The Morning Report
Get the news and information you need to take on the day.
In an obituary today, the Los Angeles Times memorializes one of the inspirations for Tom Wolfe’s 1968 book “The Pump House Gang,” which captures the life of rebellious teenage surfers at La Jolla’s Windansea Beach in the late 1960s.
Jack Macpherson – the Mac in the book’s Mac Meda Destruction Company – died Nov. 16 in La Jolla. He was 69.
Leaning heavily on a 2003 story in the La Jolla Light, the Times says:
Jack Macpherson earned a permanent niche in the history of Southern California beach culture, thanks to the loosely organized group of surfers and other beach-area denizens that he co-founded in the early 1960s – a crew whose logo was an abstract rendering of a mushroom cloud and whose name became synonymous with “huge beer orgies.”
Macpherson was the Mac in the Mac Meda Destruction Company, the party-loving “underground society” immortalized in “The Pump House Gang,” Tom Wolfe’s famous chronicle of the teenage surfers who hung out at Windansea Beach in La Jolla.
The obituary is here.