The History of Surfing

by Warshaw, Matt

  Meanwhile, for those few hundred GI surfers in foxholes, barracks, tents, tanks, mess halls, and airfields around the world (including Jack Cross, Dickie’s older brother, stationed on Midway Island), surfing and all its attendant pleasures became a daydream; a favorite subject for homesick can’t-wait-to-get-back letters to friends and family. In these letters, soldier-surfers often touched on noble aims like freedom and democracy. But they lingered on things that were less ideological, more immediate and personal—a speedy return to Bondi, or Waikiki, or Malibu, and a mad dash for the surf. This was a form of patriotism, too; a longing for the everyday pleasures that peace and free society allowed.

  Chapter 3: Malibu Swing 1945–late 1950s

  BOB SIMMONS NEW EQUIPMENT: FASTER AND LIGHTER JOE QUIGG THE “GIRL BOARDS” MALIBU: THE PERFECT WAVE DALE VELZY DEWEY WEBER BOTTOM TURNS, WHIP TURNS AND CUTBACKS TERRY “TUBE STEAK” TRACY MICKEY DORA HERE COMES THE CROWD WAIKIKI SURF CLUB RABBIT KEKAI GEORGE DOWNING BIRTH OF BIG-WAVE RIDING THE SECRET LIVES OF WAVES BUZZY TRENT SURFING’S BEAT GENERATION AUSTRALIA’S NEW START BUD BROWNE THE SURF MOVIE PAT CURREN THE NORTH SHORE GREG NOLL WAIMEA BAY

  In late 1946, John “Doc” Ball, the amiable round-faced founder of the Palos Verdes Surf Club, published California Surfriders, one of the sport’s first books. Just back from his wartime posting as a Coast Guard dentist, Ball threw himself into this friendly vanity project, producing 510 copies of the faux-leather-bound book, which Ball sold himself, mostly to his surf buddies up and down the coast, charging a stiff $7.25 for each slender 118-page volume.

  At the time, Ball and Tom Blake were the sport’s two top photographers—in a field that consisted of just three or four other photo-hobbyists. While Ball shot the occasional beach-scene candid or portrait, his signature work was done from the water at Palos Verdes Cove. Ball would place his blocky Graflex D Series camera inside an elaborate hinged and clasped rubbed-sealed pinewood housing of his own design, carefully balance the box on the deck of his board, and then paddle through a channel adjacent to the break and wait. When a surfer approached, Ball lifted the box up by its brass side-handle, flipped open a small round wooden portal covering the lens, took the shot, and quickly snapped the portal closed before a rogue drop of water could splash into the camera.

  In 1944, National Geographic published “Surf-Boarders Capture California,” an eight-page black-and-white portfolio of Ball’s work, and because the sport was at that point deep into its wartime state of suspended animation, the photos all looked snappy and new. California Surfriders, on the other hand, published just two years later, had a distinct air of nostalgia from the moment it came off the presses. Nearly all of the 150 images were taken before the war, for one thing. Also, Ball’s photo captions were often recollective, even wistful, as he described the “good old days” at the Cove and harkened back to, among other events, the 1940 Pacific Coast Surf Riding Championships and the big Thanksgiving Day swell of 1937.

  But it was more than that. Within a year after V-J Day, surfing had entered one of its great periods of change, and the nation as a whole—glad to be distancing itself from war and the Depression—now had its gaze excitedly pointed to the future. California Surfriders not only asked readers to look back, it depicted a sport that in many respects no longer existed. Surf clubs, matching team jackets, the Pacific Coast Championships, jetty surf at Corona del Mar, headstands, hollow boards, diaper-like woolen surf trunks, Long Beach Flood Control—by 1947, when California surfers first got a look at Ball’s book, these were all gone, or nearly so.

  CALIFORNIA SURFRIDERS, 1946.

