EPISODE TRANSCRIPT

Have you ever stopped to think about yourself and your story? If someone were to write your memoir what would it say? We all seek some level of authenticity but have trouble removing the labels and finding our whole story. Welcome to Dropping In with Diane Dewey. In this program we’ll explore diverse stories on identity to help determine what is truly yours. Now here is your host Diane Dewey.

Diane: Welcome to the show everyone. It’s an unusual time and today we’re going to interview a woman about her mother who was an unusual woman for her time. It’s Betty Pembroke Heldreich Winstedt. The name of the book is Wave Woman. Her daughter Vicky Durand is gracious enough to be joining us from Hawaii where it’s 5 AM. Good morning Vicky. So glad you could be with us.

Vicky: Oh good morning Diane. Happy to be here.

Diane: That’s lovely.

Vicky: It’s a little earlier than usual but doing good.

Diane: You can do it. I know enough about your mom to know you can do it. This book is a truly remarkable accomplishment. It’s a layered view of this primarily the surfing culture in Hawaii which is where your mother moved to very early on. When you were 12 years old you visited Hawaii and came back with a renewed sense, a renewed vigor. Your mother was curious enough to investigate your passion for the place and went there herself. She became part of the surfing culture. This book documents both your family and the personal life of one amazing woman Betty Pembroke Heldreich Winstedt. Her dates were 1913 to 2011. I feel like I was there. Congratulations, this is such a transporting, vivid, concrete description.

I’m just going to try to give us our audience a little bit of an intro. The focus that is required by something like surfing or activities that your mother took part in pottery, building things, building her house, the concentration involved honestly I feel as though she’s the right woman for our time as well because we need a sense of balance right now more than ever with coronavirus and fear gripping our nation. It’s the end of the world. It’s really important to reflect on simplicity and what focus can give us in the way of alleviating anxiety as we come to terms with or come to ground as David White would say with this new reality.

We need the positive energies and we need the focus and strength that your mother really exuded in her lifetime. I feel empowered by her and I feel as though by reading this book Wave Woman, we can really tap into her energies and her sense of overcoming, overcoming really vast obstacles to become who she was and to become an example for her daughters. I’m also grateful that we’re on radio which is one way to stay in contact and connect with one another when in-person contact has its risk. I’m glad that this is a venue that’s accessible to all and is free.

I’m going to give a brief description from your publisher Spark Press. The book Wave Woman is coming out next month. It’s really not to be missed. It’s going to give you a historical context. It’s going to deliver you to a sense of place. It’s going to immerse you in the life of a woman who was truly a pioneer. Spark Press says Wave Woman is a charming and intimate biography, a love letter from a daughter to a progressive mother who broke glass ceilings with simple curiosity and desire. Betty trained to swim in the 1936 Olympics. She eloped on a hunch and learned the top lessons of love.

With an entrepreneurial capacity and a drive for self-sufficiency Betty found meaning as a sculptor, a dental hygienist, a jeweler, a fisherwoman, a potter and a poet. In Hawaii the thrill of big waves crashing at Makaha Beach inspired the 41 year old mother to pick up a surfboard, conquer her fears and compete as a champion. Wave Woman speaks clearly to all women and men searching for self-confidence, fulfillment and true happiness.

I just want to break this down a little bit from my experience and context, the kind of resilience that Betty had was shaped by her sense of self-efficacy. This self-efficacy, you’ll see when we talk with Vicky, her daughter. This is a belief in one’s ability to influence events that affects one’s life. To affect the events and also to control the way these events are experienced. There’s a thought developed by Albert Bandura in the early 1940s, I mean sorry the early 1990s but I really think that as Betty experienced in her mid-teens the force of the stock market crashed, the Great Depression and the sudden reversals of her parents’ life she had to survive supporting herself and her sisters when very few jobs were available especially for women but Betty devised a plan and she took incremental logical steps to solve her dilemma.

I really see this sense of, this force of self-efficacy. She made a plan and she also took control of her mentality. She didn’t despair. She looked for the positive. I would say largely she was encouraged by this by her father. Women on the other hand were encouraged to become debutants. This family was once one of privilege. They suffered this reversal. Betty came through as the resilient survivor and she started setting about to find ways to practically exist and to thrive and to never forget those lessons that women need to address sustainability of their careers.

