The History of Surfing

by Warshaw, Matt

  Jose Angel was the most-loved and least-understood of the early North Shore surfers. Gentle and easygoing on land, a favorite teacher at Haleiwa Elementary School, he shifted into a different gear when the surf got huge. The intense moment was what counted with Angel. Successfully riding a giant wave was fine, but there were other ways—right after takeoff, with a Tourette’s-like compulsion, Angel might jump off the tail of his board, tuck into a backward summersault, and skip down the face as the curl pitched overhead and exploded into the trough. “Or he’d take an unbelievably hairy drop,” Grigg recalled, “make the hard part of the wave, and then step off his board and let the thing destroy him.” Some speculated that Angel had psychological problems. But nobody pursued the subject—not among the group, and certainly not with Angel himself—and he died while free-diving for black coral, a probable suicide.

  Greg Noll Leads the Charge at Waimea Bay

  Pat Curren was the insider’s pick as the consummate big-wave surfer, but Greg Noll wanted to carry the banner, and nobody got in his way. He was the biggest, loudest surfer on the North Shore. He was also more focused than the others on making a career from the sport; by 1957 he was producing surf movies and running Greg Noll Surfboards, and he’d soon be publishing a surf magazine. More than that, he was obsessed with riding huge waves—and just as obsessed with the idea of getting recognized for doing it. When Noll unstrapped his board from the top of his car to lead a small and mostly reluctant company of surfers into the lineup at Waimea Bay on the morning of November 7, 1957, he made sure the cameras were rolling.

  Waimea was still considered off-limits to surfers. Even when the ocean was flat and local kids ran and splashed naked along the bay’s waveless edge, it was full of quiet menace. The bay itself, for one thing, was the North Shore’s most pronounced geographic feature—deep and broad, with two jutting black lava rock points connected by a sandy crescent of beach, which in turn backed into a river-bottomed valley. Driving Kam Highway as it followed a mile-long bell-shaped route down one arm of the bay, toward the mouth of Waimea Valley, and back up the other arm, the imaginative surfer had two full minutes to fearfully contemplate the rocky eastern point. Less than a hundred yards off the tip of that point, a wave occasionally developed on a nearshore reef with the kind of shape and form that even a nonsurfer would recognize as compelling—except that it was bigger, thicker, steeper, and more violent than any known surf break in the world.

  Nothing about the Waimea surf has changed over the decades. Smaller waves pass over the reef with no effect at all, while ten-footers foam along the rocky points on either side of the bay, producing a walloping shorebreak that quickly hisses up the steep-canted sand berm. Ten or fifteen times a year the surf is big enough to catch and fold over on the reef. On maybe three of those occasions—when the swell is both massive and clean, and the wind light—Waimea comes into full shuddering glory. Thirty-foot, roughly, is Waimea’s maximum size. Above that, it closes out. Using conventional equipment, a surfer will hit terminal velocity on a twenty-five-footer—give or take. For three or four generations of surfers, starting in the 1950s, the borderline between rideable and unrideable waves was drawn most clearly on a big day at Waimea.

  Simple vertical height has never been Waimea’s full measure, and that was particularly true for those early big-wave riders who cut their teeth at Makaha. Where a big Point Surf ride began with a rolling start before funneling into the explosive Bowl section, the Waimea wave banked off a steep-faced underwater ridge so that the crest lunged up and out, then fell into the trough to detonate like a small atomic device. Everything here was front-loaded. At Makaha you got to ease your way into the hard part of the wave. At Waimea, the ride began with surfing’s version of the swinging trap door. Then it was over, as the wave quickly tapered off into deep water. Ten seconds was a long ride here.

  It was this rushing near-vertical takeoff, more than anything, that kept North Shore surfers on the Kam Highway shoulder, watching, not riding, through the midfifties. Then there was Dickie Cross’ death, and a riptide that pulled visibly seaward through the middle of the bay when the surf hit twenty feet, which looked too fast and strong to paddle against. The bay itself was rumored to be a shark breeding ground. The austere square-walled tower of the Saints Peter and Paul Mission overlooked the break, adding that bit of spiritual severity, and there was a heiau temple located near the mouth of Waimea Valley, with its ancient lava-stone alter where, surfers knew, animals and humans had been ritually sacrificed to Ku, or Lono, or Pele, or whichever of the fearsome assemblage of Hawaiian gods needed to be appeased. “The forbiddeness of the place made it that much more compelling,” Greg Noll later said. “For years we’d drive by Waimea on the way to Sunset or Haleiwa, and sometimes I’d pull over to watch these big, beautiful grinders, then I’d hop up and down trying to convince the other guys, and myself, that Waimea was the thing to do. But the taboos were just too strong.”

