Hey Roger please keep us up to date on this story. I believe there’s something for all of us here. You are doing something really special and I think we all are waiting to hear about the boards.
Don’t let an indivdual with no Aloha, get you down. I wish he just stayed out of this.
Aloha, Harry
Roger and Kirk,
I am truly sorry about your friend. The older we get the more we see of this type of thing.
Wood Ogre. If I may be so pretentious as to thank you for your service to our country. Mike
!
o
This is a design/build forum. There are better places for a sympathetic ear.
o
tom surfed and built surfboards, so it is related to this forum. a lot less related stuff has been posted here over the years. this really doesn't have to do with who served when or where (thank you for those of you whom have served our crountry) but about a fellow surfer AND board builder that in his decling health was taken advantage of, lost everything and was found wandering the streets far, far from home unaware of what was going on or had happened. could happen to any of us. a lesson to us all.
Prony, the Lance Carson is an 8’2" square tail. I have e-mailed LC about the board and am awaiting da info.
KP,
Fin stash is safe and sound in a secret location. All 52 fins have been labeled and sorted according to length, rake, and foil. Some of them have tremendous flex. Tommy Trim sure knew how to foil fins. I plan on testing out a few dozen.
Thats cool , I think Paul Gross foiled alot of those fins.
There are concept fins in this collection that are quite amazing.
I’ll take some photos and post here in the near future.
My F off to the Ogre was uncalled for and I apologize. I honor you for your service and have often wondered how the line up was effected by my deferrment. That was a long time ago and there were lots of things that happened then, that we would do different today!
Roger
Tom has been moved into a facility that is specifically for dementia patients. Jimmy the Saint transported him in his own car Friday evening so he would not have to stay over the weekend in the place pictured above where they kept him drugged so he wound not wonder. It was not a locked facility…so for anyone that is ambulatory(able to walk), they keep them looped.
What a difference a few days makes. He just lit up when he saw us and was trying to tell me he thought he could still do that…what he was trying to say was surfing…He wants me to take him…so I told him he needed to get strong and we would go when the water warms up…
So we started walking the halls and he kept mumbleing about the girls. It is a large place, impeccably clean, and lots of pretty nurses. It seemed like they all know him and my guess is has been flirting with most of them. He can be stareing vacantly one minute and the next he has caught sight of a nurse and is all smiles. He seems to come in and out of cognition…but overall does not seem stressed. When Jimmy brought him in Friday, the nurse took him off to the shower…when he came back with a huge grin…he told Jimmy that he liked her…then upgraded to " I love her"
He is still skinny at about 130 pounds…but is eating well. This is a vast improvement over the 99 pounds he weighed upon his return from Thailand, accompinied by two dectectives and a nurse, which was about one month ago.
Late 60’ and into the 70’s Tom did some college, got into Real Estate, and I think he continued surfing, unlike myself who never transitioned to the short boards. We really did not see each other much during those yeasr…but he did help me buy my frist house in San Pedro in 1975. A few years later we bought an apt building together and around that time, Tom’s daughter was born…same year my 2nd son was born(1982…)Geez…I lost some years along the way.
Our investment together got screwed up somehow and there was lots of wrangling…and bad feelings and legal threats and finally a sale. By then, Tom and wife had realized that their daughter was severly disabled. Sometime after that a divorce.
The thing that always led to reconcilliation was surfing. Tom encouraged me to get a board and in 1983 I bought a Becker(longboard) and rode my first wave(since maybe 1969 or 70) at Santa Rosalilita in Baja, Hooked immediiately and shortly thereafter Tom encouraged me to get a Liddle…I still lived in Pedro…Tom in Redondo…and I would see him at Malibu whenever I went up there…
He was an absolute finatic with his boards…He got into riding the Liddle hulls and longboards. He would spend hours fiddeling with the fins…refoiling…one fin behind the other…all kinds of tinkering. Paul Gross and him hooked up and Tom was basically the test pilot along with Paul. They set out to build the best Malibu longboard and judging from what I saw, Tom sat the deepest at first point, and many might agree, that he rode the place better than anyone. It always amused me that Tom would not wax the nose of his boards…for some reason nose riding was a no-no…although from what I saw in the 60’s in Hermosa…he could nose ride with ease. Ask Dane Peterson or Josh Farborough or Dylan Jones about Tommy Trim…He was an influence of all of them.
I moved out of Pedro in 1989…in the Santa Monicas and Malibu was nearly a daily event for me. BTW it was Tom who told me about the place I moved to…
In 1993…he finally go me on a Paul Gross…9-4 I think and I got the hull addiction and had Paul build me a lot of boards and Tom would tune them for me…He would take a board and start to paddle out and often he would take a few strokes and come back and say you have the wrong size fin in the board…maybe change it from a 91/2 inch to 9 or ? It might take him a half hour or more and he would move the fin around and the last adjustment could be the width of a razor blade…but I swear the boards would be so dialed…He was an idiot savant on this stuff…
But…when you went up to the car with him to get a fin or a screw driver…after locking the car…he would obsess over locking the doors…might check them 4 or 5 times…start to walk away and then go back to check again!!
