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Surf Icon Gidget Loses Home in Palisades Fire

Originally posted on SURFER | By Dashel Pierson | Last updated Jan 14, 2025 12:29 PM ET

As a pioneer of early California surfing, a young highschooler named Kathy “Gidget” Kohner began riding waves at Malibu’s Surfrider Beach in the mid-to-late 1950s. Even more so, then, the scene at Malibu was a boy’s club – legendary longboarders like Miki Dora, Terry “Tubesteak” Tracy, Dale Velzy, and others ruled the lineup. Yet Kohner pushed forward, forging a path for future female surfers.

When she came home from surfing, Kohner regaled her parents with tales from the day – and those became a novel, Gidget, penned by her father Fredrick Kohner, which later snowballed into a pop culture phenomenon with more books, movies, TV shows, comics, and theatrical productions.

Today, Kohner (now Kohner Zuckerman) still resides in coastal Los Angeles County, although like many others, she recently lost her home in the devastating Palisades Fire.

“At my age, imagine it: The house is gone, the neighborhood is gone, the community is gone,” she told the Los Angeles Times. “But the diamond in the rough is that the Duke’s family and the surfing community have all rallied around. I am so appreciative.”

Duke’s in Malibu, the surf-themed restaurant named after Duke Kahanamoku, is still intact despite the widespread destruction in the surrounding area. Kohner Zuckerman had previously worked as an “Ambassador of Aloha” at the eatery, in which she chitchatted with patrons, talked story about her heydays in the Malibu surf, and permeated an air of “aloha” throughout the joint. And once they reopen after the fires settle down, they’ve offered Kohner Zuckerman her gig back.

“With all these calls, I have reentered a world that I left a long time ago,” Kohner Zuckerman said about the surf world support, “and that community has been just incredible to me.”

For more on the real Gidget, here’s an excerpt from Matt Warshaw’s Encyclopedia of Surfing:

“Kohner, a five-foot, 95-pound 10th grader, began surfing at Malibu in the summer of 1956 and became, in her words, the ‘group mascot’ to Terry ‘Tubesteak’ Tracy, Kemp Aaberg, and another half-dozen Malibu regulars who in large part set the tone for California surfing. It was Tracy who said that Kohner looked like a girl-midget—a ‘Gidget.’ Kohner spent her summer days learning to surf and trying her best to fit in with the Malibu crew (in part by distributing a bottomless supply of homemade sandwiches), then went home and relayed all to her parents in long, gushing teen-speak soliloquies. It was her idea to do a book about her new Malibu beach life; her father took on the project in early 1957, and in just six weeks wrote Gidget, his first novel.”

To learn more about how to help with the Los Angeles fires, head here.

This article first appeared on SURFER and was syndicated with permission.

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