Surf and Destroy
WindanSea's secret society
Author Tom Wolfe referred to the Mac Meda Destruction Company as an underground society. The Surfer's Journal called it a "beer-for-labor demolition crew." To the surfers who frequent the storied Shack at WindanSea Beach, the Mac Meda destruction company has been omnipresent over the last few decades, another reminder of the beach's rich heritage.
Though many people like to speculate about what the secret group actually was, only Jack Macpherson knows for sure. That's because he is Mac of the group's name. And he'll be the first to say that the whole thing started as a joke.
Macpherson is a retired postal worker, ex-surfer and a bartender at London's West End Bar on La Jolla Boulevard. The bar is on the outskirts of La Jolla, on the blurred line between Bird Rock and Pacific Beach, and it serves a sort of a base of operations for the remnants of Mac Meda. Macpherson serves drinks every Wednesday through Sunday from 6 to 10 a.m.
At 8 a.m. on an average day, he has a crowd of regulars discussing the previous day's news and saying things like, "Mac, we'll have a couple more Budweisers."
In an isolated corner of the bar, there are a few photos and newspaper clippings that refer to Macpherson's glory days. Outside, a carved wooden sign depicts a mushroom cloud and the words "Mac Meda Destruction Company."
"The cops always said it was a gang," he said. "It wasn't a gang. It was just a bunch of us who liked to do crazy things like break houses down. There was no gang. It was just a joke. The cops hated it."
Gang or not, Macpherson, his friend Bob "Meda" Rakestraw and the group of surfers they hung around back in the 1960s started something that has taken on a life of its own. Beyond its home base at the West End, Mac Meda stickers decorate everything from rusting jalopies to $50,000 SUVs seen all over La Jolla. T-shirts bearing the group's logo are cranked out at the Branding Iron, run by silk screener Doug Moranville, on Eads Avenue. And, a decade or so ago, the group even had a float in the La Jolla Christmas Parade.
The Pumphouse Gang
It was Wolfe who gave the company its most widely distributed recognition. In his 1964 story of surf culture at WindanSea, "The Pumphouse Gang," the author made generous references to Mac Meda. As the story poetically describes the alienation of youth culture at WindanSea, he often cites the company as an omnipresent force.
Like Macpherson reports, Wolfe wrote that the loose-knit group's main purpose was to harass the establishment.
Wolfe wrote in the story: "Ooooo-eeee-Mee-dah! They chant this chant, Mee-dah, in a real fakey deep voice, and it really bugs people. They don't know what the hell it is. It is the cry of the Mac Meda Destruction Company. The Mac Meda Destruction company is ... an underground society that started in La Jolla three years ago. Nobody can remember exactly how; they have arguments about it. Anyhow, it is mainly something to bug people with and organize huge beer orgies with."
Though Wolfe brought the group international appeal, he is not thought of as a sage or prophet among the WindanSea locals.
"Tom Wolfe is a dork!" was once spray-painted on the pumphouse he named his story after.
"He's pretty far off-base," said Moranville, who looked up to the Mac Meda big kids when he was young. "He's just trying to sell books. ... The people who hung out at the pumphouse before then were who he should have been writing about. ... That story to me was kind of unappealing."
'A walking destruction company'
Macpherson is certain of the group's origins. He remembers it starting back in the 1960s with his friend and Girard Street roommate Rakestraw's inner desires to smash things up.
"I was Mac and he was Meda, and we go to a party. And Makestraw, he wouldn't just walk into a house, he'd run through the door and jump out through a window. People would say, 'Here comes Mac and Meda. They're a walking destruction company.' "
Thus, the Destruction in the group's title is a literal term. They destroyed things. It's referenced in Wolfe's story.
Macpherson said they even helped pave the way for Interstate 5 back in the day. As the freeway was being built, Mac Meda would offer their services for free to anyone needing demolition. They even made business cards that read: "Don't pay us, we'll pay you."
"They were putting I-5 through and all these old houses, we'd go out there and knock 'em down," said Macpherson. "We didn't ask for any permission. They were going to be knocked down anyway. We'd drop kick the chimneys off the house, and we'd use the water heater as a battering ram to go through 2 x 4 studs."
Macpherson said the most work he and the crew ever did was three houses and a 60-foot water tower in one day.
"Pat Shea, who was an original Charger running back, he'd bring football helmets and he used to run right through walls with his head. They were made with plywood. They were like cardboard boxes, those houses."
Longtime La Jolla resident Melinda Merriweather remembered those days. "What they pay people to do now, the demolition of a property, in those days it was an excuse for us to have a party. To us, it was just great fun, and people would ask us to come out and tear down houses. We would make a party out of it. Turn up the music and tear down the walls. It was good innocent fun."
Leader of the gang
The unofficial mascot of the company was Albert, a San Diego Zoo gorilla who captivated Rakestraw. The police often thought Albert was the phantom leader of the outfit and searched for him.
"It was like he was Saddam Hussein or Osama Bin Laden," said Moranville. "They were always looking for him."
Albert now decorates many of the Mac Meda shirts seen on regulars at the West End. He even had a beer named after him at the Red Mountain Inn, another company hang-out.