I really feel as though this was also reflected in the life of Vicky and as I say she was 12 years old, an incredibly important time for her identity to be validated. This is when her mother Betty took Vicky’s advice and went to visit Hawaii. You can hear the rustling papers because we’re looking at a manuscript here but I’m just going to read you something where Vicky, she started to realize oh my gosh, my mother actually heard the unhappiness in her voice living where they did in Geno and more importantly she listened to it that Betty decided to visit Hawaii and to see what had moved me.

I think that that validation for you Vicky was tremendously important. I think it speaks volumes as to how you develop maybe your sense of self-efficacy, the idea that you could actually influence events. I think in this sense also bring about a new kind of renaissance to your family especially your mother. It must have been a great deal to you. I just feel as though you also go through the book as a kind of life lesson that writing the book allowed you to see in hindsight that you had the mother that was absolutely right for you in your life. I can see how these two forces coalesce at these moments but also when you learn to surf together.

I’m going to give you a tiny biography of Vicky and then we’re going to cut right to our conversation. Vicky Durand graduated from Punahou High School in Hawaii. Already a young surfer, in 1957 she won the Makaha International Surfing Championships. Vicky and her mother were invited to Club Waukee in Lima, Peru as Hawaiian surfing ambassadors. Vicky received her AA from the Fashion Institute of Design and Merchandising in Los Angeles. Her BS from California State University Long Beach. The subject was family and consumer science. She holds an MS from Oregon State University in clothing and textiles with a minor in adult education. Vicky is certified in secondary teaching and special education. Her fashion sense led her to establish a cottage industry in sportswear and textile. Its products were distributed nationwide.

Vicky taught at a title one school in Munai, Hawaii, you’ll help me with the pronunciations and collaborated with community groups there for promotion of education and services. The mother of two grown daughters in and an avid gardener, an animal rescue advocate. Vicky is now married to Bob Liljestrand who manages the Liljestrand House in Honolulu.

Vicky: Liljestrand.

Diane: Thank you. Please come in and help us with our terrible pronunciation. The most beautiful thing was when you answered my email with aloha. Vicky, take it from there in terms of what you’ve heard. Does this resonate with your thoughts?

Vicky: All right. Well you’ve done a magnificent job of introducing my mother and myself. Thank you for giving me the opportunity to share a story. My mother was a woman with guts, curiosity and persistence. She believed that anything exciting was worth trying at least once. She was a real adventurer. Growing up. Are you are you speaking to me?

Diane: I’m right here with you. Thank you very much.

Vicky: All right. When she was growing up at about age three or four her father noticed that she had an amazing manual dexterity. She was very, he bought her a tool chest with all kinds of, she wanted to build things at an early age. I think this bonded to her father who was a mining engineer and a very philosophical man which I think that’s where she developed a lot of her philosophical view on life. She was much closer to her father than her mother. He really nurtured her. She was a sports woman and very competitive and grew up playing basketball, ice skating, roller skating, running through the neighborhood with the boys who were the Dern boys, the grandparents of the actors today and having a just a final time up in Salt Lake.

Diane: I think I feel the resonance in this in the sense that when you were in your teens and kind of running with the surf clubs. I mean you were kind of genetically imprinting a really lovely way to become viable when in fact you were transplant to the area. Even your mother speaks of feeling like an ugly duckling, a tomboy. Those of us who have grown up that way certainly resonate with that but you were also finding your way in a new community and looking for a community and a way of being accepted. Somehow that mimics your ability to use sports as a great connector with people your own age and to gain your own respect and validity through sport. Do you feel as though that contribution was the common thread?

Vicky: Oh yes because when I went to Punahou I had actually been in high school. I had to go back to the eighth grade, mid-year. They were very immature. I was mature. Here I was back with these babies I felt like. They were all a click. They’d been together since kindergarten and they were not accepting of newcomers. I really had some friends in high school, Hawaiian football players and that made me even less popular with the girls. I just went to surfing. We lived in Waikiki and I could walk to Waikiki Beach. I had the world of Waikiki at my fingertips. I love surfing and the people that I surfed with I made friends with and so that was really my life in high school. Then I surfed with my mother.

