The History of Surfing

by Warshaw, Matt

  Other wave-riders filled the sport with humor, and prurience, and a few more surfing lifestyle essentials. Blake, however, embodied the idea that a surfing life could provide relief and comfort to those who felt broken. Further, he saw this particular form of sheltering as a virtue. “I found the water good,” Blake said, “better than the land I was cut off from. Water supports a rebel, if he has the will and ability to swim.”

  Surfers would pull as much utility from this Blake-defined notion as they would from the hollow board, or the fin, or the surf photo.

  No Depression Here: Surfing in the 1930s

  The Depression did good things for surfing in America. Being poor on the beach in Southern California was a lot better than being poor in the Nebraska plains or on a New York street corner—or anywhere else in the country, for that matter. Surfers were already familiar with living on the cheap: they made their own trunks and surfboards, pulled lobsters and abalone from the sea, gathered wood for their own fires, and could build an evening’s entertainment around a ukulele, a guitar, and a passed-around bottle of jug wine. Riding waves didn’t make up for being jobless or underemployed, but it was a nice way to pass the time if you were. With a long curl-beating ride to the beach, the surfer could still find grace moments, just as he had during an era of prosperity.

  In California, and to a lesser degree Hawaii, beaches and lineups during the Depression were commanded by down-at-the-heels journeymen like Tom Blake, who sold his swimming medals and cups to pay for meals. Another was the hulking surfer-paddleboarder Gene “Tarzan” Smith, who during the 1930s lived on and off in a cave he excavated in a sandstone cliff near Corona del Mar. On weekend nights, Smith, a binge drinker and predatory brawler, would roll his only suit and a pair of old dress shoes into a piece of oilskin, paddle across Newport Harbor to the enormous Rendezvous Ballroom, change next to a nearby boathouse, dance and drink and bust a few heads, then roll the suit back up and make the return journey across the harbor to his cave. Smith became famous among surfers for his otherworldly paddling stamina. In 1940 he paddled from Oahu to Kauai, a seventy-mile, thirty-hour journey, on a board outfitted with a compass, flashlight holder, hunting knife, and pneumatic pillow. Over the last few miles, Smith hallucinated that he was stroking down Hollywood Boulevard. Sixty-five years passed before another paddler made the crossing.

  The masses—or at least those living along the coast—were being encouraged to surf like never before. Popular Mechanics and Popular Science both ran build-it-yourself surfboard articles, with blueprints and cutaway diagrams, launching thousands of woodshop projects. Bodysurfing was already a national craze in Australia and catching on fast in America. In 1931, The Art of Wave Riding—a short paperback primer by bodysurfing expert and former UCLA track-and-field star Ron Drummond—explained the difference between “sand busters” and “glide waves” and gave detailed advice on everything from wave-ducking techniques to the tricky somersault takeoff. Articles on surfing always introduced it as a “new” sport while noting its growing popularity. “At the California beaches there are schoolboys who easily rival the best Hawaiian experts in the thrilling sport of surfboard riding,” Popular Science announced, clearly hoping to inspire eager young builders to replicate the beautiful 11-foot laminated plank shown at the bottom of the page.

  Meanwhile, beachgoing in general not only blossomed but was egalitarian to a degree found in almost no other public setting. The beach and the surf were free; a swimsuit and towel were the only two required accessories. The suntan—once viewed as a mark of the laboring classes, and thus fought with the aid of parasols, veils, wide-brimmed hats, tents, and pavilions—became a fashion statement, thanks to bronzed celebrities like Coco Chanel and Charles Atlas. “A white unsunned body,” British author D. H. Lawrence noted, should now be considered “unhealthy, and fishy.” Tanned skin, of course, was a different thing altogether from dark skin, and Depression-era American beaches, either by city ordinance or general understanding, remained segregated by race.

  VOGUE, 1938.

  WESTWAYS, 1945.