Mac Meda would also hold "conventions," loosely organized parties in locations that were only communicated through word of mouth. Things were often destroyed at these gatherings as well.
"All this back country that's now all subdivided," said Moranville, "used to be just dilapidated old barns and stuff, and nobody cared (about the destruction). It just got bigger and bigger as it went along. There were a couple Mac Meda conventions at the beach where there were hundreds and hundreds of people."
At the time of the group's heyday, Macpherson and Rakestraw began making crudely designed T-shirts with stencils and spraypaint. The shirts grew in popularity among the locals and eventually raised the eyebrows of the police who, Macpherson said, viewed the group as a street gang similar to the Hell's Angels.
"If anybody had a shirt on, they would take them down to the station and question them," he said. "I remember one time, I was walking down Girard ... and this cop came by, and they said, 'You with the Mac Meda T-shirt on, stop.' And then they said, 'Where did you get that shirt?' I said, 'I got it at Penney's.' Then they said, 'How'd that get on there.' I said I put it on there. Anything they couldn't understand was a threat to them. They used to say, 'We don't want an army, a Hell's Angels gang in the beach area. We want you to quit making these shirts.' When they left, we laughed."
Moranville tells a story of Rakestraw shooting an anti-tank gun into the ocean off a La Jolla cliff.
"He actually got an anti-tank gun and got up there and shot it off the hillside up there and just about hit a lobster skiff or something," he said.
The Mac Meda stickers, still a frequent sight here in La Jolla, were also referenced by Wolfe in the Pumphouse Gang.
"They stick them on cars, on phone booths, any place. Some mommy-hubby (slang in the story for adults) will come out of the shopping plaza and walk up to his Mustang, which is supposed to make him a real tiger now, and he'll see a sticker on the side of it a 'Mac Meda Destruction Company.' And, for about two days, he'll think the sky is going to fall in."
Even an outsider like Wolfe was in on the joke.
These Days
Since the group's beginnings and the attention bestowed upon them by Wolfe and local law enforcement, they have been mostly demystified in many people's eyes. They even had a float in the La Jolla Christmas parade a few years ago.
"It was the main attraction," said Macpherson. "I used to ride in front with a little tiny bicycle and give candy out to the kids. I would hear people say, 'Here comes the Mac Meda float. Here comes the Mac Meda float.' The whole community thought it was really neat."
Years later, as Macpherson was keeping himself busy with a career at the post office, a group of kids hijacked the Mac Meda name and began attaching it to random acts of vandalism around La Jolla. A local newspaper interviewed Macpherson and asked him if he felt responsible for the new generation of kids.
"I was in my late 20s, and these were just a bunch of teen-age kids running around town," he said. "It wasn't me. I didn't know who they were. Don't make me sound like I'm an evil person. We were just having a good time."
From the slipshod spray paint T-shirt designs of the 1960s comes the more legitimate process of silk screening courtesy of Moranville at his shop on Eads.
Moranville has known Macpherson all his life and first started making Mac Meda shirts in his back yard before he owned the business.
"Jacky lived up the alley from me when I was a little kid, and they were actually out with a hand-cut stencil spray painting Mac Meda Destruction Company on T-shirts," he said. "I did them in my back yard before I had the business. I started the business in '78 and I've been doing them all along."
"I still have a Mac Meda sticker on my car," said Merriweather.
Moranville's efforts and the distribution of the stickers by Macpherson and others has helped proliferate the Mac Meda legacy far beyond the surfing community of WindanSea. There are Mac Meda stickers all over the world.
"You see that guy right there," he said, motioning to a West End patron, "His brother is in Iraq, and he's got one on his tank.
"We put a couple in the Mormon Temple up there. They'll probably never find them. When they had the grand opening, we went in there and put some under this sink, we put some over there."
The most literally and figuratively far-out story of a Mac Meda sticker involves an employee at General Dynamics who managed to get a decal onto the Galileo space probe orbiting Jupiter at this very moment.
Written by Lance Vargas
Meda calls to far and near
What a hoot. The spirit of Meda lives on.
As I hunker down for my 30th Oregon winter, with heavy, wet and grey dominating all, the mushroom cloud icon cheers me. It zips me back to WindanSea, the Shores, Boomer, Marine Street, places I thought I would never leave.
It conjures the smell of salt air and Coppertone, warm sand and bodies not coccooned with parkas and longjohns. It reminds me how far I've traveled from La Jolla and how much I still miss it.
I thought there was no life east of I-5. When I was in the eighth grade at La Jolla High, I asked myself each day if I would go to school or to the beach.
By ninth grade, I no longer had to ask. The most common sight at WindanSea at 6:30 in the morning was Jack MacPherson standing next to his woody drinking a cup of coffee.
Until my mid-20s, my only thought about what I would do in life was to have a night job that earned me enough money so I could spend all day at the beach. Meeduh. Now, retirement is on the six-year plan and Zihuatanejo is the destination.
Think I'll stop at Doug Moranville's place and pick up a new Mac Meda T-shirt on the way down. My old one rotted off me.
Written by Robert Okey
Portland, Oregon