California’s celebrated beach culture was dealt a blow Wednesday with the passing of Terry “Tubesteak” Tracy, the man best known as the original Big Kahuna of Malibu. Tracy, the archetypical beach bum, lived on the Malibu shoreline for years, but his biggest contribution to American pop culture came when he gave a young surfer named Kathy Kohner her nickname, “Gidget.”
Tracy was born in 1935, and raised by his grandparents in the Wilshire District of Los Angeles after his parents split up in 1941. By 1950, at the age of 15, he had … More
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