  The Not-So-Quiet American

  Before World War II, surfing lived in the reflected light of the tropics, with Duke Kahanamoku’s noble dark-eyed visage shining godlike from on high. Surfers and lifeguards were one and the same (in Australia), or close associates (in America), and the sport in general was lightly spritzed in heroism. After the war, surfing began its long march to the near and far corners of industry and media, and it became the cool new activity of choice for droves of revved-up bushy-blond suburban Southern California teenagers. It traveled with pandemic speed north to Santa Cruz, east to the Atlantic Seaboard, further east to Biarritz and Newquay, and south to Lima, Rio, and Durban. Surfing had in fact already been introduced to many of these places. But the postwar style of surfing—the Southern California style, with trunks worn low on the hips, and an often-shouted litany of stoking new words and phrases, and a fervor not just to ride waves but to be known as a wave-rider, and do so in a way that might piss off nonsurfers—this was new.

  Surfers already had a history of distancing themselves from mainstream society; Depression-era masters like Tom Blake, Whitey Harrison, and Pete Peterson had done exactly that. The trend intensified after the war. In the hands of California youth, surfing wasn’t so much a refuge from society as an alternate universe. And because California during those crucial postwar years was also birthing modern American pop culture, that alternate universe was in short order broadcast around the globe.

  Other cultural forces were at work, too. California was central to the emergence of America’s postwar suburban middle class. The state’s thriving industrial base—powered by big-ticket Pentagon defense contracts, which spurred a wave of military-supported aerospace companies—meant that it had plenty of good jobs. California newcomers arrived in droves: 1.4 million arrived in Los Angeles County alone during the 1940s, and almost 2 million more came in the 1950s. Many of the newcomers were former GIs who’d trained at Pendleton or El Toro during the war and couldn’t wait to return in peacetime. In the early 1950s, Los Angeles County became the nation’s most populated county (breezing past Illinois’ Cook County), while Orange County and San Diego County were soon in the top five. Fires, earthquakes, race riots, locally bred cults and quacks—nothing could stop the migration to Southern California.

  Suburban housing tracts multiplied by the hundreds across Southern California’s interior, each one paving over a few acres of orange, lemon, or walnut groves. A massive new regional freeway system fanned out to connect dozens of just-incorporated and invitingly named cities—Garden Grove, Lakewood, Thousand Oaks. These sleek multilane highways provided easy access to Highway One, which in turn linked every California surf break from Dana Point up to Huntington Pier and Malibu, and then way north, past Steamer Lane in Santa Cruz and beyond San Francisco into surfing’s great West Coast unknown. Right away, just from all the aerospace engineers looking for something to do on the weekends, there was a bump in the number of Southern California wave-riders.

  BOB SIMMONS, MALIBU, LATE 1940s.

  In addition, this was the beating heart of America’s entertainment industry, and the region had in large part already staked its reputation on celebrity and glamour. Los Angeles was a leader in radio, home to Hollywood and the American movie industry, and in the 1950s it would claim television as well. TV ownership nationwide went from ten thousand sets in 1946 to five million in 1950, and network coverage of Pasadena’s annual New Year’s Day Rose Parade taunted America’s frost-bound states with Southern California’s typical midwinter balminess. This alone convinced a few hundred thousand people each year to move west.

  Glamour here had its own unique palette. No place else looked liked Southern California, and the hypersaturated Technicolor film that became a Hollywood standard in the early 1950s was the perfect media analogue to a landscape that could be similarly brilliant and unnatural—the turquoise blue swimming pools and water-sucking green lawns. Even the brilliant sunsets that so often bought a tranquil end to the surfer’s day at the beach owed much of their color and vividness to the abiding stratum of oxidizing smog that filled the Los Angeles Basin. (The electric-powered Red Car train system that had transported George Freeth so cheaply and efficiently between Redondo Beach and Venice Beach prior to World War I had been dismantled by the midfifties, and Los Angeles quickly became the runaway national leader in both car ownership and air pollution.)

  M
eanwhile, Southern California’s celebrity culture made room for surfing. After the Rindge family was forced to sell parts of their enormous Malibu Ranch, Hollywood quickly established a beachfront bedroom community in what was called the Malibu Colony. Former child star Jackie Coogan, tough-guy character actor Richard Jaeckel, Rat-Packer-in-the-making Peter Lawford, and a few other respectable B-listers bought surfboards and often walked down the point to ride and socialize with the Malibu regulars. Santa Monica surf-hunk Tommy Zahn dated a blond divorcée named Norma Dougherty in 1947, just months before she signed a contract with Twentieth Century Fox and changed her name to Marilyn Monroe. “I was twenty-two, and I guess she was twenty,” Zahn later recalled. “I used to take her surfing at Malibu, tandem surfing, in the dead of winter, and it didn’t phase her a bit. She was very good in the water. Very robust.” Other young newsmaking females were out there, too. Among California Governor Earl Warren’s brood of handsome and vivacious children, his stunning blue-eyed daughter Nina “Honey Bear” Warren dated surfers and became a semiregular at Malibu.

