Honorary Mayor of Huntington Beach

Chuck Dent first appeared in Seal Beach straight out of the Bellflower, California, badlands in 1963 to take a job with Jack Haley Surfboards as a patcher. My friend Stu Herz was shaping there then, so I hung around and watched. Haley’s shop was the first stop for the landlocked, surf-stoked when they finally reached the beach. What an assortment.

Right away, we could tell Dent was different from the average patching grub. 

Even though the patcher was the lowest on the shop stature list, Dent managed to attract a loyal following of inland grems right away. 

To them, any job in a surf shop was a gift. Chuck called them his “goons,” but he took care of them too.

Chuck quickly rose from patcher to shop manager on the strength of his sarcastic machine-gun mouth and arrogant showmanship. And his surfing got better too. His rap became famous, and surfers would come in and present themselves to his abusive pitch while the afternoon’s audience rolled on the floor. Dent’s sales act was choreographed to James Brown and Little Richard, and his surfing and dancing were so poised that he got the name “Do-do!”—just like you say to yourself when you pull a drop-knee bottom turn in the hall at school.

After Dent had built his empire around being Haley’s shop manager, Jack came in on 

a Friday and gave him until Monday to buy the business, or he would be fired. The following Monday, we saw Haley driving Dent’s “cherry” green Porsche Speedster and knew that Chuck had saved his job. That summer, Dent paid off the shop with hard work and built up his following. He also had the hottest surf team on the coast (it was the surf-team era): Nuuhiwa, Baxter, Martinson, Chuck Mundell, Dennis “Buckwheat” Ranney, Tom and Bob Lonardo, John and Herbie Fletcher, Barry Kanaiaupuni (honorary), Mike Haley, Bill Fury—the list went on. Dent had become the area’s underground express (the clean-cut good guys in town being the Harbour Surfboards gang), and his fame grew wider and his act even more outrageous.

Next summer, Dent moved to the big leagues, right into the heart of Surf City at the Huntington Beach Pier. In the following years, he became enforcer of the pier and its sandy realm. His Main Street shop was “the scene,” his pitch even more devastating. You could hate Dent and still be drawn to his act like a magnet. His audience and the world were all his “goons,” or so he said.

Into the ’70s, Chuck’s businesses came and went with his partners’ bankrolls. He starred in classic sequences in John Severson’s Pacific Vibrations and MacGillivray-Freeman’s Five Summer Stories and authored “Blood & Sand at Huntington Pier” in Surfer magazine, Vol. 10, No. 6, in his inimitable style. But he also put on a lot of weight and drank too much.

As the decade continued, Dent became a hangover from the 1960s. No longer “the kid,” he was now a man in a kid’s world. Not a surfing world so much—more a world of frustrations and past glories. He kept his fingers in the surf-shop business, finally hooking up with the Bronzed Aussies for one more round of “let the good times roll,” but, like others before him and more to come, he never really transcended. He got stuck in the time frame of the ’60s, until one Saturday night in March 1980 when he never woke up again. The medical report said it was a massive heart attack.

His service was on April Fool’s Day at St. Raymond Catholic Church, way out in the flatlands behind Long Beach, in a place he had long ago forsaken. The Huntington contingent was sparsely in attendance: Nuuhiwa, Randy Lewis, Sammy Hawk, George Draper, and some others from Chuck’s recent and distant past. The pier was never quite the same without him.

[Feature image: Dent, a self-described “angry young man of surfing,” wild in the street on PCH and Main, circa 1970s. Photo by Drew Kampion.]