The History of Surfing

by Warshaw, Matt

  Sydney was the undisputed capital of Australian surfing during the interwar years, but the sport migrated easily to Queensland’s semitropical Gold Coast, and also took root in the beaches around Perth, Adeline, and Geelong, Victoria. But progress was slow. Surfing in Australia wasn’t the Sport of Kings, as it was in Hawaii, and had little or none of the early-onset cult panache that was developing in California. While Australia was destined to become the world’s most exciting surf nation, first it would have to make a clean break from the SLSA.

  The California Style Emerges

  Hawaii invented surfing, and Waikiki remained by far the easiest and most agreeable place in the world to ride waves. Yet by the 1930s, Southern California was uniquely qualified to begin reinventing the sport. America’s capitalist-consumer culture had already transformed Los Angeles from an adobe village outpost into America’s most innovative and forward-looking big city. Now, it would turn its attention for the first time to surfing.

  The first commercially made surfboards were built, stored, packaged, advertised, and shipped by Pacific System Homes, a light industrial company sprawled over twenty-five acres in south Los Angeles. Founded in 1908, Pacific System soon became the world’s leading manufacturer of precut houses, and by 1930 the firm had produced more than twenty thousand ready-to-build kits—popular models included the “Waikiki Cottage,” the “Patio Farmhouse,” and the “Distinctive Spanish Home.” Myers Butte was the son of a company cofounder, and in 1929, after the stock market crashed, Butte dropped out of Stanford, returned to Los Angeles and the family business, and convinced his father that building surfboards might be a profitable Pacific System sideline. It’s not clear whether Butte himself tried surfing, but like any other young Southern Californian he went to the beach often and knew the sport was on the rise. The subsidiary interest he organized was called the Swastika Surf-Board Company—in 1930 the hooked-cross design was recognized, if at all, as an obscure good luck symbol; it wasn’t yet associated with Germany’s Nazi party—and a small swastika was wood-burned into the tail section of each board.

  The first Pacific System boards were finless single-slab redwood planks weighing 70 pounds. Butte knew this was too heavy, so the following year he made wholesale buys on light kiln-dried balsawood. From 1932 on, Pacific System boards (all planks; no Blake-style hollows) had a balsa core and redwood on the sides, nose, and tail. Half-inch strips of redwood or mahogany might also be laid along the board’s vertical axis. The laminated mixed-wood designs were nearly as strong as the one-piece redwoods, but much lighter—a 10-foot Swastika weighed just 45 pounds—and each board, with its contrasting and perfectly interlocked pieces, looked as if it had been pulled from Frank Lloyd Wright’s sketch pad.

  Butte hired Pete Peterson, Whitey Harrison, Calvin “Tulie” Clark, and other top Southern California surfer-craftsmen to make his line of boards. They usually worked in pairs, shaping and sanding, varnishing and finishing. Commercially made surfboards were a luxury item during the Depression, and there weren’t many orders; Peterson’s workload in 1938 amounted to a dozen boards. Custom jobs were accepted, but most boards were built to preset dimensions—the 1938 line consisted of three “Hawaiian” models, a 14-foot paddleboard, two “kiddie boards,” and an aqua-plane. These were sold in sporting goods stores, beach clubs, and department stores like Robinson’s and the Broadway. (Later that year, when swastika-draped Nazis marched through Austria, Butte hurriedly changed the name of his line to “Waikiki Surf-Boards.”)

  Pacific System spent freely on surfboard advertising and promotions, and Butte was expert at getting his boards into the hands of celebrities, including Duke Kahanamoku and Shirley Temple. A new Pacific System board retailed for $35—as compared to $8 and change for a DIY model—making it the sport’s original status item. Pacific System boards were also surfing’s first export product, and a 1932 shipment of a half dozen Swastikas to Waikiki was newsworthy enough to get coverage in the Los Angeles papers.

  Dale Velzy, destined to become the most celebrated boardmaker of the 1950s, was a schoolboy when the Pacific System boards were at their peak. “The Swastikas were real droolers,” Velzy recalled. “I remember these brothers, Roger and Bob Bacon. They had two brand-new ones that they hauled around in their candy-apple red ’36 Ford convertible. God, those boards were beautiful sitting in that cherry Ford. It hurt to look at them, they were so bitchin’.”

  “I REMEMBER THESE BROTHERS. ROGER AND BOB BACON. THEY HAD TWO BRAND-NEW SWASTIKAS THAT THEY HAULED AROUND IN THEIR CANDY-APPLE RED ’36 FORD CONVERTIBLE. GOD, THOSE BOARDS WERE BEAUTIFUL SITTING IN THAT CHERRY FORD. IT HURT TO LOOK AT THEM, THEY WERE SO BITCHIN’.”

  —Dale Velzy, on the Swastika model surfboard

  Meanwhile, in 1932, Tom Blake secured a patent on his hollow surfboard—or “water sled,” as Blake called it on the Patent Office filing papers, keeping the board’s potential uses as open as possible. He then entered into the first of a series of licensing agreements to manufacture, market, and sell his signature line of boards. One of the firms Blake signed up with made airplane wings, another was a ladder manufacturer; making surfboards, for all of the companies, was never more than a tiny sideline operation. Blake himself designed and built the prototypes, but almost all of the boards made under his name were assembled by professional woodworkers of one kind or another. The best Blake hollows came from the Robert Mitchell Company, a midsized Cincinnati furniture plant; they were built with African mahogany, had an elegant two-tone keyhole design on the deck, and were cross-hatched on the deck for traction. A small round sticker reading “A Genuine Tom Blake Hollow Surf-Board” was placed near the tail; Blake himself was featured in the middle of the sticker, in color, smiling as he rode one of his own boards, arms extended in a pose of casual mastery. The Mitchell boards were available only in Hawaii and along the East Coast, and were pitched to the upscale buyer: ad copy promised the Blake hollow had the look of a “miniature yacht.” Though monastically uninterested in material goods as a rule, Blake had the company build him a one-of-a-kind board completely made of teak.

  Where Pacific System boards were designed and marketed primarily as wave-riding craft, the Blake hollow was offered as a paddleboard, a rescue board, a tow-board, and a water polo board. The companies Blake signed up with likely believed that paddleboarding, not surfing, was where the real sales were; paddling required little or no skill and could be done in any body of water, including rivers and lakes. Blake himself never seemed comfortable with the idea of the surfboard as solely an instrument of pleasure. He wanted his boards to have not only a moral purpose but multiuse functionality. Blake often came up with uses for the hollow board that had nothing to do with surfing: he used it to shoot down river rapids, and he created the “sailing surfboard,” as well as a plate-glass “look box” that let you peer through the board’s deck and “enjoy the beauty that is hidden underwater.”

  None of it had much effect on the bottom line. Never mind what the brochures said, paddleboarding wasn’t really a sport, it was just exercise. Add-ons like sail rigging and the “look box” gathered dust on the warehouse shelf. Lifeguards might use the Blake hollow, but its obvious first function was riding waves—the problem was that the worldwide surfing population in the 1930s remained below five thousand. The sales figures are long lost, but Blake said his semiannual royalty checks rarely topped $100 and were often below $40. Pacific System Homes did no better: just fifteen boards were made in a given batch, and the boardmaking operation shut down completely after America entered World War II. Surfing wasn’t yet big enough to support even a cottage industry.

  But who needed a fancy store-bought board, anyway? Popular Science believed that “any amateur woodworker” could build a redwood/balsa plank surfboard, and the magazine’s 1935 do-it-yourself article was there to help. The job required perfectly cut strips of redwood and balsa, as well as some dowel-and-glue joining, which made for a reasonable intermediate-level woodworking project. The hollow board wa
s a different story. Tom Blake’s 1937 Popular Mechanics article on how to built a 12-foot “hollow Hawaiian surfboard” was dense with cutaway views and blueprints, and its materials list included thirty-two copper nails, six gross of flathead brass screws, a brass drain plug, twenty yards’ worth of spooled cotton cloth seam tape, marine glue, seam compound, and spar varnish. Huge amounts of effort were spent on these boards. And a lot of them, upon launch, gurgled quietly and sank to the bottom.

  CALIFORNIA SURFER GENE “TARZAN” SMITH AND HIS SWASTIKA MODEL BOARD, WAIKIKI, 1937.

  PALOS VERDES SURF CLUB GET-TOGETHER, LATE 1930s.

  * * *

  Membership in your local surf club wasn’t mandatory in California, but by the late 1930s you could have driven a Packard Super 8 from San Diego to Santa Cruz and had a hard time loading it up with nonaffiliated surfers. Unlike the surf-based organizations in Hawaii and Australia, these new clubs were focused on wave-riding, and a bit of paddling, and nothing else. California’s best-known and best-organized group was the Palos Verdes Surf Club, founded in 1935 by a surfing dentist named John “Doc” Ball. Headquartered south of Los Angeles in Gardena, where Ball had a dental practice, the PVSC took its name from the nearby Palos Verdes Peninsula, home to a quietly wealthy Mediterranean-themed bedroom community, as well as the Cove, a beautiful cliff-lined bay sometimes referred to as “Little Waikiki.” Just under thirty surfers took the club oath and became PVSC members during the 1930s. A dozen other similar clubs were formed up and down the coast, every one filled with young gung-ho middle-class surfers, roughly half of them college students.

  The club movement said a lot about how the sport was developing in America. Surfers now had the numbers and confidence to join together in organizations having little or nothing to do with extraneous things like lifeguarding or canoeing. Wave-riding was enough. At the same time, the clubs helped validate an experience that was still new and a little strange; all of the established rituals of club life allowed the sport to be talked about and presented in terms familiar to everyone, surfers and nonsurfers alike.

  Doc Ball and his PVSC cohorts took this idea further than any other surfing organization. New initiates pledged to conduct themselves “in a manner becoming a Club Member and a gentleman, so help me God.” Meetings were held, minutes were kept, and the club schedule was filled with Saturday night banquets, fundraisers, and “socials.” Ye Weekly Super Illustrated Spintail, the PVSC newsletter, recapped club members’ latest hot ride and surf-related mishaps, and it was written in a bouncy Walter Winchell style. The club emblem was stenciled onto the deck of each team member’s board, and a round PVSC club patch was sewn onto the left breast of each member’s matching two-tone jacket—just like the ones handed out to varsity football players. The conformity didn’t stop there. At PVSC club meetings, members were occasionally asked to stand and give a progress report on their studies or jobs. Six months after one of the club’s top riders dropped out of college to spend more time in the surf, he was called to floor and told to return to class or face expulsion. There was the occasional clubhouse booze-up, but PVSC members were good citizens as well as good surfers.

  With clubs on the rise, surfing took another inevitable step toward organized competition, which meant rules and standings, winners and losers, trophies and championships—the staff of life to sportsmen of all kind. Also, there was a flattery inherent in the rise of club-sponsored events, contests, and newsletters, in that they all promised to put the surfer at the center of the action. In a social and cultural sense, this was essential to the development of the sport. But it didn’t reflect the surfer’s experience in the water, which constantly veered into the wild, to places that had nothing to do with any regulated or organized form of sport.

  Take the big surf of 1939, for example. In September, a hurricane originating off the coast of Panama broke away from the standard northwest storm track and became the only tropical storm to ever make land in California, ramming straight into Long Beach. The day it made landfall, forecasters had predicted clouds, but no heavy weather, and the storm went completely unnoticed until it brushed past San Diego—all told, it killed thirty-nine people in a deluge of rain, wind, and waves. Surfers had a heads-up, as a rising swell moved out in front of the storm. A few hours before the rain hit, PVSC member LeRoy Grannis drove to Malibu with some friends and later recalled that the surf was well overhead, rising, and much louder than usual, thanks to a vault-like atmospheric stillness. The waves came up steadily. By noon, only a half dozen surfers were left in the water, and they were streaking the entire length of the point on double-overhead set waves, all the way to the end of Malibu Pier. Then a gale-force southerly wind hit and chopped the waves to bits. Grannis and a friend were the last two surfers in the water; when the other surfer lost his board, the two men draped themselves over Grannis’ plank just outside the lineup, paddled in as best they could during a lull, and allowed themselves to be churned to the beach by the next set of waves.

  Another swell arrived on Thanksgiving Day, out of the west, and big enough that a Santa Barbara surfer at one point counted thirteen distinct and simultaneously breaking lines of whitewater lined up in rows. A New Year’s Eve swell was just as big, maybe bigger.

  Grannis sat this last one out. At twilight, on January 31, he walked to the end of the pier in Hermosa Beach, just north of Palos Verdes, leaned against the vibrating guardrail, and watched astounded as a school of dolphins torpedoed through the interior of a huge incoming swell. As the wave fringed, the dolphins all broke the surface at once, arced through the cold air, then disappeared back into the water ahead of the whitewater explosion.

  This was how the sport was actually proportioned. The surfer wasn’t anywhere near the center of the action. In fact, he stood at the feathered edge of something too big to see—almost too big to comprehend.

  * * *

  San Onofre was the sweet and easy low-simmering crucible of American surfing in the 1930s and early 1940s. Tiny pod-like surfing communities had taken root in California from San Diego’s Mission Beach all the way up to Pacifica in the San Francisco Bay Area; Virginia already had three decades of surf history; and Florida had enough riders by the end of the Depression that Daytona Beach was able to host an annual contest. But San Onofre, located halfway between Los Angeles and San Diego, was where the mainland version of the sport shined brightest.

  San Onofre wasn’t a town, and never had been. The name “San Onofre” just began turning up on mid-nineteenth-century maps on the western edge of the vast two-hundred-thousand-acre Rancho Santa Margarita y Los Flores. By the time San Onofre was first surfed, in 1933, all that marked this little section of coast was a tumbledown fishing camp, a Texaco station, a roadside café, and a faded gable-roofed Santa Fe line train depot. The coast itself was unremarkable. A long scrub-covered bluff kept the beach hidden from the road, cattle grazed on foothills to the east, a ribbon of sand below the cliffs trailed off into a warm haze to the south, and a mile or so north was a wave-fringed point. (Surfers from the next generation would lug their boards up there, discover a trio of cobblestone pointbreak waves, and name the whole area Trestles, after a pair of rail-road overpasses that cut along the base of the point).

  PALOS VERDES SURF CLUB MEMBER FENTON SCHOLES (FOREGROUND), AT THE COVE, 1939.

  PLANK SURFBOARD BLUEPRINT, FROM A 1935 ISSUE OF POPULAR SCIENCE.

  It was a well-marked half-day’s journey to get to San Onofre from any of Southern California’s beach communities. The not-quite-finished Pacific Coast Highway still contained sections of unpaved road, and a rutted one-lane track connected the highway to a packed-dirt beachfront parking lot. “You’d go there for a long weekend,” one 1930s regular recalled, “and it usually meant four flat tires.” The isolation was more imagined than real; San Clemente, just five miles to the north, was already a thriving beachfront town. But San Onofre felt hidden and private—an exact fit for what Beach Boy Brian Wilson would later call the nearest faraway place.


  The San Onofre wave was perfectly engineered to work with a 50-pound wooden surfboard. A telescoping set of reefs produced a long stretch of beginner’s surf near the beach, and a more concentrated peak further offshore—like Waikiki, but at one-third the scale. San Onofre waves were longer and better-shaped than those found at Venice, Hermosa, Pacific Beach, or any of the other surfer-populated Southern California beachbreaks, and unlike the winter-only reefs at Palos Verdes Cove, it had rideable surf all year. A typical San Onofre wave not only broke both ways, left and right, but reformed as it went; a surfer might begin a ride by pulling a tight angle toward San Clemente, then aim for the beach, then dip a rail and charge off in the other direction. Overhead surf arrived pretty often, but maybe the best thing about San Onofre, surf-wise, was that it could conjure waves from nothing. Beaches to the north and south might be completely flat, but there was always something to ride here.

  The Pacific Coast Surf Riding Championships moved to San Onofre in 1938, after the break at Corona del Mar—the contest’s original site—was ruined by a jetty extension. Surf competition rules also changed. The paddling race was out. Riders now gathered next to a buoy placed just beyond the surf line, and over the course of a two-hour meet they earned a point for each ride that took them past a second buoy, anchored near the shore and about fifty yards to the north. Trophies were given to the finalists. Tom Blake donated the engraved cup he’d won in 1928 to be the Pacific Coast Surf Riding Championships perpetual trophy, which was handed off to the winner of each year’s event.