  Finally, it was Southern California that invented the cult of the teenager. The monster of demography known as the baby boom wouldn’t make its presence felt in the lineup until the late 1950s, but California was already the national bellwether state for just about everything young and new. Disneyland had just opened. Seventeen sold more copies here than anywhere else. A new galaxy of West Coast hot-rod and motorcycle clubs had come into existence, and the Friday night cruising was endless on Van Nuys Boulevard and a hundred other Main Street drags from Bakersfield to Chula Vista.

  Surfing after the war could survive pretty much anywhere. But only Southern California could launch it into a national, then international, craze.

  Smart, Fast, and Mean: Bob Simmons Reinvents the Surfboard

  Surfboard design rocketed forward in the postwar years. Though it was a group effort, Bob Simmons, a knobby misanthropic engineer from Pasadena, was the era’s leading figure. Simmons was strange, brilliant, experimental, permanently ungroomed, and often angry—he once answered some bullying by a group of Palos Verde Cove locals by splitting open the decks of their hollow boards with an ax. He died by surfing misadventure at a young age, which secured his place in the top rank of the boardmaker’s pantheon.

  After a bicycle accident as a teenager, Simmons’ left elbow was fused at a 90-degree angle, which left him unfit for military service. A Caltech dropout, Simmons nonetheless found work during the war as a mathematician with Douglas Aircraft, where he impressed and spooked coworkers with his flat-affect recall for numbers and formulae. (Older brother Edward, a Caltech grad who remained in Pasadena until his death at age ninety-three, was equally bright and eccentric: a stress-gauge device he created earned honors from the New York Academy of Sciences, and in his senior years he became locally famous for conducting his daily business—lucid as ever—wearing tights, dance slippers, and a tutu.)

  Simmons was twenty when he learned to surf in 1939 on a borrowed Tom Blake hollow board. He hopped freight trains to get from Pasadena to the beach. Later, he roamed Highway One looking for waves in a gutted primer-gray ’37 Ford Tudor sedan provisioned with a Boy Scout bedroll, canned soy beans, bagged oranges, rolled-up bathymetric charts and coastal maps, a few porn magazines, and a set of homemade boomerangs. Surfing was an empirical pursuit for Simmons. He never daydreamed about Waikiki, or strummed a ukulele, or wore a Hawaiian shirt—the Polynesian romance of the sport just didn’t register with Simmons—and while he quickly developed into a technically adept surfer, he did so with an aggressive lack of wave-riding style and artistry. Schoolboys ruled the mostly empty lineups during the war, and while Simmons had nothing to do with their banter and roughhousing and endless sex talk (Simmons never married and apparently never dated), he nonetheless became an accepted fixture in the water. A few younger surfers even befriended him; Simmons had a car, after all, and knew how to mix kerosene into his weekly war-rationed supply of gas so as to get every last mile out of a road trip.

  Simmons did an informal boardmaking apprenticeship under Gard Chapin, an older surfer who was just as prickly, but louder and more aggressive. Before the war, Chapin was arguably the most progressive surfer in the state, having developed a technique where he’d drop his back knee to the deck of his board and use the lower center of gravity for added turning leverage. His line of attack was so much higher and sharper than that of his peers that he often made a slanting pass across their wakes, shouting curses the whole time. A carpenter by trade, and one of the coast’s finest boardmakers, Chapin invited Simmons to his Hollywood workshop in 1945, and the two worked on surfboards together after hours; nothing too radical, often just reshaping redwood planks. Simmons became one of a tiny number of shapers working in the Los Angeles area—or anywhere on the coast, for that matter. Surfers began to look him up.

  SAN DIEGO SURFER AND A NEW BOB SIMMONS “SLOT” BOARD, EARLY 1950s.

