Wee Man’s Chronic adventure
Wee fun
Jason Acuña has always had a gift for fun.
He was born 36 years ago in Pisa, Italy, where his father was stationed in the Army. The family moved to the South Bay when he was three months old. In the beginning, George Acuña was worried about his son. He thought life would be difficult for “a little person.” But from a very early age, Acuña noticed that his son possessed an extraordinarily happy disposition, and that wherever he went, he seemed to bring happiness with him.
Wee Man samples the product. Photo by Blake Peterson
“He’s the happiest person around, and everyone is happy when they see him,” Acuña said. “It’s been that way his whole life. It didn’t matter where we went, or where I took him, he has always been the center of attention. Everybody wants to be there with him. Ever since he was small, we’d go to the park and everybody would want to be around him – the kids would just come running. We’d go to a family gathering, and everybody would say, ‘Where is Jason? Where is Jason?’ Everybody wanted to see him. So he is used to it.”
Jason’s physical stature never daunted him. It was just never an issue. One time, his mother took him to a little person’s convention. He hung out and checked out the scene, but he wasn’t impressed. Everybody seemed to “bitch and complain” about being small.
“I was like, ‘Okay, what are we doing here? Just because everyone is little?’” he recalled. “I was like, ‘Mom, I don’t need to go to these things. I like hanging out with my friends, who like to do everything I do.’”
And there was nothing he liked to do more than skateboard.
“He had a little Huffy bike, but he really enjoyed the skateboard,” his father said. “He’s always been on wheels.”
Jason remembers vividly the day his mother gave him a skateboard. He was eight or nine, and he immediately headed for the Strand.
“It felt like full freedom, you know, no motor, just me skating down the beach,” he said. “Man, it was fun.”
Peterson was nine years old when he first met Wee Man, who was only five at the time. They lived across from one another on the 5th Street walk street in Hermosa. Peterson remembers asking his father why Jason was smaller than the other kids. His father replied that some people are just born little. It was last time it was an issue in the course of friendship that has now lasted three decades.
“Small guy, big mouth,” Peterson said. “Just awesome. From then on, he was just a normal guy. Well, he is like a normal person, but he’s not really your normal guy – he’s an incredible amount of fun and he has the most energy of anybody I’ve ever seen. He is always on the go, always doing something, never sitting around…24/7 fun.”
“I was born with this disposition,” said Wee Man, spreading his arms wide. “I don’t think I could have any other disposition going on. I don’t worry about anything – size, color, anything. We all live, you know what I mean? It’s just living.”
He eventually attended Torrance North High School, where he met Chuck Rich, aka Heavy Metal Chuck. They skated every spare moment of every day.
“Back then if we could we’d skate all day,” Heavy Metal Chuck said. “Like on weekends, it was like we would skate 12 hours, all day long…come home, go to bed, wake back up and go skating. He lived in North Torrance, over by El Camino, and we’d meet up by 9 or 10 a.m. over by the Galleria, skate to Hermosa, Redondo, all day long, some days all the way to Venice…’til 10 o’clock at night.”
They hung out at ET Surf in Hermosa so much that finally they were offered jobs.
“To work at our favorite skate shop? Sure. That’s not hard to do,” Heavy Metal Chuck recalled.
ET Surf founder Eddie Talbot saw something special in Wee Man. He remembers Wee Man running up and down the shop’s counters and just having a blast every time he came to work.
“He was always the most colorful, nicest, most easygoing guy, and he was the sweetest guy with the kids – just a gem with the kids,” Talbot said. “Him and Chuck, his sidekick, they were quite a team. Jason was a great example for the kids, because he was always up, always happy.”
Wee Man worked at the shop – as well as at Von’s Grocery on Pier Ave. – for a few years. It was in the early 1990s, the heyday for the local skate scene. World Industries, headed by skate legend Steve Rocco and headquartered in El Segundo, became the biggest manufacturer of skateboards in the world. It was at the company warehouse in Torrance, in fact, where Acuña received his name. Every time he would come to the warehouse with his ET Surf crew to pick up product, Rocco’s brother, Sal, heralded his arrival with: “Wee Man is here! Wee Man is here!”
The name stuck.
“It worked from day one,” Wee Man said.
Skating had pretty much become his life. He had come to realize that he had a special skill for it, as well.
“But I thought with my ‘disposition’ I wouldn’t take it as far as an average kid could take it,” he said. “But I think it did, in the long run, help me, because I was doing what the big guys were doing with this, so then it went even further and people recognized me more. It’s like, when you see Brad Pitt walking down the street, you kind of question if you see him. You see me walking down the street, you could see – that’s me, man! So it’s a benefit. It’s a blessing.”