Gangbusters, Heard in Surfing but From the Streets

Hello, you have A Way with Words.

Hello, Grant Martha. This is Martin Hoffman. I’m calling from atop Mount Helix in San Diego County.

How are you guys doing?

Oh, yeah, I think I see you waving. How’s it going?

Hello down there. It’s good. How are you guys?

All right. All right. What’s on your mind?

Okay, so I’ll try to keep this brief.

But so I grew up here in a small, wonderful little beach town of Point Loma in San Diego, just above Garbage Beach.

And I started surfing probably about the age of nine or ten.

And admittedly, I was one of those atypical StoCal surfer dudes who believed that the more surf slang I could stuff into a sentence, the more genuine and authentic of a surfer I believed I was.

Not quite as bad as Spicoli, but I was certainly up there.

You were not at Spicoli, huh?

So that’s how it takes.

All right.

So what did nine-year-old you sound like?

Oh, dude, the A-frames are just frothing out there.

Grant was boosting sonar today.

Oh, I had a feeling you guys might ask me to do that.

I love it.

Sure.

But, you know, honestly, I could probably talk to you guys for hours for just the litany of slang and terms in the surf.

World. I mean, even how, you know, between different regions of the U.S. Where I’ve traveled,

They use different words to essentially say the same thing. But in the interest of time,

There is one term that I heard a while back. I’ve never heard it outside of the surf community. And

Even within the surf community, you don’t hear it too much. And the term is gangbusters. And I can

Give you some context if you’d like yeah so 1992 I was about 12 years old my best surf bro Mike

Carvalho and I went to go see Bruce Brown’s The Endless Summer Too and for anyone that doesn’t

Know that’s basically, you know, two guys that want to chase summer surf around the globe

Go into the different hemispheres and what was kind of interesting about Bruce Brown the filmmaker

Was he would narrate over the entire film.

And so early on in one of the scenes,

They’re at a surf spot in Costa Rica called Ollie’s Point,

And the surf is just perfect.

There’s nobody out.

And Bruce Brown says it was just gangbusters out there.

And that just stuck with me.

And like I said, I’d never heard it,

And I’m just kind of wondering,

At what point did gangbusters become a positive thing,

And has this really been used in different areas?

And just overall, if there was any kind of background, you could get me on that term.

Do you feel like gangbusters is part of surf lingo or just larger lingo and slang in general?

That’s a good question, Graham, because like I said, I hadn’t heard it before watching The Endless Summer 2.

And to be honest, Bruce Brown was a legend of the surf community within the surf community.

Of course. Absolutely.

Yeah. So I’ve always thought it to be just a surf term.

But, you know, like I said, I’ve never heard it anywhere else.

Those two films are classics, even to people outside the surfing world.

We know a lot about the term gangbusters, and we actually know where it comes from and how it became popular.

So at the very beginning of the history of the word gangbusters, it was literally about busting up gangs.

Gangs meaning criminals, people who, criminal gangs, people who break the law.

And it was about cops as early as like 1904.

Cops would, gangs would form in big cities like Boston and New York and Chicago.

And cops would get this reputation as the guy to go to, to get in there and do what needed to be done,

To bust heads and, you know, disrupt these operations and destroy the, you know, the structure of these organizations.

It wasn’t just about catching the guys, but it was busting up their distribution methods and destroying their know-how and destroying their facilities and all of that.

So if you busted a gang, you really got a reputation and you rose in the ranks.

And so you will find mentions as early as the 1920s of people like Lieutenant Jeremiah David of the New York Police Department as the gangbuster of the Madison Street Precinct in the Lower East Side of Manhattan.

And in the 1930s, Captain Williams, in the same precinct, was given the same moniker.

And so legends like that gave rise to popular culture.

So there was a 1931 movie called The Gangbuster about a man who gets tangled up in a gang war when he tries to rescue the kidnapped woman that he’s in love with.

So these real-life police officers show up in fiction as these larger-than-life characters.

And in 1935, a radio show called, no, it wasn’t called that.

It was called G-Men, it appeared.

And it featured FBI cases, real FBI cases from the FBI’s point of view.

It was very sympathetic to the FBI with lots of earnest drama and loud sound effects as the opener.

We’re talking screeching police whistles, wailing police sirens, a loud echoing announcer, Tommy guns, and all this stuff.

The opening kind of changed over the years.

But it was always very loud.

And a year later, the show was very successful,

And it was renamed Gangbusters

Because most of what happened in the dramas

From these FBI files was busting up these criminal gangs.

And the show was a hit that lasted, I think, about 20 years,

Both in radio and television.

And it coined the phrase,

Coming on like gangbusters,

Because when the show came on the air,

It was so loud.

The whistles and the sirens and the atomic guns.

Right.

It literally came on and it just caught your attention or startled you.

So it referred to somebody who came on strong personally, like they were demanding or aggressive

Or pushy.

And interestingly, a lot of the early print uses of coming online gangbusters appear in

Black newspapers.

And a lot of the early uses have to do with going full force or playing really well in

Jazz, like going all out while you’re in the jazz clubs, you know, late at night and just

Like giving it your all.

So eventually, though, of course, that term strips down and becomes just anything could

Be like gangbusters, meaning by comparison or for emphasis for anything that’s exceptional

Or unusual.

And this leads us to Endless Summer 2, where we’re talking about amazing waves, right?

These gnarly serfs, they’re gangbusters that are just astonishing and exceptional for their kind, right?

They’re gangbusters.

That means they are just loud and big and aggressive.

They’re very demanding of your skill.

Yeah, that makes a lot of sense.

And I love the jazz reference as well.

I can definitely hear someone saying, oh, man, he was just going gangbusters last night at the club.

Right, yeah.

Yeah, so I love the fact that it’s these two subcultures, two American subcultures, kind of both of them respecting talent.

Both of them are very much, I think, about not hierarchy so much like, do you have the chops?

That’s all I care about, right?

Surfing and jazz are all about the chops.

And they’re also, even if you don’t have the chop, there’s a culture, it tends to be a culture of respect.

People will give you a chance to show your chops and let you grow if you don’t yet have them.

They’ll teach and lead and guide and help you get to where you need to go.

I think there’s mostly a culture in jazz and surf of bringing people along, right?

Bringing the groms up so that they can find their feet.

Absolutely.

I was definitely one of those little grommets.

I love it.

Wonderful.

Well, I appreciate you guys taking the time and letting me know all that.

That’s really cool.

I’ll keep using the term, but I might broaden my use outside of surfing.

Yeah, you’ve got to come back to some more of that surf stuff, Martin.

Anytime.

I would love to.

All right, you guys.

Thank you so much for your time.

We really love to do it.

Keep at it.

Bye-bye.

Take care, Martin.

Bye-bye.

All right.

You too.

Bye-bye.

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