  In 1946, Simmons bought a copy of Lindsay Lord’s Naval Architecture of Planing Hulls—a daunting three-hundred-page technical manual filled with graphs, tables, and equations on hydrodynamics and structural mechanics. Lord, a naval engineer and architect, was interested in building faster, more maneuverable boats, but Simmons knew that much of Planing Hulls would apply to surfboards, and he kept the book near at hand, Koran-like, at all times. With this, Simmons advanced from boardmaking tradesman to full-fledged designer. Other boardmakers owned Planing Hulls, but no one else could really make heads or tails of it. Simmons liked to deepen their bafflement with long flat-voiced orations on aspect ratios, chord values, and Bernoullian flow. “It was all over my head,” Dale Velzy recalled with a shrug, adding, “and who gives a shit anyway?”—thus making the case for all shapers past and present who work more by intuition than calculation.

  Simmons had a low opinion of the hollow boards, which he dismissively referred to, regardless of use, as “paddleboards.” The plank design was better, he thought, but not by much. Both had blocky rails and a perfectly flat deck. Hull design was never really considered; all boards were similar in this regard, marginally thicker in the middle than at the bow and stern, creating a soft nose-to-tail curve along the bottom surface. An advantage the plank had over the hollow, Simmons noted, was that it could be stripped and reshaped. Keel-shaped fins were now in use, meanwhile; the one big improvement from a decade earlier. As for the Hawaii-developed hot curl board, California surfers, Simmons included, thought it was a “sinker”—not floaty enough—and left it alone.

  Planing Hulls made note of two new building materials: a silica-based filament cloth called fiberglass, and polyester resin. These were used in combination: resin-saturated fiberglass, squeegeed on most surfaces, dried to become a light, strong, durable, waterproof shell. Both products were invented during the 1930s, but it took wartime development before they had a commercial rollout. (“Development” included a bit of industrial espionage, as British spies stole the latest and best resin formulas from Germany and passed them over to the Americans.) Simmons was greatly interested in fiberglass and resin. When he and Chapin began putting Lord’s book to use on surfboards, the first thing they did was strengthen the tips of their boards—always the first place for dings and cracks—with a layer of Owens-Corning fiberglass and Bakelite resin. It took more than a year for the boardmakers to take the next obvious step and “glass” the entire board, top and bottom, front to back.

  * * *

  Simmons and Chapin eventually had a falling out. By late 1947 the younger surfer was working alone, first out of the family garage in Pasadena, and later in a single-room industrial zone workshop in Santa Monica. By then, Simmons was obsessed with the still-new branch of oceanography called wave science; he realized that to produce a better board he needed a better understanding of the dynamic medium it would be used in. He visited Scripps Institution of Oceanography in San Diego to pore over stacks of navy-related research papers, becoming the first surfer with a systemic knowledge of wave forma
tion and interval, swell decay, and how incoming swells respond to points, shoals, and reefs.

  The more he learned, the more Simmons appreciated just how much was being asked of a surfboard. It had to perform at speeds ranging from zero to thirty miles per hour, on a surface that at any give moment could be flat, canted, or convex; solid or churned; glassy, rilled, or chopped. It needed to grip one moment, then go “slippery” the next. On a medium-big day of surf, a board might be ridden on waves ranging in size from three to ten feet, and the difference between the two, in terms of speed and power, was huge. Tom Blake had always kept a few boards at the ready, believing that different conditions required different equipment, but for the majority, carrying multiple boards was neither practical nor popular. Most surfers as a rule had just one.

  Simmons began adjusting the prevailing design components—length and width, rocker (the nose-to-tail curve, as viewed from the side), foil (nose-to-tail thickness), weight, rail curve, fin shape and placement—to see how each variable affected speed, bite, and maneuverability. More often than not, change to a single feature rippled out and affected all the others. Flatten the bottom curve for speed, and the board rode “long” because it had more planing surface in the water. Reduce the fin size to increase responsiveness, and the narrow tail started to lose grip. Things were made even more complicated by the fact that handmade boards were impossible to duplicate. A sixteenth-inch variation along the hull, or an undetectable low spot on the rail line, or an ounce of extra resin in the finish coat—any little thing, and the copy board rode differently than the original. Boardmakers, in other words, never had a dependable baseline.