eventually, after having nine children in 16 years, the Paskowitzes found themselves back where they’d started, at San Onofre, living in a small travel trailer and wondering how they would survive. The answer, they concluded, was to keep doing what they’d always done — surf every day, hang out at the beach, stay as healthy and happy as they possibly could — but to share their lifestyle with other people for a few weeks every summer. “What I was looking for,” Dr. Paskowitz says, “was a way to live every day with my kids around me — what every father dreams of.”
The reason they chose San Onofre is part mystery — “It’s like a big magnet that keeps drawing us back” — and part practicality; “We decided that the stretch of beach between San Onofre and Cottons [to the north] is probably the best place to teach surfing in California. It has everything from slow, rolling waves, to fast pro-quality waves.”
Of the 20 or so kids at this session of camp, about half are already skilled surfers. After breakfast they put on their orange vests so they can be easily spotted from shore, pick up their boards, and head for the water. Some of the other boys, however, require instruction, and for this, the camp has employed four expert surfer-counselors.
Sean Spencer is the senior counselor and has worked at the camp for seven years. With his crew cut and innocent grin, he too, seems like an endless adolescent on an endless summer. “No matter how inexperienced the novice surfers may be,” Sean says, “we always get everybody up. We paddle out with them, we work on their wave judgment, we help them overcome their fear — a lot of people come with that.” One area of the beach with a long, gentle section of white water is known as Goon Lagoon. That’s where the novices go to work on their skills until they’re ready to try a real wave.
“About three weeks ago,” Sean says, “we had a guy who weighed about 300 pounds. He was a beginner, and we tried and tried, but we couldn’t get him up. So we went and borrowed a 14-foot windsurfer, six inches thick — a real boat — and we finally got him on his feet.”
The majority of the campers are boys between 8 and 18, but there are others too. “Just last week we had a woman, a 28-year-old accountant, who just decided she wanted to surf,” Sean says. “I really thought it took a lot of balls to come to surf camp and hang around with a bunch of boys.”
There’s a wealthy doctor from Florida who comes to the camp every year with his daughter. He could afford any luxurious vacation he wanted, but he likes to sleep on the beach with a bunch of surfers. In fact a small but predictable percentage of the camp’s clientele consists of middle-aged people who just never had the chance to go on a surf safari when they were teen-agers. It’s almost as if they’re taking a vacation back to adolescence, only this time, they’re living it the way they would have liked to the first time around. “What’s really funny,” Sean says, “is that they aren’t at all self-conscious about being grown-ups here. They get totally goofy, eat Cap’n Crunch for breakfast, don’t shave, and act just like the other kids.”
One of the boys in camp this week is from Minnesota. He’s an experienced skateboarder and has subscribed to Surfer magazine for years, but he’s never surfed. On his second day out, he catches a wave and stands up — an impressive achievement for a beginner. But with Midwestern modesty, he downplays its importance. “It was no big deal, really,” he shrugs, smiling though his chapped lips. “Near as I could tell, though, it was better than skateboarding. When you wipe out on a surfboard, you don’t hit asphalt.”
Seeing the Minnesotan ride his first wave makes Sean’s day. “I surfed professionally for five years,” he says, “and after a while surfing got to be almost a task. I almost got to where I hated it. Now to see a kid stand up for the first time and be stoked all day, it gets me stoked all over again.”
Surprisingly, except for a few minor scrapes, none of the camp’s surfers has been injured. "The closest we ever came to an accident was the week this kid we called Tex was here,” Sean says. “He was from Texas, of course. The surf was huge that week, and we told him to just go ride the inside whitewater. We went to help some of the others, and when we looked back just a few minutes later, Tex and his board had been sucked out about a half mile. All we could see were his orange vest and two arms waving. We paddled out to get him, and he had literally shit in his pants. He thought he was dead.”
By far the worst tragedy that can befall the surf camp is for there to be no waves. “Surf camp without surf is hell,” Sean says. “These kids have the energy level of little hamsters. They’ll go hard for an hour, collapse for five minutes, then get up and go for another hour. And that goes on all day. If there’s no surf, it drives the counselors crazy. Sometimes we just break down, load them all in the vans, and take them to a movie.”