  On that November morning in 1957, Noll and his friend Mike Stange had just left Sunset Beach, which was too big to ride, and were driving to Makaha. Noll, as always, pulled over to look at Waimea. Another two Makaha-bound cars stopped as well; the group of surfers—pacing and chattering as they watched the point across the bay—included Pat Curren, Fred Van Dyke, and a chipper young Santa Monica high school senior named Mickey Munoz. The swell wasn’t especially well-groomed, and the wind had already put a light chop on the ocean surface. All three cars were parked on the west side of the bay, opposite the break itself, which made it hard to gauge wave height, but it looked about fifteen or twenty feet—nowhere near full capacity for Waimea; more like good-sized Sunset. Everyone’s voice was loud and adrenalized. Noll and Curren voted to paddle out, while the others hedged, bounced on their toes as they watched another set, shook their heads, and made the case for Makaha. Curren drove off to get his board, which he’d left near Sunset. Noll convinced Stange to be his second, pointing out that they could paddle out and watch from deep water, then decide if it was rideable. Twenty minutes later they were both sitting on their boards in the channel, wondering what to do next. Ten minutes after that, another six or eight surfers had also paddled out.

  The mid-bay current was noticeable, but nowhere near strong enough to pull them out of position, which was a huge relief. Noll paddled twenty yards toward the point, edging into the lineup. The others followed. Not long after that, a midsized three-wave set rolled through, with takers for each, and before the last wave fizzled onto the sand, Waimea was officially on the map as a rideable surf break.

  Who rode the first wave that day? That question remains an unsolved surf-world puzzle. According to Noll, it was Noll, all by himself. Stange said Curren and Noll rode together. Munoz always said the first wave was caught by Harry Schurch, a quiet Long Beach lifeguard. (It probably was Schurch, although he remained steadfastly uninterested in defending the claim. “On the scale of human events,” Schurch finally said for the record in 2008, “I understood the significance of what I had done . . . not really that much.”)

  MIKE STANGE (TOP) AND MICKEY MUNOZ RIDE WAIMEA FOR THE FIRST TIME, 1957.

  The Waimea debut was as crude as it was brave. For reasons that aren’t clear, all those who paddled out that day were underequipped—some even riding their California hotdog models. Here was a wave that plainly called for the kind of long, narrow, specialized big-wave board that more experienced riders like George Downing and Buzzy Trent had been using for years. The day unfolded as a series of cartwheeling wipeouts, interrupted now and then by a stiff-limbed ride to the channel. But proper big-wave form, at this stage, didn’t really matter. Understanding that a wipeout was survivable, and that you weren’t going get pulled to sea in a riptide, or eaten by a shark—these were the day’s real achievements. The Waimea voodoo wasn’t entirely gone. But now it was manageable.

  * * *

  The surfers learned something else that day. Mike Stange noticed it in the lineup that morning before anybody even caught a wave. �
��The road around Waimea was now lined with cars and people,” he later wrote. “Everybody likes the prospect of disaster, and this venture had all the earmarks of one.” More than a hundred people clustered around the bay—probably four times more than had ever gathered on the North Shore at one time to watch surfing—to see how Noll, Curren, Stange, and the rest would fare against Waimea. By dumb luck, the big-wave riders had hit on surfing’s one failsafe draw to the public at large. Mike Stange was being flip, but not that flip, by saying that everyone on hand that morning was hoping for a disaster. In fact, the Waimea crowd yelled and cheered each successful ride. But they gasped and clutched their heads and stood rooted to the spot during a bad wipeout, as 30-pound boards spun like plastic spoons over the crest, and as surfers pitched through the air, touched down with splayed arms and legs, and vanished beneath huge drifts of whitewater. The event played like a minor-key symphony of everyone’s oceanic fear of riptides, sharks, rock-smashing waves, and drowning. Once on the scene, it was impossible to turn away.

  Surf-watching itself was not new. George Freeth and Duke Kahanamoku had long ago proven that surfing demonstrations could hold the public’s rapt attention, and summer beachgoers could spent the better part of an afternoon idly watching the frenetic hotdogging at Malibu. Spectators crammed onto the beach at Makaha for the International Championships, but the big stuff there broke off in the middle distance and was largely obscured by nearshore waves. Waimea introduced tension, immediacy, and proximity to the viewing experience. The dirt shoulder on Kam Highway was curved and raised on both sides of the bay, with excellent sightlines to the break, suggesting nothing so much as theater balconies; the inclined and accessible lava-rock point thrusting out toward the break was like expensive floor seating. Big-wave surfers now had their own dedicated arena, just like bullfighters and Formula One racers.

  Later on that day, after Noll and Curren and everybody else had left, Mickey Munoz and Mike Stange were out alone at Waimea when a rainstorm moved in. Stange, a former high school actor, turned his bearded face into the wind and began shouting passages from Hamlet. Munoz answered back with his own half-remembered Shakespeare lines. It was an adrenaline release and a salute to the day’s events. But as the two surfers shook their fists at the heavens and plunged imaginary daggers into their chests, their actions implied that big-wave riding would from now on be equal parts drama and melodrama. The audience was watching. Play it up.

