Jack Macpherson

John Duncan "Jack" Macpherson III (October 20, 1937 - November 16, 2006) was a former mailman and bartender at London's West End in La Jolla, California. According to his Los Angeles Times obituary, he was a local legend who acquired "a permanent niche in the history of Southern California beach culture".

Macpherson was born in La Jolla, the oldest of two children of an orthopedic surgeon who was also serving in the United States Navy; the family moved to Hawaii, where Dr. Macpherson was stationed and where as a four-year-old, Jack witnessed the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor. The family returned to the States on a Dutch freighter, and Jack and his sister Jill grew up in La Jolla, and later moved to the neighborhood near the local beach "Wind'n Sea", where the best surfing conditions on the California coast still prevail.At that time, however, this was virtually the only place in the mainland United States where surfing was done at all.

One of his sister's boyfriends taught Jack to surf at the age of eleven, and after graduating from La Jolla High (where he also ran track). To his parents' dismay, he started hanging out at the beach, with a number of surfers, including Robert Norris Rakestraw (December 8, 1940 - September 21, 1996), commonly known as Bob, and to his friends as "Meda", after a word he used as a swear word. Soon Jack (or "Jack Mac", as his fellow surfers called him) and Bob became fast friends to the extent that they were almost always seen together and would enter the scene to the cries of "Here comes Mac and Meda; they're a walking destruction company."

In the 1960s Macpherson and Rakestraw brought together their friends, acquaintances, and hangers-on into a loose organization they called the Mac Meda Destruction Company, described as "a beer for demolition crew". The group was featured in Tom Wolfe's 1968 book The Pump House Gang. Wolfe described them as going "Ooooo-eeee-Mee-dah! They chant this chant, Mee-dah, in a real fakey deep voice, and it really bugs people. They don't know what the hell it is. It is the cry of the Mac Meda Destruction Company. The Mac Meda Destruction Company is ... an underground society that started in La Jolla three years ago. Nobody can remember exactly how; they have arguments about it. Anyhow, it is mainly something to bug people with and organize huge beer orgies with." The group also managed to get Wolfe to be recognized in London, England in the mid-1960s at the Indica Gallery by sending them a note which read, 'Put this in your window, and Tom Wolfe will come and see you.' (How they ever heard about the gallery is believed to be a mystery.)

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