We would laugh and tease…but he could not help himself…Obsessive with the fins…with the locks…
Hasta Luego…gonna see if I can get a wave before I go see Tom…
This pic from Sept. 2009…Palos Verdes Cove…relaxing on a beautiful day on the Mayors bench…A few days later we got Tom to paddle out at Malibu…it was the last time he was on a surfboard…he was showing many signs of the dementia at this time…
Frick! This is real life. Your a good man, Roger. I knew it the first time you asked me if I wanted a ride down to the beach and confirmed later with the kid thing. Sorry about your friend, boys. He couldn’t ask for better friends. I wonder if he knows how lucky he is. I had an old guy tell me once, " If you have 3 or 4 REAL friends in your life, your lucky." So true. mike
Howzit Roger,My hat goes off to you for being such a good friend to Tom. I know how it is to try to deal with someone with dementia especially when it comes and goes like his is. Take care and I hope he has more lucid moments when you visit him. Aloha,Kokua
The issues surrounding Tom’s daughter’s disablilty were many and dealings with the ex strained during the early 90’s. Tom’s anger with the ex…seemed over the top to me and eventually interferred with his visitations with the little girl. Some of his energy and obsessiveness was beginning to be channeled into building a better cane for blind people. He spent countless hours refineing these handles and went through the process of getting his creation patented. After a while he realized that all handles on tools were not right and hoped that his handle would some day be used on many different tools and devices for the disabled. He may have been correct about this, but he was reluctant to share it for fear of some company stealing his designs. I dont think he ever had a computer and he spent hundreds of hours in librarys scribbleing notes and making copies etc. When I look at tools today, many of them seem to have a very similar handles to what Tom had made in the early 90’s…People would advise him about how to get it out there …but it never went anywhere, although he had received great feedback from some blind people who tried out his canes…all the while surfing Malibu religiously and with a few stints at Bolsa Chica mixed in. Every few years he would swear off Malibu for one reason or another…but he would always come back…It was around this time that Tom made his first board. I cant remember if I ever rode it but, he said it was the best longboard he ever had…until he had a gutter rack failure on the 405 and it ended up in two pieces…He kept it for some reason and it was taped together in the truck where I found the other 10 boards…
Tom was very sensitive(thin skinned)…and I remember a cat at Malibu coming up to me and asking what was wrong with Tom…Tom had gotten mad about something and would not talk to him or even let him know why he was mad. This was a guy who had become close to Tom…I let him know that I understood his frustration as Tom had done the same with me at various times and we were not alone in this regard…
Tom and Woodzy top photo would do battle in the lineup
Tom’s dear friend Saf bottom pic
i first met tom back in late 80's when he ventured out at my regular spot. at the time it was a friend and myself(on liddles) and here comes some guy in from the top, trimming alnog on a clean 4' wall. when he went by i noticed his board looked a lot like a liddle. the three of us traded off flawless point waves with nobody else out, for a couple of hours. at some point during the surf i approached tom and asked him if his board was a liddle. nope. something similar though. it was a very bladed out paul gross, about 9 foot in length (as i recall) round tail.what was really unique was the two, lined up single flex fin set up he was using. something he and PG had been working on.
a few years later pg and spence had a surfshop together called our blue planet, where they specialized in hulls-short and long, and longboard spoons and hulled semi-guns.tom was there a lot chatting it up, getting new boards from PG etc. got to know him fairly well back then-and proneman at that time as well. good people for sure....
Two of the handles,(prototypes I suppose) that I mentioned above…made out of balsa…
Yea, Matt those were really good times. I always wondered when and how you met Tom. Saw Tom yesterday and he was good, but he was talking about going home…and we had to tell him that it was" Doctor’s Orders" that he stay where he is for now…He is getting stronger and walking good and has a great appetite…but his prospects for ever going home are dim.
roger
My first experience with Tommy was in the early 80s through our mutual and dearly departed friend, John Medici. Tommy would leave the line up whenever the tide changed to either re-foil or change the fin. He carried many different fins in his car, and would change or alter the fin many times throughout the day. Way too anal for me. We would argue about the best time to surf Malibu; dawn patrol’s off shores and glass or the afternoon’s rippled perfection. One thing was clear, he knew all about hulls and flex fins. I would hear Liddle and KP tell stories about Ranchland surf trips and Tommy would be more concerned about his car keys than the surf. The early signs of Dementia? Could be.
Thanks Rogelio for getting things done. You’re an angel and a true friend to Sr. Cimino.