Diane: Yes, that is where I wanted to enter because I thought this incredible bond that you forged, this ineffable bond really. You talk about it in the book and it’s really something incredible. You could feel together. I’m quoting from the book. “The ocean’s liberating and healing powers it was exhilarating and peaceful at the same time.” you and your mother are on surfboard boards at this moment. “We exchanged houses and chatted about the beautiful surf conditions, my mother’s building project, Fred’s 8th grade science class then we waited, looking out to sea, watching for new mounds of water forming on the horizon, the first sign of incoming waves.” then you experience this almost transcendent experience I would say together of being syncopated in the ride on the wave where your emotions even mimic one another. It kind of gives me goosebumps. You were almost as one intuitively, instinctively reading one another.

Despite this this incredible exhilaration I would say maybe it was one of the times when you were more super connected than you even were on land because I want to venture an idea here. Your mother was by your description a woman of few words. I know that nonverbal communication, the kind that happens between a mother and a daughter, father and a daughter certainly in my life, these were types of communications that almost bond at a deeper level like at a cellular level but in actuality and day-to-day it can be difficult to read a person like Betty who was a woman of few words. She was very stoic. She didn’t admit her vulnerabilities as many in that generation didn’t. You were always kind of decoding and reading the signals, studying her behavior.

I just want to posit the thought that this is what makes you a great writer. Great writers, first of all typically feel themselves to be the outsider at some point in their life. Then you have these great observational skills. When Betty comes in to eventually tell you that she is leaving your father, Ron which was a kind of a lengthy 20-year misfit but traditional for the time. She still subsumed herself for him and worked together with him but you noticed the way Betty came to you to talk that she no longer used her contractions in language. She formalized her words and through that clue you realized her tension that something really imminent was going to be happening. I think you had to dig very deep through some of the layers of her psychology when you wrote the book to try to uncover what was going on with her and what she meant at various stages in her life. I just wonder if that as a process for you. We’ve got about a minute left. We’re going to take a short break after that minute but can you speak to that for a moment?

Vicky: I think that that even made us closer that she would confide in me that she wanted to leave this marriage but asking was it okay with me. That I think was a pivotal moment in our life where a parent would actually ask their child. Well, I was a senior in high school but asked if it was okay to make sure that she could move ahead with that.

Diane: I love that. I think too it’s another experience which gave you an idea of the value of your worth and your feelings. We’re going to take a short break now but when we come back we’re going to find out how Betty, Vicky’s mother rebounded from this and perhaps their tie even became closer. Don’t go away. You won’t want to miss this. We’re on Dropping In.

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Has your manuscript languished because you can’t find the direction it wants to take or have you lost the motivation to finish and polish it for publication because it can be such a big formidable task? Let Diane Dewey help you resolve your writing issues. Diane’s manuscript coaching offers help with sticking points like the arc of your story and how to flesh it out, finding the inner story and what you want to say, developing your message revelations that become your reader’s takeaways, helping to rally the motivation to finish your project and what to do next. We can analyze, edit and advise you on publishing. Who are the next collaborators on your writing path? If you seek resolution to these and other questions please contact Diane Dewey author of the award-winning memoir Fixing the Fates. Find her at trunordmedia.com. That’s T-R-U-N-O-R-D.com or on her author’s page dianedewey.com. Diane can also be found through social media. Connect with her through the links on the show page.

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You are listening to Dropping In with Diane Dewey. We’d love to hear from you if you have a question or comment about the show. Send us an email to ddewey@trunordmedia.com. That’s the letter ddewey@trunordmedia.com. Now back to Dropping In.

Diane: Welcome back everyone. We’re here with Vicky Durand and she is the author of Wave Woman. It’s the life and struggles of a surfer, surfing pioneer, that is her mother, surfing pioneer. You won’t want to miss reading this book. It will fill your senses with the sights and sounds and sense of place in Hawaii, on the beach with surfing as a culture, as a community. Vicky writes in her book Wave Woman. “Mother and I served Waikiki and Makaha together for about seven years. Surfing was not just a sport. It was our lifestyle. Something that brought us together during a precious time in our lives. The ocean’s beauty and feeling of being one with nature gave us a sense of well-being just as important it released us from our quditian lives.”

