When times were good, he got enough money from the lessons to make ends meet. When they weren’t so good, he went back to the docks or washed dishes in one of Honolulu’s nine million greasy spoons or worked in the cane and pineapple fields that filled the middle of the island. When he wasn’t out on the ocean, he didn’t much care what he did.

One day when he was, by his standards, flush, he paid a hundred bucks for a 1927 Chevy hardtop with no rear window. What the former owner perceived as a deficiency was to Oscar an asset. It let him stow his surfboard much more conveniently. The board, of three-inch-thick koa wood, was eleven feet long and not the easiest object to transport. After seeing how handy the missing window proved, three or four of his fellow surfers knocked the back glass out of their jalopies.

Oscar had been brought up bourgeois. Every so often, he wondered what the hell he was doing with his life. But all the doubts flew away when he rode along at the crest of a wave-or when he rode one of the girls he’d taught to kneel on a board in the wahine surf near the Moana Hotel in Waikiki. He was having a good time: that was what he was doing. Who needed anything more?

He snagged a lot of lessons toward the end of 1941. He’d been short on cash, and winter brought the tourists out from the cold parts of the country. But when his latest girlfriend threw a vase at his head after he didn’t ask her to marry him the night before she sailed back to Los Angeles, he decided the time had come to get away from it all for a little while.

He loaded his board into the Chevy. With him rode Charlie Kaapu, a large, smiling, half-Hawaiian fellow who also lived for the surf and a good time. Charlie’s surfboard was six or eight inches longer than Oscar’s. They tied a red rag to the back of it to keep cars behind them from running into them, then took off for the north coast and whatever they found there.