Kim Turtenwald Hopes to Capture the Longest-Beard Title Again in San Juan Capistrano : Wishful Whiskers

Kim Turtenwald is the hairiest man there is. At least he has a plaque saying so, awarded last year at the Hairiest Man Contest held in San Juan Capistrano as part of the city’s festivities surrounding the fabled return of the swallows each March.

He won for having the “longest existing beard,” which is pretty much saying he’s the hairiest of the hairiest, given that the other categories are namby-pamby things such as “best-groomed.”

He will be competing again at the event this year, which will be held Wednesday evening at the town’s El Adobe restaurant. It’s a new locale, the source of commotion in January when the San Juan Capistrano Fiesta Assn. moved the contest from its traditional digs at the neighboring Swallow’s Inn, where hair pretty much grows on the walls.

He hopes there will be more competition this time, since his beard went uncontested in its category last year.

The event has been going on in one location or another since the early 1800s, always in conjunction with the swallows’ return, which occurred Sunday this year, though just what relationship there is between the birds and the beards is lost in time.

No swallow has ever tried to nest in Turtenwald’s thicket, though it has suffered its share of other indignities. Indeed, the main reason he entered the contest, he said, is “being in California, I don’t get much outside validation on having a long beard. I thought this would be one safe arena for me to have a beard without facing any criticism or stereotypes.”

The 38-year-old is an instructional assistant at Carr Junior High in Santa Ana, where we spoke during his lunch break last Thursday. It’s one of the places where he gets grief for his looks.

“Since I work with junior high school children and they have a culture that doesn’t really have people with long beards, they’re always saying, ‘When are you going to shave that thing off?’ and ‘You look terrible with that thing on, Mr. T.’ . . . So I get a lot of tearing down. And even in my family of origin, there’s not much approval,” he said.

The world seems to conspire against a beard. Turtenwald keeps news clippings on businesses that discriminate against bearded employees, and, particularly, has no great love for Disneyland’s anti-facial-hair strictures.

He griped, “Now don’t you think it would be much more effective if somebody who looked like me dressed in a pirate outfit was helping people into those boats rather than some blond-haired girl with brown polyester pants?”

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He hasn’t measured his beard, nor has the Hairiest Man contest, which judges by looks. It looks to be at least 16 1/2 feet shorter than the Guinness Book of World Records honoree, Norwegian Hans Langseth, who left behind a 17 1/2-foot beard when he died in 1927.

Turtenwald says a long beard has its advantages. “When you’re cleaning the dishes, it’s a great scouring pad. I’ve done a lot of motorcycle riding, and it helps keep me warm, along with being the motorcycle image. And the longer my beard is, the less of a chance there is that people are going to ask to borrow money from me,” he said.

Indeed, when out driving with his family last year, his children spotted a bus-bench charity advertisement.

“It had this tired-looking old guy with a beard eating Thanksgiving dinner and my 5-year-old son declared, ‘Daddy, it looks like you!’ I said, ‘Nick, I don’t think that was a compliment,’ ” Turtenwald said.

Susan, his wife of 12 years, would prefer he wore his beard shorter, and she sometimes gets catty comments about it from other women. Still other women--strangers--sometimes come up to him in public places and ask if they can touch it.

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Does his beard trawl through his soup? Does it get caught in heavy machinery? Does it impair driving?

Well, when he rides his Harley Sportster the beard flares out to look like Yosemite Sam’s, an effect he likes. On the occasions he’s ridden motorcycles with windshields, he finds there’s a vacuum effect that does throw his beard up in his face. Fortunately, he doesn’t like motorcycles with windshields.

“And if I eat pizza, I have to cut it in very slender strips. Otherwise I end up wearing it in my beard. That’s trouble. I suppose it’s possible that in the old days, Moses sometimes had to be told that he had a speck of manna in a section of his beard,” Turtenwald said.

He has as many reasons for having his beard as he has hairs. He’s worn one since he was 18, to make up for a very thin and young-looking face. He always kept it short until 1991. Along with all his humorous reasons for the decision are some deeper ones.

“I’m an Old Age man,” he said. “I’m not a New Age man, and I have a strong identification with some men in the Bible, who valued holiness in their thoughts and their actions. And they had beards.”

Over the years, he’s had a curious range of interests, the most innocent of which were collecting old lap steel guitars, vintage lawn mowers and newspaper clippings of odd human doings.

A few of the headlines he has saved in his garage include: “Convict Blames Cambridge Diet.” “Man Shoots Dog, Self, at Pulpit.” “Student Vote Asks for Suicide Pills in Event of Nuclear War.”

He also used to collect experiences.

“I’m an armchair social cultural anthropologist. I think people are fascinating. I’ve spied on or visited a number of fringe groups, be it the John Birch Society bookstore or the Hari Krishna Temple in Venice Beach, or outlaw biker hangouts, unusual churches. I’ve been interested in how other people live and think and what their different values are,” he said.

Always, though, he’d been an outsider looking in, with a sense of professional detachment. Meanwhile, his own life was nothing to envy, he said, with his penchant for self-destructive habits and relationships. He prefers to not go into specifics. “Let’s just say I no longer have the need to carry firearms with me everywhere I go,” he said with a laugh.

To him, his beard is “a type of celebration that I have a new life since the Lord has changed it. It was a big surrender and a big fight. The fight was the leading-up to the surrender, like trying to do things alone without help or support. And then it was like ‘I give up! I’m going to be dead soon. I need help. I give up.’ ”

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These days he plays bass in a church band and invests “my time in my family and my relationship with my wife.”

He thinks his beard does carry disadvantages, including probably limiting any prospects of making inroads in the corporate world. “There are always consequences to being an individual. But there may be some companies out there with older values. Like, I may have a chance to get a job at In-N-Out Burgers because claim they do things the old-fashioned way,” he joked.

He’s found justifications for his beard in everything from Robert Bly’s “Iron John” to Leviticus, where he cites instructions from God not to shave, quipping that King Gillette probably had a lot to answer for at the gates of heaven.

Around the country, he says, “I’ve seen longer beards than mine, but I’m not telling them about this contest. I’m really hoping to win again.” If he doesn’t, he’ll “pour on the Bandini and try again next year. I’m looking for all the validation I can get.”

He finds its greatest validation and greatest use is in the home.

“My children (boys aged 5 and 8) have never seen me without my beard, so they see it as part of me,” he said. “So when they’re on my lap, they have their hands in my beard while they’re talking to me. It’s just something for them to hold onto, like a handle. Sometimes they take it and pull it if they want me to look at something. They just take it for granted. I like that.”