By Dick Sutphen

On average, Tara and I now offer from two to five seminars a year in Malibu, California—our home town. Seminar attendees often ask questions about the community and want us to supply tourist information. The Web search engines can connect you with many Malibu sites—from local hotels and businesses to online real-estate tours.

Here, I will provide some background and share photographs and the kind of information you probably won't find on the Web. As we take new photos, we'll be posting them on this site.

From Dume Cove, looking up the coast to Westward Beach.

At age 19, while attending Art Center School in Los Angeles, I discovered Malibu, California—a casual community stretching 27 miles along Pacific Coast Highway—the Santa Monica Mountains one side of the road, the shimmering Pacific Ocean on the other. The beaches of the seaside community became a favorite weekend getaway when my roommates and I weren't overloaded with homework. At the time, I decided the weather, beauty, serenity and live-and-let-live attitude made this the ideal place to live.

After Art Center, career moves took me back to the midwest for a few years, then to Scottsdale, Arizona until 1981 when I returned to Malibu to stay.

The palm trees, sand, surf, sun and bikini bathing-suit image of Malibu, probably goes back to all the 1950s beach movies, which helped to make it such a famous place. Not that that this isn't an accurate image, but the community amounts to so much more. Sure, Zuma Beach is probably the most famous beach in the world. If it's hot, crowds will line the sand and overhead, seagulls will wheel and dive. On adjoining Westward Beach you'll often run into a sea lion basking on the shore. If you don't like the crowds, up the coast there are many hidden little public beaches.

Surfing, of course, is the official local sport, although not many of the local adults participate. Any day, rain or shine, up and down the coast, you can observe hundreds of surfers bobbing off shore, waiting for the "big one." Surfrider's Beach, just west of the Malibu Pier, is said to be the only California Beach reserved for the exclusive use of surfers.

Malibu Pier on Pacific Coast Highway.

Surfers at Malibu Beach.

Click HERE
for Part 2 of
“Our Malibu”