Every week the camp has its own surf contest, awarding prizes of $10, $7, $5, and $3. And at least once during the week, the kids get to meet professional surfers. Moses knows a lot of the pros, and when they’re in town, he’ll pay them 50 bucks or so to stop by the camp.
Last week the kids went to a professional surf contest at Oceanside, where they got to meet Martin Potter, the top surfer in the world right now; Christian Fletcher, a 19-year-old who recently won $27,000 in a contest; Matt Archbald, a legend with young surfers; and Hans Hedeman, one of the all-time surfing greats. “I’d almost forgotten what it was like to see your heroes outside of a magazine for the first time,” Sean says. “One kid almost threw up because Martin Potter walked behind him. ‘Did you see that! Martin Potter just walked right behind me.’ ”
Another camp counselor is Taku, a 22-year-old surfer from Shonan, Japan. He says he came to California to work on his surfing as well as his English. He’s a good-natured fellow who wears his baseball cap backwards, just like American surfers, and will patiently teach the Japanese F-word to anybody who asks. He’s only been in California a few weeks, but so far his impression is a good one. “California is very big country,” he grins. “Every house, every car, very big. The people here very kind to me. Beaches very clean. Every beach has good bathroom, good shower. I very impressed with that.”
“So, Taku,” one of the boys challenges, “you know any karate or what?” Taku shakes his head no, and the boy looks away, disappointed.
At the end of the day, when it’s time for dinner, Moses puts his fingers in his mouth and lets out a tremendous whistle that turns heads up and down the beach. The youngest surfer at the camp, eight-year-old Kevin, has been riding the shore break all afternoon. As he comes walking up the beach with a surfboard he’s barely big enough to carry, his attention is focused very seriously on Moses. And Moses knows instinctively what it is the boy wants. “You were rippin’, Kevin!’’ he says. And the boy breaks into a big grin.
In the evening, while everyone is waiting for dinner, the campers sit around the picnic tables, munching on pretzels and cheese fish. Except for the freeway, which is visible from the camp, and the Amtrak, which rattles by every few hours, the atmosphere of the camp is pretty much like any other summer camp. At one time, the Paskowitzes thought of buying an old motel near the beach to serve as camp headquarters; but they abandoned that idea, and not just for reasons of economics. “This is summer camp,” Moses explains. “You’re supposed to sleep in a tent, on the ground, take cold showers, and use johns that may not always be perfectly clean.”
To pass the time, the boys assign nicknames: Lucky Charm to a boy who looks like a leprechaun; Mule to a rather slow fellow; and Grown Man to the oldest of the bunch. One kid from Florida makes the mistake of admitting he owns a surfboard made by an East Coast company named Clubber, and this immediately becomes his humiliating nickname.
Southern Californians dominate the group, both in numbers and in social hierarchy. They’re more aggressive than the other boys, more style-conscious, and more sexually precocious. “Get that stick out of your ass and learn how to walk,” one of them tells an East Coaster.
Most of the chatter revolves around the typical adolescent obsessions: homosexuality (“You homo!”); masturbation (“Colin says he’s got a shaved, lubricated gerbil”); fecal matters (“One of life’s simple pleasures”); and fashion (“Josh’s hair’s gonna fall out cuz he’s dyed it about seven times”). When older girls walk by the camp, the boys whistle and hoot obnoxiously, suggesting obscenities they can barely pronounce, let alone perform. But when girls anywhere near their own age appear, they become remarkably quiet and flip their long blond hair aside with carefully practiced poise.
If there is even the slightest lull in the conversation, one of the boys will begin reciting, word for word, long scenes from a recent video. It’s almost as if each of the boys has a video library and a VCR in his brain, and at any moment he can push the “play” button.
A good deal of the conversation is concerned with surf sponsors. Nowadays just about every surfer who can paddle out beyond the shore break has half a dozen surfboard and beachwear manufacturers supplying him with free goodies. “I’m gonna quit Astrodeck,” one boy says, “see if I can get on with Rip Curl.” “Jason says he’s gonna set me up with Victory,” another boy responds. And so on, for hours at a time.
