As many of you know, Santa Cruz shaper, shop owner, and all around great guy, Mike Locatelli died two weeks ago after a 15 year battle with brain cancer. Ben Marcus wrote a super nice tribute on surfermag website- here it is:
A TRIBUTE
To a Local Hero
Mike Locatelli: 1960 – 2007 by
Ben Marcus
SurferMag.com Correspondent
Michael Angelo Locatelli
Mike Locatelli wasn’t the quietest, but he moved on quietly on February 21, finally succumbing after many many hard years to a brain tumor that slowly took away his life, his livelihood and his loves.
Mike Locatelli’s slow demise was proof positive that sometimes life just isn’t fair. What happened to Mike over the last 17 years was the kind of slow punishment that Saddam Hussein deserved – or Enron executives – but not Mike. He remains the best of guys in the hearts and minds of everyone he left behind – including the hundreds of people who came to Santa Cruz over the weekend of February 24 – 25 to say goodbye at Resurrection Catholic Church in Aptos on Saturday, and then under Tom Blake’s “Blessed Church of the Open Sky” for a paddle out at Santa Maria on Sunday.
I knew Mike since the 70s in Santa Cruz, where we both grew up during a lucky time under that Blessed Church of the Open Sky, when Santa Cruz was just a cool, little hippie surf town. Santa Cruz was the Murder Capital of the World at that time, but also a beautiful, inexpensive, quiet place to live. Mike was one of seemingly hundreds of Locatellis who had been in Santa Cruz forever, one of the many founding families who came there to fish, cut logs, make a life.
I took Mike surfing for the first time, and the memory is a memory of Santa Cruz at its best. We came from Seventh Avenue, which is now called mid-town. Our path took us along the Santa Cruz Boardwalk which at the time was lined with real Hell’s Angels hanging out along Beach Street, and also funky town men and women from Oakland with full afros, listening to the O’Jay’s, Ohio Players, Earth, Wind and Fire and a lot of 70s super funk that makes rap pale in comparison.
Mike had grown up in Santa Cruz and I was from the Valley and we all rode surf matts at Twin Lakes Beach before moving up to hard boards. I had a purple, eight foot Haut gun-like thing that I loved. Mike and I were riding our bikes along the Boardwalk, wearing our Animal Skin and Seal Suit wetsuits, when a black couple walking by said: “You all goin’ surfin’ man?” and “Skin tight, man!”
Skin tight, man. Mike and I said that to each other for years.
I pushed Mike into his first wave at Cowell’s and I have a very vivid memory of Mike surfacing in time to take my Haut across the back of his head. He got better from there. He was a good surfer, and was part of many many many hundreds and thousands of hours of surf sessions around Pleasure Point and at the Harbor and Rivermouth, during those lucky years.
I have a lot of other memories of Mike. He was a dedicated baseball player who loved the game. Santa Cruz is a rabid softball town in the summer and during the 80s, I had a concession stand at Delaveaga Baseball Park, where Mike played with a lot of other Santa Cruz surfer/athletes.
On one field there was a three home run rule which made the fourth home run an automatic out. Mike came up in a heated game against a team I have forgotten – I think he was playing for Hurry Back Inn. There were already three home runs and the score was tight. Mike got up to the plate, looked at the first pitch, yelled “Fuck it!” as he swung and jacked it out of the park.
My hero.
Locatelli was blessed/cursed with that Italian work ethic I have seen in Doug Palladini and others. Out of high school Mike shaped boards under the Loco label and took over Portola Surf Shop. There he developed what I came to call the “feeding frenzy school of retail.” Mike would pack his shop so full of goods that when you walked in, you went a little hysterical and had to buy something.
This worked even better when Mike went to work for O’Neill’s Surf Shop on 41st. The shop on 41st was just like that and still is: Packed to every corner with wetsuits, surfboards, clothes and other goods. People come in and buy buy buy.
Mike surfed and played baseball until the tumor took those skills away, and then he fished. Mike had barked about Montana for years and years and years and I finally got up there to join Mike and Rich Metiver on the Big Hole River in Montana. I snapped one of Mike’s fly rods on that trip, but the real tragedy is that is where we were when we heard Jay Moriarity had died. That hit Mike hard, as he had mentored Jay as a grom and a surf shop employee and a sponsored surfer. Mike said Jay was a nice guy before and after his rise (fall) to fame, and Jay was one of the best employees he ever had.
Mike mentored a lot of young Santa Cruz kids, taught them how to work and walk a straight line and there are a lot of Santa Cruz kids who took the straight and narrow under Loco’s withering gaze.
Around 2000 Mike was no longer able to work at O’Neills because he wasn’t moving so well, so he went home. The San Francisco Giants and fishing were his two passions alongside his wife Nancy and daughter Olivia.
I wasn’t going up to Santa Cruz very often – because it was no longer that place of Hells Angels and Funky Town and Seal Suits when Mike and I were teenagers. But when I did go up there I would stop by and see Mike and talk about the Giants and shoot the shit.
It killed me to see him slowly becoming more and more disabled, and I thought of all those days we surfed Rivermouth and the Harbor and Pleasure Point and of him jacking that third out, out of Delaveaga baseball park.
Mikey was a stud, and what happened to him just wasn’t fair. I saw him once when he was no longer able to walk, and it was hard to talk to him and see him so disabled. Then I heard he could no longer talk, and I thought about what it must be like to be paralyzed, unable to do anything but think.
I was not surprised when I got an email from Josh Shorrock at ONeill’s saying Mike had finally passed on. By that time, it was merciful. I drove up to Santa Cruz last weekend to attend the funeral, which was sad, but also good in that it brought together a lot of people from that special 70s era who hadn’t seen each other in a while.
We all agreed we were lucky to have grown up in Santa Cruz during the era of single fins and Animal Skins and surf movies at the Santa Cruz Civic.
And we also agreed that Mike lived so long because he was a tough, stubborn bird, and that his ailment was in some ways a testament to his character.
And if Mike was tough, his wife Nancy was even tougher, weathering the spiritual, physical and financial toll of all those years, all those surgeries, the slow fading away.
If there is a heaven, hopefully it is Santa Cruz in the 70s, or maybe a trout stream in Montana, or a little bit of both.