  Surfing did its part for social leveling, too, but also maintained an image as a plaything for the rich and famous. A great many surfing newcomers in the 1920s and 1930s were wealthy tourists vacationing in Waikiki. Duke Kahanamoku, throughout his long and forgettable L.A.-based film career, often went to the beach to surf and socialize with his Hollywood cohorts. With four-color printing, surf photography further raised the sport’s glamour level. Previously, black-and-white surf photos were sometimes hand-tinted, but now wave-riding appeared in all its multihued glory, with oceanic blues and greens, warm redwood-plank browns, and sharp color bursts from all the new swimsuits. A glistening 1938 Vogue cover, shot from above, featured a beachboy in floral-pattern trunks and his redheaded tandem partner launching a ride at Waikiki. For Dole Pineapple’s long-running print ad campaign, the canned fruit in the foreground always disappeared into a perfect Hawaiian tableaux of surfers and waves, sunshine and clear blue skies.

  The beachfront got sexier. Latex-blend fabrics snapped their way into department stores, and the thick, wrinkled, perpetually damp woolen bathing costume of the 1920s was replaced by the elasticized body-hugging swimsuit of the 1930s. The women’s two-piece was introduced, and swimsuit material continued its merry disappearing act as it retreated up the thigh and across the back, and gave way down the chest inch by plunging inch. The surfboard became a fashion accessory. “Paddleboard models” were arranged like lifesize dolls before a row of Blake-style hollow boards at Southern California beach festivals. A 1932 Physical Culture cover illustration showed a woman riding a board in an ecstatic head-back, arms-up, finger-splayed pose that, in any other context, would have required a brown paper wrapper.

  Surfing’s enormous gender gap narrowed during the 1930s—a tiny bit. The default setting for women beach-goers was to be ornamental rather than active, and those who counted themselves as “surfers” were often lightly bedewed tandem partners carefully steered through the lineup by proud boyfriends. Still, women found the new hollow surfboards easier to handle than the solid-wood planks. The new swimsuits also helped, since they trimmed off the water-absorbing collars and leggings and pantaloons that had nearly dragged previous generations of American female surf-bathers to the ocean floor.

  Furthermore, there was no real stigma, at least not like there would be in the future, for a woman to pick up a board and ride on her own. Mary Ann Hawkins, one of America’s best junior division middle-distance swimmers, became the teenaged queen of California surfing during the Depression. Hawkins won paddling events, rode alongside Duke Kahanamoku, stunt-doubled for Bathing Beauty star Esther Williams, hosted well-attended surfer soirees at her parents’ house, and later married Bud Morrissey, one of the state’s best surfers. A series of photographs in a 1938 issue of Life showed Hawkins walking smartly down the beach with her board, paddling out, and gliding back to shore with a radiant smile.

  Australians Join the Club

  Surfing pioneer work was underway during the 1930s in Lima, Durban, Rio, and a few other coastal cities. But the surf world remained for the most part tri-cornered—practiced in Australia, Hawaii, and California by less than three thousand people total—and each region was separated from the others by layers of cultural and geographic insulation. More than 7,500 miles of Pacific Ocean separated Los Angeles and Sydney without a single wire, cable, or satellite connecting the two. Over the previous thirty-five years, maybe a dozen surfers had circulated between California and Hawaii. Even fewer went from Australia to Hawaii, or vice versa, and surf travel between California and Australia didn’t exist. Occasionally a bit of surf news, in a magazine article or newsreel short, went international, and the hollow board was common to all three regions. Then there was Duke Kahanamoku, the living King of Kings, known and admired by wave-riders everywhere. Beyond that, not much crossed over from one surf region to the next.

  Australia during the Depression was truly a surfing land unto
itself. World War I had brought horrific carnage to this young gung-ho nation—resulting in 60,000 dead and 170,000 wounded Australian soldiers, out of a total population of 5 million—and inspired a long war-related political slugfest. In the postwar years it seemed like the entire country went to the beach for healing and reconciliation. On a hot summer weekend afternoon, Sydneyites by the tens of thousands drove their flivvers to Manly and Bondi and the rest of the sand-fronted suburbs to take a dip, sunbathe, and parade across the new amusement-lined boardwalks and piers. A few hundred miles north, a lush strip of coast in South Queensland, anchored by the Surfer’s Paradise Hotel, was being promoted as Australia’s version of Waikiki.

  MARY ANN HAWKINS, PALOS VERDES COVE.

  SURFOPLANE RIDERS, SYDNEY, LATE 1930s.

