Jack Macpherson

Who was Jack Macpherson?

John Duncan "Jack" Macpherson III was a former mailman and bartender at London's West End in La Jolla, California. According to his Los Angeles Times obituary, he was a local legend who acquired "a permanent niche in the history of Southern California beach culture".

Macpherson was born in La Jolla, the oldest of two children of an orthopedic surgeon who was also serving in the United States Navy; the family moved to Hawaii, where Dr. Macpherson was stationed and where as a four year old, Jack witnessed the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor. The family returned to the States on a Dutch freighter, and Jack and his sister Jill grew up in La Jolla, and later moved to the neighborhood near the local beach "Wind'n Sea", where the best surfing conditions on the California coast still prevail.At that time, however, this was virtually the only place in the mainland United States where surfing was done at all.

One of his sister's boyfriends taught Jack to surf at the age of eleven, and after graduating from La Jolla High. To his parents' dismay, he started hanging out at the beach, with a number of surfers, including Robert Norris Rakestraw, commonly known as Bob, and to his friends as "Meda", after a word he used as a swear word. Soon Jack and Bob became fast friends to the extent that they were almost always seen together and would enter the scene to the cries of "Here comes Mac and Meda; they're a walking destruction company."