Mark Sedlak
Our friend Mark Sedlak passed away on May 2nd 2024 due to complications associated with a history of heart disease. He was 75 years old.
Mark was born in 1948 to his American soldier father and his English mother after the Second World War. His father, Jerry, was one of the first soldiers to liberate the Auschwitz Concentration Camp in Poland. When Mark was an infant, the family moved to the United States and his parents divorced while they were living in California. Mark and his dad moved to Hawaii in 1956 when his father was offered a three- month gig playing with a band at the Royal Hawaiian Hotel. They ended up staying in Hawaii for the next thirty years.
Being the only child of a roving jazz musician, Mark had to grow up quickly and was mostly on his own given the late-night working hours his father’s nocturnal profession required. Mark pretty much grew up raising himself, which in retrospect wasn’t really that unusual an experience for kids growing up in a resort town like Waikiki with parents in the entertainment business. I remember Mark years later recalling how he would stop at the local beach side diner on his way to school, starting at around the third grade, to have a breakfast of a cup of coffee and a doughnut. He was an 8-year-old sharing the diner’s counter with hotel workers, chain smoking Beauticians on their way to work, and a crowd of carousers from the night before having breakfast before heading home.
Mark’s playground was Waikiki Beach where he became well known as the red haired, freckled faced haole kid to many of the legendary Waikiki beach boys of the 50’s and 60’s, including Blue Makua and Rabbit Kekai for those familiar with modern Waikiki lore. Mark would often say that growing up in Waikiki was like growing up at the carnival. Where places like Santa Barbara have their annual Fiesta for a few days each year, every day was like a fiesta in Waikiki. It was in Waikiki that Mark fell in love with surfing, which became the passion of his life.
Mark was very bright and excelled in school, which was quite an amazing feat given the fact he had very little parental supervision or encouragement from his father. At the time he was ready to enter high school, he decided that rather than continuing his education in the scholastically inferior Hawaiian public school system that existed at that time, he would pursue getting into private school. As a teenager on his own, he applied for and secured a scholarship to the prestigious Punahou School in Honolulu, also the Alma mater of Barack Obama and many other dignitaries. Mark was motivated to go to a good college and felt this would be the best way for him to gain admission.
He attended Punahou for two years where he excelled. Sadly, his Punahou education was cut short when Mark’s father could not find work and decided to relocate to Puerto Rico. While in Puerto Rico, Mark also started competing in surf contests, winning almost every contest he entered. The notoriety he gained that year in Puerto Rico was also being noticed by the mid-sixties surfing world in Hawaii. While in Puerto Rico, Mark found he had an aptitude for learning foreign languages and studied Spanish all though high school and college, becoming quite fluent.
After returning to Hawaii in 1966, Mark graduated with honors from Kalani High School in 1967. He became a familiar figure in the surfing competition scene, along with notable surfers like Gerry Lopez, Reno Abelirra and Clyde Aikau. In 1972 and 1973, Mark took first place titles in the very prestigious “Makaha International Surfing Competition”. He was also a member of the first team for the newly established “International Professional Surfers” tour, along with his childhood friend Jimmy Blears who was the winner of the first World Surfing Title in 1976.
For the next few years Mark traveled the world competing in locations like Brazil, South Africa, France and Australia to name a few. He was featured in Surfer magazine as an up-and-coming surf star and was influential in the development a new short board called the “Triplane” by Hobie Alter and also the revolutionary “Twinfin” with his friend and surfboard maker Randy Rarick. Although Mark had many successes on the pro tour, notably beating out Cheyne Horan in a contest in Brazil, back in the seventies a Pro surfer couldn’t really make a living at surfing. Thus, Mark pursued his academic career and eventually received a Bachelor’s degree in Hotel Management from the University of Miami.
After college Mark worked in the Hotel business in Waikiki for a few years, but realized that working indoors all day and climbing the corporate ladder was not for him. Instead, he decided to take a job on a Tahiti bound cruise liner as a waiter/bartender that allowed him to travel and surf the beautiful and uncrowded waves of the South Pacific. When the airlines were mandated by the FAA to hire male airline stewards in the early 1970’s, Mark quickly applied and spent several years working as a steward. With routes to Europe and international destinations, this job helped fulfill his adventurous nature. He would often say these were the happiest years of his life.
Among Mark’s friends, which were many around the world, he was considered one of the funniest people they ever knew. He had a wonderfully self-deprecating “Dangerfield-esqe” sense of humor, but also with a style all his own. You could find him regaling a dozen people or more at a party or bar with humorous stories of his life, or just about what happened to him that day to uproarious laughter from the crowd. I remember traveling on surf trips to Central American countries with him and was very impressed by his ability to have the same effect on a Spanish speaking audience by telling his stories in Spanish. In later years people inquiring about Mark would often remark about how much he had made them laugh.
Mark moved from Florida to Carpinteria, California in 1993 to live with friends from Hawaii on a ranch near Rincon Point, where he particularly enjoyed surfing the long point break waves of the California Coast. He had many varied jobs in the Santa Barbara area, then worked as a Federal Customs Inspector at the L. A. Airport for several years. Mark retired in 2002 to care for his elderly father in Santa Barbara, who died a few years later at the age 90.
After living in Mexico for a few years Mark returned to Santa Barbara due to declining health and mobility problems. He spent the last few years of his life living quite a reclusive and solitary life at the Saint Vincent Garden Housing in Santa Barbara. He made very clear to the people that cared about him that he preferred to close out his journey on the planet that way.
Mark was never comfortable with Happy Birthday wishes or any other displays of affection bestowed upon him, maybe because it wasn’t something expressed to him by his family as a child. I believe, however, that if he could make you laugh, it was like getting the hugs he never got as a kid. For those who knew Mark and want to honor his memory, let’s all remember the times he made us laugh and at the same time give him a final good bye hug!
No memorial service is planned at this time.