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I love to surf.
It’s great great way
to just
kind of erase yourself
from what your everyday life is
and just
get out
into a different headspace for a while.
It's a good space to be in.
My name is Juan Rodriguez,
I was born in Sarasota, Florida
in 1951.
My father was from the Dominican Republic
and came to America,
joined the army in
1942.
My mother
grew up in New York state
of czechoslovakian background.
Uh... They met in New York city,
got married
in cuba
and settled in Sarasota and been here ever since.
Well I was born in 1951.
I had a great childhood.
It was a small neighborhood,
but a lot of kids.
And unlike the generation today,
there was nothing on tv
to start with,
basically no tv. We had 2 stations
and they were both stupid.
So, there's no reason to be in the house
because there's nothing on tv
plus,
there was no air conditioning,
So, you're in your house in the daytime,
It's about like you could bake
pizzas in there
and there was nothing to do
but on the next block,
there were ten or fifteen kids
that were going to the same thing I was going through. Didn't want to be in the
house, nothing to do,
lets go out and play.
Great. Lets go build forts, lets go climb trees, lets go fishing,
lets walk down the railroad tracks, lets pick up railroads spike,
lets have orange fights
lets do all this stuff. That was just what you did.
It was great.
We’d have big bicycle races, like twenty kids in a bicycle race
and there would be the best wrecks.
It was so much fun
and you wreck your bike
and two or three guys run over you,
you cried for about two minutes and you start laughing.
It was a great way to grow up.
We used to jump off bridges
and it was fun
and no one ever got hurt hardly.
Except a couple times,
but we buried him.
It was just
a lot more open
as far as what you could do
without getting in trouble.
Now, if
today if people did
half the stuff we used to do,
you would get in a lot of trouble
and it was innocent fun. We had a lot of fun. So
at some point, I discovered the beach.
My mom used to take me to the beach when I was little
and I loved the water. I was always in the water.
I mean we’d go out to Crescent Beach and it was just beautiful.
No condos.
In Siesta Key, there were no condos. No Condos.
But um...
I discovered surfing in one of my classes
at Mackintosh Junior High.
This girl that sat kind of next to me, that I knew,
brought
a surfing magazine
to class that her brother had
brought back with him from California.
And there was a little bit of a rumble about surfing
with these beach blanket movies and the Ride the Wild Surf.
You know, really hokey hollywood movies.
It just kind of captured bunch people's imagination. Like you could do all this stuff
and be out in the water
and there would be parties and girls.
You know the lifestyle
And everything is really cool. Nobody worked in these movies all they did was surf
every day and party every night,
but anyway I started started surfing.
So we would hitch hike out to Lito Beach or take the bus out
and I remember going over the Ringling Causway when it was wood
and hearing the
bus clanking on the wood.
Kind of rhythmically.
And seeing how close guard rail was to the side of the bus,
like freaking out, never really taken a bus before.
So the first wave I caught was in Lito beach.
That day I could catch a wave
and stand up
and I loved it.
It was like the coolest feeling
and I thought the waves were like six or eight feet.
Looking back now, it was maybe
waist high. You know,
we didn’t have anything to compare it to.
So I'd go to crescent beach
which is the closest beach to my house
and we'd surf there
We went
as far, one year we built the surf hut
that we used to sleep in on the weekends.
Surfing was such a fun sport to do. It’s like an adventure.
It's a great way to be outside
and kind of commune with nature because
um... anything can happen when you're sitting on your board waiting for another wave to come in.
I've seen sea turtles come up right next to me,
baby sea turtles wash over the deck of my board
in a wave.
I've seen porpoises
jumping right out of waves.
A nice big swell will come in and 5 porpoises will be inside the face of the wave, swimming.
You see them through the water
and all of a sudden they all jump,
like 10 feet in the air.
Do this arch right in front of the wave.
I've seen whales, I've seen sea snakes
I've seen sharks.
I've seen Sharks.
So you never know what you're going to see out there.
You know, when I'm waiting for a wave,
I'm not just sitting on my board wagging my feet underneath me,
lah-dee-dahing
along.
I'm trying to be aware
of what's around.
When I got out of high school
I got a job
at
a restaurant,
met some
other guys
that had this idea
to go to California.
So I hooked up with two other guys
and we hitch hiked to California.
I got a job in Ecinitas,
working at a surfboard factory.
And
when I was a kid
I always made things,
either model cars or
I used to make little dugout canoes from tree branches.
I just made stuff.
I always liked to work with my hands.
So I thought,
this is what I want to do.
I want to make surfboards.
So I really dedicated myself
after that
to learning how to make boards.
Um... What other jobs did have I had my life?
Basically, none.
Okay, so we are back in the
part of my shop where everything happens here.
Uh... on the right,
I have
2 redwood surfboards that I made.
The uh...
the board on the left,
was made out of the rootball of a giant redwood tree.
I made that in 1996
and that might be the nicest board i'd ever made.
And the wood all came from stumps, so there were no actual trees cut.
So they're the stumps of trees that were cut about a hundred years ago.
I like to do redwood because
well... you might think I'm weird.
Redwood.
Lets say the tree is a thousand years old
the air
inside the wood,
is a thousand years old. It hasn't been breathed in a thousand years.
It's like,
going into a mummys tomb
in Egypt
and cracking that seal
and breathing air that hasn't been breathed in a thousand years or two thousand
years.
When I shape a redwood board
I take my shirt off,
I wear shorts,
and I sand it
with as little clothes on as possible
to absorb
this prehistoric air
and the redwood dust
stains my skin,
turns my skin dark. Over here
I make wooden surfboard fins for all the old guys
that made surf boards in the sixties in California.
It's a trip
because never in my wildest dreams when I was a little kid
looking at Susie Cook's surfing magazine that her brother brought from California
that I would be on a first-name basis
with the guys that were in that magazine at the time.
It's pretty bizarre.
Usually if you get a board from me, you get the best very best board I can make
because I've never been motivated by money.
I've always been motivated by
completing projects
and making things.
Am I the best craftman in world?
Not by a mile.
Do I try as hard as I can? Absolutely.
Am my still learning and getting better? Yep
because we all have room to get better improve.
That's kind of story.
(laughs)
And I'm sticking to it.