I want to come back with you Vicky. Your mother consulted you before she left her father. Another remarkable endorsement of both your bond and her belief in you as a person and the importance of your voice to her. After that what happened? Did she experience a rebounding, a rebirth, a renaissance? What would you describe it as?

Vicky: Yes, definitely. She was free from the grasp of my father. She moved. They have bought a beach lot. Makaha has one of the most beautiful beaches in the world. It’s a crescent of sand with the gorgeous mountains and back. They had bought a beach lot. She decided that she was going to claim that. She moved. There was a Quonset, a rusty fishing Quonset next door owned by some lovely Japanese watercress farmers. They used it for fishing on the weekends and she talked them into letting her stay there while she planned and built her own house on the property next door.

She left this two-story house on Royal Hawaiian Avenue in Waikiki and moved out to the country. It was really the country. Mainly just little shacks. It was a farming community and this Quonset had no hot water, no inside bathroom. It was a shower out on the, next to the beach. You had to take a shower in the morning or before the sun came up or in the evening. It was not the most comfortable place. Cooking on a little camp stove but she was just ecstatic. She was over the moon with her new life. Right on the beach she could go surfing every morning while she planned and ordered her house. She was able to after working for 22 years with my father, they were manufacturing jewelers.

She was able to get enough money out which was not an easy task either from him to live and put up this house. She ordered a prefab house from Washington and did all the work on everything that she could do herself. She had somebody…

Diane: That’s the remarkable part to me. I mean an extraordinary part that your mother, she was so hands on. I feel like when you talk about this deliberation it’s almost like she shed like a shell or a skin, something. In some ways it’s very metaphorical that you came back to originally this very simple Quonset hut and then had the, by the way the book is laden with wonderful photographs of the house that Betty built, completed, the prefab house. The beaches themselves, there’s diagrams of waves and how they break. There are maps. There are beautiful photographs of Betty, Vicky’s mom immersed in the water I would say in her element.

I really feel as though this idea of this minimalism somehow Betty had this in her kind of all along. It feels like it came out. She was writing haiku. You talk about her haiku, her poems that and they’re interspersed throughout the book, the actual poems which are just lovely but it’s almost the space between the lines that does the talking much like Betty herself. There’s this sense of being very, very practical and yet somehow being guided by a kind of a, I don’t know, spiritual dimension. She kind of let this stillness kind of propel her and this instinct towards what she was gravitating towards.

I really love this passage that Betty lived by and you’ve got it in the book. “You are today where your thoughts have brought you. You will be tomorrow where your thoughts have taken you.” I just wonder growing up as the daughter of someone like this. Did it seem extraordinary at the time or how was it for you? Is it just seemed normal or how was it?

Vicky: Yes. It just seemed normal. I felt lucky but writing the book, I mean I knew I wanted to spend the last years with her. I actually came back to Hawaii and was able to spend her last 20 years out of Makaha with her. I knew that was special. Then as I wrote the book I just and even today as I’m doing now, it just continues to make me feel such a sense of gratitude for the life that we had and the times together and the relationship.

Everybody loved her. All my high school friends that would come out, there were just a few actually that served. They said oh, I wish our mother will, we want your mother for our mother. She really was loved by everybody because she was a great listener. Backing up a little bit, moving out to Makaha leaving a comfortable life with an income to nothing basically. She knew she had a career that she could fall back on but it reminds us that we don’t have to live a life that we’re not happy with, that we do have the energy we can tap, our unrealized energy and potential and move on beyond what we think. She never had any limiting beliefs. She just thought whatever she wanted to do she could do.

Diane: It seemed especially after she moved out of the shadow of your dad she really as you say realized these unrealized abilities that maybe are latent in all of us. That’s why it’s so empowering to read this book. I think that anyone who wants to get an extra jolt of self-confidence and building this sense of yes, I know the way I want to go will just really benefit from reading Wave Woman.

