Episode 34 - Steve Wheat on HB History, Surf Culture & Legendary Roots

Mel and Don sit down with Steve Wheat—born in Huntington Beach in 1947 in a small cottage on the corner of Fifth Street, back when his parents had to drive all the way to Santa Ana to deliver him because there was no Hoag Hospital yet. Steve is a living archive of HB history, carrying stories that stretch from oil rigs and agricultural fields to the birth of surf culture on the beach he grew up beside. His family tree reads like an HB origin story: his step-grandfather Harry Bckery stowed away from Greece as a child of eight or nine, hid in a lifeboat to reach San Francisco, built one of the city's best restaurants from a hot dog stand wedged between downtown buildings, then traveled down the California coast after his wife died and fell in love with Steve's grandmother over morning coffee at her Main Street cafe—before building the Golden Bear, the legendary Huntington Beach institution that became the heart of the community.

Steve traces the full arc of how Huntington Beach grew from a town of oil rigs, vacant fields, and abandoned motels into the surf city the world knows today. He was there in sixth grade when he and his friends started grabbing lost surfboards off the wet sand and riding white water just north of the pier—right where Gordy ran three of six garages and shaped boards in a room where your welcome depended entirely on his mood that day. Don adds a never-before-told story Gordy shared with him in 1991: that the first surf shop in Huntington Beach burned to the ground when John Severson, founder of Surfer Magazine, flicked a cigarette outside Gordy's door while waiting to go grab beers at the Capri Bar across PCH—a fire Gordy spent ten years blaming on city arsonists. Steve also unravels the origin of the name Zach's—his father opened that beach concession, naming it after his great-uncle Zack Wheat, a 1920s Brooklyn Dodger who still holds records and is enshrined in the Baseball Hall of Fame.

Beyond the big history, Steve shares deeply personal stories: spending his first years of life in Alaska at age three while his father tried to recoup a $150,000 fortune he had burned through after owning two bars during the end of Prohibition in Ketchikan, only to find the fishing and bar boom had dried up after World War II. He shares the memory of his first childhood friend—a Native American boy near a river and waterfall in Alaska—and how he returned to kindergarten in Huntington Beach performing Indian dances he couldn't consciously remember learning. And woven through it all is the quiet grief of a man who lost his son Casey nearly six years ago—a weight Steve carries with honesty and grace. A must-watch episode.