Young surfers have come to accept the fact that surf fashion is the fashion of America, or at least will be in a year or so. This means that the surf trunks surfers wore last year are now worn by every fat, middle-aged Barney on the beach. (The current example is anything neon, which any style-conscious surfer wouldn’t touch.) But the current year’s beach fashion isn’t left to surfer whimsy. Beachwear manufacturers intentionally “sponsor” young surfers by giving them free clothes in an attempt to manipulate fashion. The surfers don’t mind being used this way; in fact they relish the notion that they’re so bitchin’, all they have to do is wear a certain brand of surf trunks and somebody gets rich. But it takes a lot of thought and energy for the young surfers to stay on top of which beachwear manufacturer’s star is on the rise and which is on the wane.
One has to wonder if these young surfers find the same purity and nearly spiritual exultation that has kept Dorian Paskowitz in the sport for almost 60 years. (“For athletic artistry, ballet is the only thing that comes close to surfing,” he says.) Aside from the immediate thrill of the sport, which is the same regardless of age, the boys are mostly concerned with surfing as a status symbol, as a way of drawing attention to themselves, and possibly as a lead-in to a career — if not as a professional surfer, then somewhere in the surfing industry.
In all fairness to adolescents, though, maybe their need for self-gratification is just a part of being 14 years old. Most likely, many more years will be required before they’re able to understand that the real value of surfing, as with any solitary outdoor sport, is the way it can unite a person with the physical world and almost magically rejuvenate the soul. For those campers who are ready to learn, Dr. Paskowitz is there — not so much to teach in the traditional sense, but as an example of one person who has spent a lifetime seriously studying the discipline of surfing.
While waiting for dinner, boredom sets in. Somebody suggests they shave off Loren’s huge red mohawk, and a lynch mob quickly begins to form. Loren darts for cover, but too late. They drag him squealing for mercy from behind the van. For a moment or two, it looks as if things could turn vicious. Somebody screams, “Texas Chainsaw Massacre!” and they begin scanning their video libraries for the perfect scene to re-enact.
But then Moses appears at the door of the kitchen trailer, his massive chest muscles bulging from the sides of his cook’s apron, and he bellows, “There will be no shaved heads in this camp, men.”
There is only one dissenting voice. Tiny Kevin screams out, “Bullshit!” But the others know better than to cross Moses, and they quietly return to their seats.
Dinner that night consists of ravioli, green salad, and rolls. There are no complaints from the boys. When Dr. Paskowitz was director of the camp, the diet was much more severe: no sugar, little fat, little meat. But the boys rebelled and began hoarding huge amounts of junk food from the nearby market. In the end, it was impossible to explain to them the benefits of a simple diet. Now the camp serves Sugar Frosted Flakes and sugar donuts for breakfast, but there is always a bowl of fresh fruit on the table as well.
After dinner Moses hands out chocolate chip cookies, a job very much like a farmer slopping his hungry pigs. As soon as he steps from the trailer with two large boxes of cookies, a stampede is started. “Back to your chairs, men!’’ Moses orders. “I have plenty of cookies! I have thousands of cookies! Everybody — will get cookies!’’
The boys stuff their pockets with the first few handfuls, then stretch out their empty palms and plead for more. Moses notices their deceit but delivers just one warning. “There will be no cookies in the tents tonight, men! The skunks are hungry.’’ The bluffs behind the camp are thick with the cunning little beasts, and in the past, campers who have taken food to bed with them have awakened to find the skunks rooting through their gear.
As the sun is about to set, Moses hauls a TV and a VCR from the back of the van and sets it up on a table in front of the boys, who are still stuffing fistfuls of cookies into their faces. As he fires up a small generator, there’s a short but intense argument over which video they should watch: Wave Warrior, Bust Your Buns, Wave Warrior Two, Caligula, Wave Warrior Three.... The argument is settled, at least temporarily, when they decide to watch the video Moses made of them surfing that day.
It’s hard to appreciate how seriously the boys take their surfing until you’ve watched them watch themselves surfing on tape. The evening could have easily turned into a ridicule session as the boys made fun of each other’s silly wipeouts or awkward attempts at an off-the-lip. But instead they’re too absorbed in studying their own flaws to even notice another’s failures or successes. The only exception is a short section of the video that shows the boy from Minnesota standing up on a surfboard for the first time in his life. The boy has been quiet all evening, and maybe he’s feeling just a bit homesick, surrounded here by noisy and aggressive California surf rats. And just maybe the other boys have noticed his discomfort. At any rate, for just a moment they drop their armor of too-cool-to-care sarcasm and give the Minnesotan a round of wild and goofy applause.