I also think you just touched on something I found equally remarkable is that your mother was very understated. She was not self-proclaiming she was really a person who was a listener. She gave deeply of her attention to other people. Maybe this was something for you growing up, I know you were quite close and intuitively connected. I wonder she invited people to the house. She was had a gravitational pull to people. Your friends loved her and voted her their best mom, wanted her to be mom. I wondered did it feel ever, did you ever feel, I guess maybe when you were surfing you reclaimed all of, you say you reclaimed the attention of everything that had been missing when your mother was preoccupied before but you lived in a house with lots of people growing up. I mean from this point on when Betty had the welcome mat out. How was that and did it force your sense of identity to achieve more and to win this time yourself?

Vicky: It was great. Before the house we actually had more fun out there camping out. We made a big fire every night. Our friends came over. We sat around the fire and we actually had more fun before the house but I loved it. The people that I’ve talked to we all feel like it was just a really wonderful time in our life and most everybody says we would love to go back to that point.

Diane: I would say if you want to share in that experience read Wave Woman because you’ll get all the smells, the food, the scents, all of the sounds of the water and the waves crashing, this camaraderie and sense of belonging that you felt then. I also just love this idea that as you reflect you have this unfolding appreciation and what a wonderful process that is to continue to learn about yourself, learn about your mother and realize the hidden gifts in your life because as they go on in the present sometimes we think oh this is it. This is my normal.

How do you, with Betty it seemed as though she always looked at this kind of upside, this bright side, this optimistic side. I wondered did you feel that that was key to her success because somehow she interpreted things. How was that?

Vicky: As one door closed she opened another and reinvented herself. My husband tells me that. You were really reinventing yourself this time. I think that’s the key to living a healthy, happy life is you just keep reinventing yourself. You don’t get stagnant and you move on. When you can’t do something you figure out something that you can do. That’s what she did.

Diane: When you were going through your own experiences did you did her voice come into your head that way to kind of urge you that way?

Vicky: I think not that I was aware of but I must have been aware of it because I’ve had a real life that’s been a circuitous journey. So I think so. I think without really, now I’m starting to see some of the parallels.

Diane: You’re connecting the dots.

Vicky: Yes. One other thing I think is she saw the best in herself which gave her the tools to see the best and everyone else. That’s what people really loved about her.

Diane: I think that somehow very unabashed for a woman you weren’t supposed to feel especially proud or do you know what I mean? There was a sense that women were somehow they were meant to hide their light under a barrel or something so to me that’s almost revolutionary that she saw the best in herself.

Vicky: Yes and I think the physical strength leading to the mental strength. She had so much belief in herself that it was just accomplished. She had a feeling of accomplishment.

Diane: Sometimes that comes strictly, I mean sorry it sounds kind of I don’t know, pedestrian but sometimes it really does come from the physical body. We’ve had conversations on this show with Andre Dubus who started fighting and boxing as a teenager before he became a best-selling author. He talked about the fact that he didn’t have any sense of himself before he gained physical strength, started training, started having discipline, started having a sense of purpose to work towards.

I think here was Betty. She set out these goals for herself to achieve a personal best and wow, it really just transferred into her sense of self and what was possible in life really in a kind of inspirational way. I suppose it’s much more inspirational now in hindsight but it just is extraordinarily inspirational to read about. I wondered for you there was a sense, I mean we’re talking in glowing terms and Betty was deserving of them but I also feel as though there was a system of rewards. Maybe this was more typical growing up back in the 50s and 60s and 70s but you had to go to I think the trip to Lima for example. You had to accomplish another goal. You had to swim a certain distance to get a certain thing. You had to achieve things to get another thing. Maybe this was Betty’s way of saying well this is what works with for me. Why don’t you try it? You’ll feel really great about yourself too but I wondered did you share the sense that the system of rewards was a positive thing? Was it positive for you as a girl growing up?

Vicky: Yes it was. When I won the Makaha Surfing Championship in 1957. I was a junior in high school. I got some attention. It didn’t get the attention that it gets today but it really, people knew who I was. That kind of boosted me up and finally people knew who I was at school. That sort of ended my problems there. I think yes that was a reward. Not many women surfed. There was only I think one, my friend Kehau. She surfed and she took third I think in the contest but I got the press in the newspaper. The boys all saw it, the boys all knew and it made me feel, gave me a good sense of myself.

