SAN CLEMENTE, Calif. — Terry Tracy, who as an easygoing, fun-loving surfer helped inspired the “Gidget” movies and television series and helped make surfing an international sport — in the process becoming the embodiment of the cool alternative lifestyle of sunglasses-wearing beach bums — died last week at his home. He was 77.
The cause was complications of diabetes, said his wife, Phyllis.
Uninterested in a 9-to-5 routine, Tracy quit his job at his family’s savings and loan in the mid-1950s and built a shack on Malibu Beach.
One day, a 15-year-old girl just over 5 feet tall named Katherine Kohner wandered up to Tracy while he was living on the beach. Soon he gave her the nickname “Gidget,” a hybrid of “girl” and “midget.”
Kohner’s stories inspired her father, screenwriter Frederick Kohner, to write a novel, “Gidget: The Little Girl With Big Ideas” (1957). It was a sensation and led to more books, a photo spread in Life magazine, a 1959 movie starring Sandra Dee and a television series in the mid-1960s with Sally Field in the title role. In the movie, a character called the Big Kahuna, played by Cliff Robertson, was based on Tracy.
Kohner, now Katherine Zuckerman, who works greeting customers at a beach eatery, said Tracy “personified the Big Kahuna’s mellow style and his love of the ocean.”
Steve Pezman, publisher of The Surfer’s Journal, said: “His surfing was competent, but it wasn’t his surfing that made him distinctive. It was his personality.”
Though his beach-bum image stayed with him, Tracy lived on the beach in Malibu for only two summers, until the authorities tore his shack down.
He met Phyllis French when he was surfing on Hermosa Beach and living back at his grandparents’ home. They were married in 1957 and had seven children.
Tracy was paid to surf as an extra in the original “Gidget” movie. He worked in surf shops and appeared in surf-related commercials — including, in later years, one for Nike.
But unable to make a career in the surfing industry, he turned to driving a truck delivering food to restaurants.
“He unintentionally launched a new era, where the sport became commercial,” Pezman said. “In later years, he became a spokesman for a simpler time past, and now he is gone too.”