As evening sets in and the campers begin retiring to their tents, Moses makes one last appearance — the end of his 12-hour day. Without embarrassment he says, loudly enough for all to hear, “God, men, I love you so much.’’
According to Dr. Paskowitz, the surf camp has never been profitable. “We’d like to make enough money to take a nice, long vacation someday, but it’s never gonna happen,” he says. It’s hard to tell if he’s serious or not. The camp has been in operation for more than 15 years, so it must have some degree of financial success. On the other hand, if his intentions were to make a lot of money, he would probably go back to practicing medicine. Possibly he cries poor to discourage competition, and possibly he’s trying to disguise his embarrassment for the camp’s cost — $650 per week — which just about eliminates all children whose families are below upper middle class.
In fact, the majority of the kids come from very wealthy families. Some of them stay at the camp for two or three sessions at a time and bring with them more spending money than some of the counselors earn in a week. Oddly enough, these “poor little rich kids” may be the very ones who need the camp the most. Some of them come from broken families or from families with parents too wrapped up in their careers to provide a family life. (One kid’s mother refused to accept a collect call from him while he was at the camp, apparently because she was on vacation — from him.) Some of the kids are bounced from boarding school to summer camp to yet another summer camp, and then back to boarding school. If you choose to look at it in that way, Dr. Paskowitz is providing a refuge for kids who come from exactly the kind of lifestyles he abhors.
The camp counselors are full of tales of bratty rich kids: One 16-year-old from Venezuela stayed at the camp three weeks, then talked his father into having the Venezuelan government sponsor him on the pro surfing tour, even though he could barely surf. Another camper conned kids into believing he was a counselor and eventually had them all running errands for him. Yet another tried to throw people over the bluff, tried to run away, and then called his parents to say, “You dumped me off with a bunch of dirty Jews.’’ But there are also stories of kids for whom the camp has had a deeply emotional effect. “There was this kid, 10 years old, whose parents were both college professors," Sean says. “His brother was 13 and already in college. His parents were trying to make him into a little genius, but all he wanted to do was surf. On the last day of camp, he came up to Moses and pleaded, 'Can’t you hide me or something? Please don’t let them take me back!’ ’’
One camper confided his deepest, darkest secret to Sean: that he’d burned down a bungalow at a hotel where he and his parents were staying in Hawaii; he was never caught, and he’d never told another soul.
And another kid, 12 years old, intentionally left his suitcase at the camp so Sean would have to bring it to the airport and the kid could see him one last time. After buying Sean lunch on his father’s hotel tab, the kid finally left to catch his plane. As Sean was walking across the parking lot, he heard the kid cry out mournfully, "I love you!”
“I think that's probably the worst thing about this camp,” Sean says. “You spend a week with these kids, and it’s just like being in camp yourself, and then they go.’’ Though the kids don’t know it at first, and it’s not mentioned in the magazine ad, what Dr. Paskowitz is providing at the camp is not so much surf instruction as love instruction.
“This place is love camp,” Moses says. "We’ve called it that for years. I hope that doesn’t sound too mooshy, but it’s true."
There are times down on the beach, mostly in the morning, when all the campers are out surfing, that the Paskowitz family has time to sit down in the sand under one of the umbrellas and enjoy the day. Breakfast is over, and it isn’t time yet to start lunch. Their beautiful daughter Tara, now 21, is combing out her wet hair. The sons have stopped by to be with the family and share news of their lives. Most of them live near San Clemente and work at least part-time at the camp. Nobody is wearing much more than a swimsuit.
These are the times when it seems as if Dorian and Juliette Paskowitz have defeated the 20th Century. They live just steps away from the ocean, surrounded by their children, and now their grandchildren. There’s no dull, grinding job to drain away their joy for life. There’s no rent to pay, no bank to pay, no gas and electric company to pay. Their lives are so innocent and free, one has to wonder why most people don’t live this way.
If people must choose between family and career, the Paskowitzes chose family. Between health and success, they chose health. Between wealth and happiness, they chose happiness. They may be the rarest of all oddities in this modern world — two people who made all the right choices.
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