Diane: Stand back. Vicky has arrived. That was the end of your invisibility, the end of that completely. We’re going to take another short break here but when we come back from the break we’re going to talk about people who really were visible who gathered around your mother’s table. Some names that we know and people that she knew as acquaintances. Barack Obama, who signed a copy of his book and inscribed it to her. Don’t go away. We’re going to come back with famous and unfamous people who formed a community of surfers in Makaha Hawaii. This is Dropping In.

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Has your manuscript languished because you can’t find the direction it wants to take or have you lost the motivation to finish and polish it for publication because it can be such a big formidable task? Let Diane Dewey help you resolve your writing issues. Diane’s manuscript coaching offers help with sticking points like the arc of your story and how to flesh it out, finding the inner story and what you want to say, developing your message revelations that become your reader’s takeaways, helping to rally the motivation to finish your project and what to do next. We can analyze, edit and advise you on publishing. Who are the next collaborators on your writing path? If you seek resolution to these and other questions please contact Diane Dewey author of the award-winning memoir Fixing the Fates. Find her at trunordmedia.com. That’s T-R-U-N-O-R-D.com or on her author’s page dianedewey.com. Diane can also be found through social media. Connect with her through the links on the show page.

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You are listening to Dropping In with Diane Dewey. We’d love to hear from you if you have a question or comment about the show. Send us an email to ddewey@trunordmedia.com. That’s the letter ddewey@trunordmedia.com. Now back to Dropping In.

Diane: Welcome back everyone. We’re here with Vicky Durand, author of Wave Woman. It’s to come out next month from Spark Press. It’s the story of her mother who was a pioneer surfer and also a kind of gregarious egalitarian, a person who welcomed everyone to her table. Vicky, welcome back and talk to us a little bit about the illuminati, the special people that kind of showed up, dropped in at your house when your mom got on her own and really built her life.

Vicky: There was a time in Hawaii and in Waikiki very unlike today when it was mainly famous people, heads of countries, actors, actresses came to Hawaii. We had first met a very notable Peruvian and he was instrumental in our trip eventually. I mean his father and his grandfather was president of Peru. We surfed with notables Jim Arness and Buzzy Trent, Fred Van Dyke, Peter Cole. These were all the big surfers of the day which have gone down in history.

It was just a very exciting time when we went to Peru. It was just this club Waikiki in Lima was only the rich and famous of Peru belonged to this club. It was just such an amazing awakening for me as an 18 year old to be down there rubbing shoulders with all these amazing people. They are also so welcoming and so gregarious and so loving actually. They loved mother. We had a lifetime continuing friendship with them, with all of them actually. It was a very, very special time. Then we surfed with non-famous people too but it was such a great time.

Diane: I can hear it in your voice even recalling it now. It just kind of makes you have a big inner smile but sports, surfing it’s a great equalizer. Barriers just to dissolve. People from all stripe can compete whether you’re young old, rich, poor. I love that your mother took this up at 41. How mind-boggling is that? Those of us that are tempted to write ourselves off at various decades. It’s never too late.

Vicky: Never too late to pursue a dream.

Diane: There you go. I think too you’re talking about a kind of a heyday. You talk about the surf clubs and really they sound like great arenas of camaraderie and warmth and hospitality. Do these still exist any longer? I’m just not sure. It’s not a world I’m familiar with. Can you open the door a little bit?

Vicky: I don’t think they’re alive and well in Waikiki. Not in the where we were. I think that’s history Waikiki is. Further down around Ala Moana there is a group of people that surf but I don’t think. I think there’s so many people. There were only 2000 people when we surfed. It was just the renaissance of when surfing was coming back after it died out during ancient Hawaii. My mother had a lot of insight. She said Vicky, this sport is going to be really big. She said you need to keep notes because someday you’re going to want to write about it.

Diane: She was prescient.

Vicky: She would and I think what 26 million people around the world consider themselves to be surfers. It’s like oh my gosh.

Diane: What’s not to like about escaping to the sense of both focus and escape that it offers. You get out of your usual environment, get in the world. There’s really a lot of allure to it. We’ve talked about being almost nomadic on this show too. I think once it was follow the sun and these kinds of cultural icons came into our imagination but you were really, with 2000 people you really were pioneering.