  Chapter 4: Boom Years–A Massive Swelling Late 1950s–1967

  GIDGET REBEL SURFERS HOBIE ALTER THE POLYURETHANE SOLUT ION GRUBBY CLARK THE WETSUIT JACK O’NEILL ORIGINAL SURF-WEAR JOHN SEVERSON SURFER MAGAZINE HUNTINGTON BEACH PHIL EDWARDS FRANKIE AND ANNETTE SURFING ON TV THE HODAD PROBLEM SURF MUSIC DICK DALE THE BEACH BOYS A GLOBAL SURF BOOM BOB EVANS MIDGET FARRELLY THE 1964 WORLD CHAMPIONSHIPS AMERICA’S EAST COAST SURF WAX SKATE-BOARDING RON STONER THE DUKE CONTEST JOYCE HOFFMAN NOSE RIDING DAVID NUUHIWA BRUCE BROWN THE END LESS SUMMER SOUTH AFRICA

  Terry “Tubesteak” Tracy was the first one at Malibu to notice fifteen-year-old Kathy Kohner as she passed by on the beach during the summer of 1956. After a bit of obligatory heckling, Tracy shouted out, “See you around, Gidget!” Kohner was five feet tall and weighed ninety-five pounds; as the better part of the Western world would soon learn, “Gidget” was a mashup of “girl” and “midget.”

  At Malibu, Kohner learned to surf by trading stacks of peanut butter sandwiches—made herself in the kitchen of her family’s airy suburban ranch house in nearby Brentwood—for the use of whatever board was lying around Tubesteak’s palm-frond beach shack. She had schoolgirl crushes on some of the Malibu surfers, but the Malibu gang viewed her as a mascot, not a love interest. By the end of summer she had her own board and had developed into a competent surfer. Claire Cassidy, Robin Grigg, Vicki Flaxman, and the rest of the original Malibu girls had long since moved on, so Kohner was almost always the only girl in the lineup. Back home, she talked incessantly about her surfing experiences, and at one point told her father that she was going to write a book about it. Frederick Kohner smiled, heard a little bell go off in his head, and offered to write it for her. And so it was that a gushing Malibu-obsessed tomboy escorted surfing to its permanent seat at the long table of American pop culture. When Gidget got her Hollywood close-up in 1959, it was the starting bell for a nine-year surf boom that took the sport from a California-centric phenomenon to a national craze to a hot international export. As the public went nuts for surfing, the wave-riding population would double, then double again, and again, and probably a fourth time. It wasn’t all Gidget’s doing. But this loud, young, hard-charging period in surf history would forever be linked in the popular imagination to a barefoot ingenue with the funny nickname.

  FREDERICK AND KATHY “GIDGET” KOHNER, 1957.

  KATHY AT MALIBU.

  Gidget—“The Little Girl with Big Ideas”

  The elder Kohner’s story is also worth telling. Just as Kathy made herself over as a surfer at Malibu, Frederick did much the same as a writer in America. He was born in Czechoslovakia, the son of a Jewish moviehouse owner, and began to write screenplays after earning a doctorate in film from the Sorbonne. In 1933, he attended a Berlin movie premiere in which all the Jewish-sounding names had been removed from the credits—the work of newly appointed Nazi propaganda minister Joseph Goebbels—and wisely decided to sail for America. The transition wasn’t especially hard; Kohner was married and well-connected, moderately wealthy, and already spoke English. Five years after landing in Hollywood he received an Academy Award screenplay nomination, and by the time he sat down with his daughter to talk about her surfing life at Malibu—and listened in surreptitiously to her phone calls with Mickey Dora and other male friends from the beach, for added slang and anecdotes—

  he had more than thirty movie and television screenwriting credits to his name.

  Gidget is a work of fiction, but just barely. It’s told in the breathless first-person voice of sixteen-year-old Frances Lawrence, who describes her previous wave- and romance-filled summer at Malibu. Kohner hammered out a first draft in just six weeks—not because the effort was gratuitous or rushed, but because in his own way he’d become as enthusiastic about surfing and the beach life as Gidget herself. The language appealed to him (Kohner’s ear for the speech patterns of adolescent girls was nearly as sharp as that fellow eastern European émigré Vladimir Nabokov, whose Lolita came out just a few months before Gidget), and unlike many postwar American adults, he wasn’t put off by the idea that the modern teenager had so much freedom and money and leisure time. Kohner in fact has a great time describing the Malibu surfers in full lounge mode on the beach, as they carefully explain the difference between “a good girl” and “a nice girl,” and holler their approval for Anita Ekberg’s Playboy centerfold. