The History of Surfing

by Warshaw, Matt

  SAN ONOFRE BEACH PARTY.

  Top surfers from Pacifica to San Diego arrived for the contest—their cars loaded with a weekend’s ration of Spam tins, a few wax-papered deviled egg sandwiches, and a rack or two of Blatz beer—hoping to catch Pete Peterson on a bad day and have a shot at claiming the Blake trophy. Peterson was a quiet, tightly wound Santa Monica lifeguard lieutenant, with thin sun-blonde hair that he combed back severely from his forehead. He wasn’t unbeatable, but it was always a surprise when he lost, and not just in surf contests; he set paddleboard records that stood for years, and beat Olympic gold medal swimmers Johnny Weissmuller and Buster Crabbe during impromptu rough-water races in front of the Santa Monica lifeguard headquarters. His reputation grew from there. Peterson also made the best surfboards in California—as well as the best paddleboards and surf boats. In 1932, he and Lorrin “Whitey” Harrison, a cheerful lifeguard from Orange County and Peterson’s only real match in the state as a wave-rider, were the first two notable mainlanders after Tom Blake to make the surfer’s pilgrimage to Waikiki.

  Peterson had a fine, pared-down riding style, and seemed to have a special radar for the chops and bumps that threw other surfers off-balance. It was a fastidious way of riding, developed by the era’s most fastidious surfer. Unlike all of his contemporaries, Peterson refused to rub paraffin wax on the deck of his boards for traction, because it dulled the five-coat Valspar finish that he so carefully brushed on. Not using wax was the equivalent of racing on bald tires, strange to the point of eccentric—but it didn’t seem to affect his performance in the least. The Pacific Coast Surf Riding Championships were held nine times between 1932 and 1941. Peterson won four. Nobody else won more than once.

  San Onofre’s cachet was greatly improved by the surf contest and the great performances by Peterson, Harrison, and others. But what made San Onofre unique had as much to do with what happened on the beach as what took place in the water. Before and after wave-riding events, twenty-five or so “Sano” regulars and another fifty to seventy-five fellow travelers—assorted friends, siblings, and girlfriends—came together informally into a kind of self-contained surf cooperative. There were no outside influences. No lifeguards. No performing on behalf of tourists or reporters. No carnival schedules to plan around or club rules to obey. For the first time in its modern era, the sport had a space in which it could develop on its own. Over the course of three or four hundred Depression-era weekends at San Onofre, surfing socialized itself.

  It was probably the sport’s communal high point. Boards were placed in long informal rows just above the high tide line, while surfers hunkered down shoulder to shoulder around the firepit. Clams, halibut, bass, and abalone were brought up, cleaned and filleted, dumped into a huge cook pot, and served to all by the bowlful. Everyone threw their arms around each other and pressed together when a folding pocket camera was aimed their way. A particular surfer look took shape, borrowing heavily from Hawaii. A palm-frond hut was built in front of the San Onofre parking lot, and anyone who played guitar bought a ukulele and learned the chord progression for “My Little Grass Shack” and a half dozen other Waikiki beachboy standards. “Hawaii to us was like what heaven is for religious people,” one of San Onofre’s original surfers recalled. “Nobody had actually been, but we all hoped we’d get there sometime, and the next best thing was to sing about it.”

  The San Onofre pioneers also developed many of the protocols for what it meant to be a surfer in and out of the water. This understanding had little or nothing to do with Hawaii, and it provided much of the rough timber from which surf culture would be built. Travel was part of it, and self-reliance. There was also a grinning sidestep from the culture at large, justified in language that often wavered between honorable and fatuous. “You’ve got to keep away from things you don’t like,” San Onofre original Whitey Harrison said. “I just live to ride waves and enjoy myself.” Not counting food-fights and the occasionally beery night out, the San Onofre gang didn’t act especially defiant or unruly—that was a job for Eisenhower-era surfers. But they were the first to imbue the sport with the pride and knowingness of an exclusive secret society.

  The bellwether years didn’t last long. In 1942, six months after Japan bombed Pearl Harbor, more than half of Rancho Santa Margarita y Los Flores, including San Onofre, was requisitioned by the United States Marines, cleared of all civilians, stocked with barracks and training fields, and renamed Camp Pendleton. A beach access gate was installed not long after the war, but surfers couldn’t get in unless they belonged to the new military-approved San Onofre Surfing Club, whose original members weren’t especially interested in expanding the membership. The good times continued, but the sense of adventure and discovery that had made San Onofre the coolest, most progressive surf break of the 1930s never returned. Camper vans filled the parking lot. The palm-frond shack was surrounded with beach chairs, hibachi grills, and a growing assortment of kids. Some wag nicknamed the main reef “Old Man’s,” which everyone accepted with a smile, and at that point San Onofre’s time as the exemplar of modern surfing was well and truly over.

  RICHARD “BUFFALO” KEAULANA RIDES WAIKIKI ON A HOT CURL BOARD.

  Getting into the Hot Curl

  In the years between the world wars, Hawaii discovered that its most valuable export was itself. During the Depression, Honolulu’s union-busting Big Five business cartel—in charge of sugar, shipping, banking, the utilities, politicians, and nearly everything in-between—closed rank and did a good job at protecting their island fiefdom from the era’s worst economic miseries, while movies, newsreels, magazines, newspapers, and radio flung Hawaiian images and songs across the Pacific to the mainland like free candy. America saw FDR cheerfully fishing with his sons in Kona; Amelia Earhart smiling and draped in leis before making the first solo flight from Hawaii to California; and seven-year-old Shirley Temple sitting on Duke Kahanamoku’s shoulders after singing “On the Good Ship Lollipop” in front of a huge audience at Honolulu Harbor. For the popular “Hawaii Calls” radio program—broadcast under a sheltering Moana Hotel banyan tree, and picked up by stations across America—host Webly Edwards introduced songs like “Beyond the Reef” and “Sweet Leilani,” then casually announced the local air and water temperatures, as waves rolled through audibly in the background.

  Attracting visitors wasn’t really the point, at least not yet. Hawaii was still too distant (reachable only by steamer, with the Los Angeles/Honolulu voyage lasting five days, weather permitting), and too expensive for all but leisured rich. Not until after World War II would tourism become Hawaii’s perpetually top-ranked industry. But the Depression-era promotion of the Hawaii fantasy helped make that happen. Few Americans actually traveled to the islands, but just about everybody learned to daydream about grass-skirted native dancers and their lovely hula hands, about walking barefoot across a moonlit Hawaiian beach, and about knifing across the blue waters off Waikiki on a surfboard or canoe.

  In 1923, an artist named John Kelly sailed over from San Francisco with his young family to do illustrations and etchings for Waikiki’s expanding hotel row. By 1928, Kelly’s nine-year-old son, also named John, was learning how to surf on a miniature redwood plank shaped by David Kahanamoku, Duke’s brother. The younger Kelly soon made friends with two other local haole surfers, a chalk-white scrapper named Wally Froiseth and a quiet, slender, well-dressed boy named Fran Heath. They rode all the Waikiki breaks and even discovered another half dozen spots within paddling distance of Kelly’s house at Black Point, on the east side of Diamond Head. When they weren’t surfing, they hung out in an overgrown beachfront lot not far from the Moana Hotel; people started calling them the Empty Lot Boys.

  Kelly, Froiseth, and Heath watched and learned from the top beachboy surfers at Queen’s and Publics—laughing in amazement at the manic wave-riding genius of Joseph “Scooter Boy” Kaopuiki, a former statewide welterweight boxing champion who ran, hopped, and pirouetted from stem to stern on a 15-foot fire-engine-re
d hollow board, stopping now and then to face the beach, spread his fingers, and waggle his hands like Al Jolson. By the time Kelly and his friends entered high school, however, they looked upon the Waikiki surf scene with a more critical eye. The old guard was just plugging along, doing the same things they had for years: taking the same angles, performing the same tourist-pleasing acrobatic tricks, and riding the same boards. There was still a lot for the young up-and-coming surfer to admire in the beachboys: they dressed well, got laid often, and were the best-connected people in Waikiki. But the beachboys lacked the single-focus commitment to surfing of the Empty Lot gang. “We used to call it ‘surf drunk,’” Froiseth later said. “We talked about it, slept on it, dreamed about it; surfing was practically our whole life.”

  The older surfers, in other words, didn’t much care about advancing the performance standard, while the new kids cared about little else. This rarely caused any friction, since there were waves enough for everyone. But occasionally the two groups collided—literally, in some cases. A middle-aged Duke Kahanamoku once made a leisurely descent into a wave that Froiseth was already riding, and the two surfers collided violently. Froiseth came up swearing. A friend paddled over and in a quiet but urgent voice asked if Froiseth knew who he was yelling at—he did, of course—and Froiseth yelled back, “I don’t give a fuck who he is!” On the beach, Froiseth was satisfied to discover that the collision had put a fist-sized ding in what, sixty years later, he still dismissively referred to as Duke’s “big long board.”

  The Empty Lot Boys didn’t like longer boards. They didn’t like hollow boards, either—too buoyant and tippy. Heath was the best surfer of the group, and from a wealthy family, and at age eighteen, he had a beautiful new Pacific System Homes Swastika model board freighted over from Los Angeles. On a summer morning in 1937, Heath and Kelly paddled out to a Diamond Head reef called Browns, located near Kelly’s house, to try and ride some overhead waves. Time after time, both surfers kept “sliding ass”—spinning out—as they tried to hold an angle across the steep faces. Kelly stared down at his plank during a backyard lunch break that afternoon and came to what now seems like an obvious design appraisal: too much planing surface in the tail section. The faster the board went, the higher it rode in the water, and the less “bite” it had. On an eight-foot wave, the boards were virtually uncontrollable. (Tom Blake had in effect already solved this problem a few years earlier by inventing the surfboard fin, but it hadn’t caught on; the Hawaiian surfers were all still riding finless boards.)

  Kelly, on the spot, convinced Heath to hand over his still-new Swastika. After setting the board on a pair of sawhorses, Kelly walked into the garage and returned with a small ax. He stood for a moment looking down at the board’s stern, and with a determined overhead swing buried the ax blade into the rail. Both surfers then got to work, giving the blocky tail section a more streamlined profile. From corner to corner, the board’s back end shrunk from about 18 inches to 5 inches, and Kelly and Heath blended the new rail lines to meet the original plane shape just below the board’s halfway point. They also thinned out the edges and reshaped the bottom surface near the tail, until it had a boat-hull roundness.

  Later that afternoon, with the fresh varnish coat still tacky, the two surfers paddled back out to a still-humping Browns lineup. Kelly had the new board, and on his first wave it bit into the wave face, and he was able to draw a high, fast angle toward the deep-water channel. Froiseth and Kelly customized their own boards the next day. Not long afterward, Froiseth shouted out, “These things really get you in the hot curl!” With that, the new narrow-tail design had a name.

  The hot curl design, like the plank and the hollow, had no lift in the nose or tail; viewed from the side, the top surface was perfectly flat. Because it had less surface area, it paddled slower than the other boards, and bogged down in small, flat waves. With a few exceptions—including a sharp-tongued little Queen’s Surf dynamo named Albert “Rabbit” Kekai—the Waikiki beachboys had no interest in the hot curl; hollows and modified planks remained the rule in Hawaii for another ten to fifteen years. Still, Kelly’s new board introduced continuous rail curve, thinner edges, and a rounded hull shape, all of which became standard board design features.

  Kelly’s new board was one of those developments that, in hindsight, seems both wildly modern and long overdue. Modern surfing begins at the turn of the century with George Freeth and Jack London, Alexander Hume Ford and the Outrigger Canoe Club. Lagging by a full thirty years, modern surfboard design begins with the hot curl.

  Makaha and the Start of Big-Wave Riding

  Browns was the most challenging wave on the south side of the island. Kelly and his friends hadn’t mastered the break completely on their new narrow-tailed boards, but they could now at least stroke into an eight-footer and know they had a fighting chance of making it to the channel in one piece. More importantly, they all knew that Browns was by no means Oahu’s last word in big surf.

  Wave-riding in Hawaii during the late 1930s was still done almost exclusively at Waikiki, where the surf was generally biggest from May to September. Everyone on the beach had a vague understanding that the waves on the north and west sides of the island came up during fall and winter, and that they were often bigger, much bigger, than anything that hit the southwest-facing reefs at Waikiki. Yet this was an abstract thought, the way a skier might wonder about snow conditions in the Himalayas. Before the hot curl, surfboards were all but nonfunctional in waves bigger than six feet; a surfer paddling boldly into the Castle Break lineup on a summer’s afternoon with a twelve-foot swell pumping through had every right to think he’d just placed himself at the very back of beyond.

  Once on shore, of course, the surfer was almost tradition-bound to play up the experience. Jack London, after all, had described the Waikiki surf zone as a place filled with “white battalions of the infinite army of the sea.” Tom Blake often told the story about Duke Kahanamoku launching into a Castle Break wave that measured “thirty feet high,” with surface rills hitting the bottom of Duke’s board like the “patter of a machine gun.” Two or three generations later, Hawaiian surfers, to look cool, would reduce their wave height estimations to such a ridiculous degree that a fifteen-footer could be offhandedly pegged down to six feet. In the 1930s, though, wave measurement was still very much in its golden era of exaggeration.

  John Kelly and Wally Froiseth got an early lesson in big-wave relativity in late 1937, when they loaded up Kelly’s Model T and drove west into the dry coastal outback near Waianae Town. This was an overnight lobster-hunting expedition, so their new hot curl boards were left behind. After parking next to a long, broad crescent of sugar-white sand, they walked north to a rocky intertidal zone, carefully laid a pair of lobster nets, returned to the car, and eventually set out their bedrolls and fell asleep on the beach with a gentle surf murmuring in the background. At 3 A.M., Kelly woke to a kettledrum roar of a new swell, and even in the black-gray duotone of night, he could tell the waves were huge—bigger, faster, and longer than anything they’d ever ridden in Waikiki. “We went home later that day,” Kelly recalled, “and told everybody about what we’d seen, and they all just scoffed. But next time we took our boards, and we had Makaha to ourselves for two or three years.”

  Oahu’s West Side is hemmed in by the towering Waianae Range, and for centuries it had been a badlands; local tribes, having remained independent when the rest of the islanders unified, were known as Hawaii’s best fighters—“Makaha” translates to “fierce”—and missionaries sent to the area were mostly ignored. The Waianae-based community that later developed around a nearby sugar plantation was tightknit and occasionally generous to outsiders, but also ghettoized and crime-ridden. The landscape was both dazzling and harsh. Jutting lava-black hillsides gave way to canopied valleys, which in turn spilled into the island’s clearest, bluest ocean water—less rainfall meant less muddy runoff. This was the last stretch of coast on Oahu to have paved roads; Kelly and Froiseth
drove on a graded dirt track from Barber’s Point north during their early visits to Makaha, and were occasionally turned back by an unpassable gully washout.

  Makaha’s enormous wave field hasn’t changed over the decades. With a moderate swell running, three distinct take-off areas open up, each one good for a playful if somewhat meandering right-slide that terminates, just a few feet off the beach, in a spectacular backwash-generated shorebreak. For spectators, this last feature has become a Makaha favorite: a spent wave rolls up the sandy berm, doubles back, and plows head-on into the next wave—surfers and boards caught at the moment of impact are launched like tiddlywinks, sometimes ten feet into the air.

  The hot curl surfers enjoyed riding on these kinds of small and midsize days. But in years to come, what they really hoped to find after the long drive from Honolulu—what each succeeding generation of big-wave surfers have hoped to find—is something called Makaha Point Surf: long ten-foot-or-bigger right-breaking waves that start at the top of the point and thunder along for a hundred yards or more with no loss in size. In the middle of the bay, where the wave should obligingly spill into a deep-water channel and die, it instead funnels into an end section called the Bowl, where it fans out like a cobra’s head, not only gaining height—ten or more vertical feet, in some cases—but also bending in on itself. The takeoff and middle sections of a Makaha Point Surf wave are twice as powerful as anything found in Waikiki, and the power doubles again at this last stage. Furthermore, as Kelly, Froiseth, and the rest of the hot curlers quickly learned, the speed and steepness of a Point Surf wave means that it has to be taken as an all-or-nothing proposal. Nine times out of ten, the surfer who manages to race across the point and deliver himself to the Bowl section fails to negotiate the last fifty yards to the channel; he either sizes things up and ejects voluntarily (with a cannonball move off the back of the board, or by dropping prone and sledding for the beach), or continues full-speed into the Bowl to be destroyed by a cataract of whitewater.