THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Sunday, August 20, 1995 TAG: 9508180157
SECTION: VIRGINIA BEACH BEACON PAGE: 07 EDITION: FINAL
SOURCE: Bill Reed
LENGTH: Medium: 75 lines
A salty original passed into Beach history last week when Robert B. ``Cap'n Bob'' Holland died at the age of 93.
He was ``the last of the kahunas,'' insists R.L. Kent Hinnant, son and heir to one of the founders of the existing Virginia Beach Life Saving Service.
And Kent is a guy who ought to know a kahuna when he sees one. His father ``Dusty'' Hinnant was one himself, a beach legend in his own time.
Holland took his place up there with Hinnant and Beach icons like John Smith, Babe Braithwait, Hugh Kitchin and others who, as young men, brought the art of surfing to Virginia Beach and passed it down to their sons, grandsons and great grandsons.
Their photographs still hang on the walls of Beach restaurants and bars. Mainly they are seen as sinewy, sun-tanned young men standing before cumbersome, 9-foot surf boards, or surrounded by a bevy of attractive young women wearing '30s and '40s vintage bathing suits.
These men set the tone for the resort community of their day and their influence lingers on in their offspring and the young men and women who grew up in their shadows.
Today their beach antecedents can be seen riding the breakers near Rudee Inlet, at Croatan or - where the real action is - at Hatteras.
The kahunas, almost all of them gone now, adopted the sport from Florida beaches in the '40s and '50s, where it had been transplanted from California. Californians, in turn, adopted it from Hawaii. Hawaiians, legend has it, adopted it from natives of other tiny neighboring islands that speckle the South Pacific. It was there that the sea-borne activity was considered a rite of passage into manhood and a quasi-religious experience that connected practitioners to the gods of the ocean.
Like other Virginia Beach legends, Holland loomed large in the city's formative history, putting his own rough-hewn stamp on its working, recreational and social lives.
``A Beach original,'' said Pete Smith, a Beach original and famed surfer in his own right. ``He was a great guy - I've known him all my life.''
Smith remembers Holland as a gruff, yet affable man who lived life on his own terms, whether he was guiding merchant ships into Hampton Roads, riding a long board through the surf until he was 74 or engaging in heavy-handed banter with friends at a local gym.
``When I had the surf shop (on Pacific Avenue), he would come in, tell a bawdy joke, pull out a pint of Beefeaters and offer me a swig,'' Smith recalls. ``I'd have to turn him down, because it was usually in the morning.''
A harbor pilot for 58 years for the Virginia Pilot Association, Holland won a medal from the U.S. Treasury Department for rescuing a shipmate from drowning on a blustery February day in 1944.
He later donated the medal to the Life-Saving Museum of Virginia, which sits on the Oceanfront at 24th Street. At a reception in his honor in December 1990, Holland offered up a typical display of humor in recalling his heroic deed.
After he dove into the frigid Atlantic and secured his comrade with a line, fellow pilots began pulling in the victim.
``Of course I don't have sense enough to hold on while they're pulling him in,'' Holland said. ``And they were so excited about pulling him in that they forgot all about me. They left my fanny overboard.''
Of course, he was retrieved and lived to a ripe and exuberant old age, and Pete Smith conjures up a wry, yet sentimental picture of the old gentleman, since his passing into the great beyond.
``He's up there somewhere now,'' Smith mused, ``riding those great waves in the sky.'' ILLUSTRATION: Photo by KRYS STEFANSKY
Robert B. ``Cap'n Bob'' Holland was a harbor pilot for 58 years, won
a medal for rescuing a shipmate and rode a long board through the
surf until he was 74.
by CNB