I want to point out that you do a very good job of honoring the indigenous population in your book talking about guides and people that really helped you. Also some of the spiritual values of the indigenous peoples and also obviously there’s a kind of a lovely wash over you about learning how to read the tides, read the waves, read the sun, the winds, all of the elements in nature that I think were probably instrumental in their world views. You’ve let us into that. Is that still an influence in your life and was it always there?

Vicky: Growing up well Makaha and Waianae, a very local area. Growing up with the Hawaiians I think was just a wonderful experience. I still have many Hawaiian friends. A few of them are still alive at Makaha and it’s really wonderful to go back out and connect with them. Very special. Another thing about surfing is that you exert yourself in you do something physical and you push yourself. Your body releases the mix of hormones which make you really, it’s an action reward action cycle. You just feel wow, I did it. You make little breakthroughs and you just end up feeling healthier and happier. It fills your courage and willingness to push yourself even further. It’s a very rewarding sport or it was a rewarding sport. I just wish I could still do it. We all do.

Diane: I know. We’re living vicariously through you in Wave Woman. Believe me, the ecstasy that you described but right now also you’re talking about it in terms of the endorphin rush and also the physical viability that sense of building on yourself with many breakthroughs and play, the sense of play to me. We have a world that really values work. This need to play to become someone to even the sense of creating playfully like potting and gardening and surfing where you’re employing more of your physicality to become viable and also to balance out the hours that we spend in front of computers to become kind of well-rounded.

Your mother, there was a description of her from one of her friends in the book at the end about how she had a kind of lightness, a kind of a shamanistic lightness to her. I wondered if that was derived even because she spent a fair amount of time and energy developing her play, her passions to play.

Vicky: The woman that actually she was the daughter of the people that owned the Quonset. She did a reflection in the book when they would get to Makaha, the first thing she would do is run over and see what mother was doing. I’ve lately reconnected with all of the four Sumita children that are adults now. They just had such wonderful memories of mother when they would go out there for weekends. There’s a great reflection by Barbara Sumita who just recently passed away unfortunately but it’s in the book. I think that gives a really good insight to the sense of play and what she was accomplishing.

Diane: I really think it connects beautifully into the culture which valued nature so much and kind of goes back into an ancient feeling and a very present feeling, a very modern day feeling. I just think wow, there’s so many dimensions to it and fortunately you sacrificed none of it in your book Wave Woman. You delved into the many layers both historical, geographical, personal. These roots that have now walked back on and have uncovered your own memories.

We had a chance to speak and I just want people to know. The subtext, the subtitle of your book The Life and Struggles of a Surfing Pioneer. I look at this and I love that the word struggles is included. Maybe that’s a modern take. Maybe that’s a more holistic take because I know that Betty herself sort of stayed on the light side, the bright side, the optimistic side. You’ve actually talked about communicating some of her sorrows, some of her outlets for those sorrows which were physical rather than verbal. I wondered how that shaped, you have two daughters, two grown daughters who have children of their own. Did it shape? How did it shape ideas about keeping a stiff upper lip or certainly not indulging in sorrow but expressing it perhaps? Has that evolved in your family?

Vicky: Oh I see. That’s a tough one right now. Let me think. I think so. I think my daughters both have not much to be sorrowful about. They’ve e sort of risen to a level at the present time. Life is I think a series of struggles. You don’t have at one point you’re going to end up with it at another point but I think they’ve both been fairly struggle free from what I can tell now. I’ve had some struggles but move on. Did I answer it?

Diane: Absolutely you did. You absolutely did. We’re going to reframe that as challenges that you rose to. Thank you Vicky Durand. The book is Wave Woman: The Life and Struggles of a Surfing Pioneer. Wavewomanbook.com is Vicky Durand’s website. You can also get the book at gosparkspress.com. Facebook Vicky Durand. Instagram Wave Woman Book. Twitter @womanwave. The publication date is April 2020. Aloha Vicky and be well. Thank you.

Thank you so much for dropping in. please join Diane Dewey again next Friday at 8 AM Pacific Time and 11 AM Eastern Time on the Voice America Variety Channel. We’ll see you then.