  Duke Kahanamoku had left his sugar pine surfboard behind after his visit in 1915, and replica boards quickly turned up on Sydney beaches from Cronulla to Avoca. With each year, though, Duke’s performances, and his guide to proper technique and form, receded in memory, and the locals pretty much invented their own version of the sport. Australia’s east coast beaches were filled with quick, steep, fast-curling “dump” waves. Riding here wasn’t anything like Waikiki, where gently-sloped breakers nearly guaranteed a smooth entry. A long, heavy board paddled into a Sydney shorebreak dumper by a typically overeager novice was likely to tip to one side or nosedive into a shuddering full-stop “pearl.” During takeoff, the Australian surfer learned to pivot his board 90 degrees, parallel to the crest and at right angles to his body, and then plunge down to the trough—sometimes at one with the curl—like a human seaplane. Once safely ahead of the whitewater, the board was quickly rotated back to the standard nose-forward position, and the surfer would jump to his feet and carry on toward shore. “We just reckoned that two feet of sideways board was easier to handle on the dump than nine feet of board straight on,” one of the top Aussie surfers of the time recalled. If the wave had a suitable shoulder, a top rider might cautiously put his board on an angle, just as they did in California and Hawaii—“cornering,” as the local blokes called it.

  Bodysurfing was practiced in Australia by nearly everyone but the infirm and elderly, and wave-riding expanded with the 1930s introduction of two homegrown products, the wave ski and the Surfoplane. Saxon Crackenthorpe, a Sydney physician, brought his patent-approved surf ski to Manly Beach in 1934 (though he apparently stole the idea from a teenager in nearby Port Macquaire), and the new craft proved immediately popular for both wave-riding and rescue work. A surf ski was thick, wide, and hollow, usually about 8 feet long, with a slightly pitched deck—sort of a cross between a surfboard and an Eskimo canoe. Second-generation models were much longer, up to 17 feet, and some were made for two riders. Sitting on the deck, legs forward and feet held in place by a pair of cloth straps, the rider maneuvered through the water using a twin-bladed paddle. For the experienced hand, catching waves was nearly effortless, and with some added thrust during takeoff, it was possible to jet out ahead of the mauling dump section. While riding, the paddle itself could be used both for balance and as a rudder; an ambitious surf skier could also brace the paddle on the deck and jump to a standing position. In the late 1960s, the surf ski would be replaced by the compact and maneuverable plastic-molded wave ski, which remains hugely popular in Australia.

  Ernest Smithers, another wave-riding Sydney doctor, brought out his inflatable rubber Surfoplane in 1934, and it soon became Australia’s most popular surfcraft. Four feet long and 20 inches wide, the Surfoplane inflated with a tire pump and had a pair of solid rubber handles glued like bumpers to the nose. Kids loved them. So did wave-dabbling adults. Surfoplanes were soft and safe, cheap and transportable, and a breeze to use. A surf session was brought to a quick end with a puncture or tear, but an overnight glue-on canvas patch usually put things right. Although designed for prone use, youngsters immediately began to ride on their knees, even standing; three generations of Aussie nippers got their first best rides on the Surfoplane. Inflatables would later become just as popular in America, where they were called “surf mats”—most often the familiar blue-and-yellow model built by tennis shoe giant Converse.

  For all of Australia’s ingenious surfing equipment developments, the sport remained very much an auxiliary of the powerful Surf Life Saving Association. A sports organization and social network as much as it was a life-guard service, the all-volunteer SLSA, by 1935, had nearly ten thousand bronzed, muscled, highly-disciplined members who were the beachfront pride of the British Empire. On any given summer weekend, surf clubs were responsible for hundreds of rescues nationwide. From the mercilessly competitive SLSA ranks came people like Andrew “Boy” Charlton, who won an Olympic gold medal at age sixteen, and Harold Hardwick, who won the 100-yard freestyle swim in the 1911 Festival of Empire Games in London and less than forty-eight hours later KO’d two fighters, in back-to-back matches, to take the heavyweight boxing championship. Fathers helped sons train for their Bronze Medallion, which allowed them to become a patrolling member of the local club. Young SLSA initiates submitted dutifully to frat-style hazing by senior members and dreamed of manning the sweep and leading their club’s surf boat team to victory. Local sheilas arranged their beach towels so that they might cut looks at their favorite club members, and made plans for the big Saturday night clubhouse dance—the only time girls were allowed entrance into what was otherwise an inaccessible boys-only establishment.

  Given the SLSA’s beachfront dominance, surfing Down Under was bound to come of age as a much different sport than it did elsewhere. Virtually all first-generation Australian surfers were lifesavers first and wave-riders second. Surfing was something you did during off-duty hours, knowing that many of your fellow clubbies thought the whole thing was somewhat pointless, and maybe even detrimental to the good of the club, as wave-riding had nothing to do with making rescues. The sport was included in carnivals, but as an afterthought.

  In 1927, SLSA president Charles Paterson—the same Charles Paterson who, in 1912, failed utterly at surfing and converted his redwood plank into the family ironing board—voiced the prevailing Aussie lifesaver’s view of the surfer when, after a visit to Hawaii, he described the local guards as “lazy boys” who “spend their whole time on the beach, giving exhibitions on the board or taking out bathers on board or outrigger.” The SLSA’s disdain for surfing, and surfers, was also made clear the year before, during a 1926 carnival in Newcastle: after a shark was spotted cruising just beyond the surf line, meet organizers, rather than ordering a cancellation or postponement, simply reshuffled the day’s events and ordered the board-riders into the water.

  Hollow surfboards were introduced to Australia in 1934 by Sydney’s Frank Adler, a Bluto-like paddling champion who made his first board by carefully following the do-it-yourself instructions from an imported issue of Modern Mechanix. The hollow was adopted for rescue work, but reluctantly; Australian guards never took to it the way their American counterparts did, instead favoring homegrown equipment like the surf boat and the belt and reel.

  Still, the SLSA made room for surfing—indeed, just about every surfboard in a given beach community was stored in the local clubhouse. Boards were in fact often regarded as club property, regardless of who built or paid for it; the club insignia was painted on the deck, and any further design was invariably rendered in club colors. When it came to pure surfing (not rescue work), Australians far preferred the hollow board to the plank, and the bigger the better. The most popular model was the “racing 16” (also known as the “toothpick”), a lethal-looking stiletto of pine and plywood, 16 feet long and a scant 20 inches wide.

  There were a few early signs that surfing would eventually break from lifesaving. Claude West and Charles “Snowy” McAlister, SLSA members with solid rescue work credentials, were both celebrated mostly for their wave-riding skills. A lantern-jawed apprentice undertaker, West as a teenager attached himself to Duke Kahanamoku following one of the Hawaiian’s surfing exhibiti
ons at Freshwater, and Kahanamoku later anointed West by giving him, for keeps, the sugar pine demonstration board. One year later, West was the best of the fifty or so dedicated surf-shooters in Australia. Ten years after that, in 1925, when the national surfing population was somewhere around 500, he was still on top. West was the first native-born surfer to give demonstrations; if the event was within a few miles of his Manly Beach home, more often than not he would hoist his board to the water’s edge and paddle up or down the coast to the demonstration site. A Kahanamoku loyalist, West for decades honored the Hawaiian’s legend by riding Duke’s Freshwater board at least once a year.

  CHARLES “SNOWY” MCALISTER.

  West was a skilled and durable wave-rider, but also quiet and serious, with a vaguely patrician bearing. To some degree, he was a placeholder for Snowy McAlister, a friendly little gamecock of a surfer who, spiritually if not chronologically, was a much better fit for the role of Australia’s surfing forefather. Yet another wave-crazed Manly youth, McAlister also saw one of Kahanamoku’s demonstrations, and at age eleven he made himself a smaller version of the board Kahanamoku had given to Claude West. Eight years later McAlister beat West in the board-riding portion of the SLSA nationals. Two years after that, at the 1928 championships, McAlister famously kicked up into a headstand while riding, carried on through the shallow water, grounded himself on the beach and held a fully inverted position until a meet official walked down, tapped McAlister’s leg, and announced him as the winner. McAlister would remain a happy, friendly, yarn-spinning presence on Australian beaches for another sixty years; at a local surfing contest in the early 1980s, he arrived wearing a T-shirt with “Valuable Surfing Antique” printed across the chest.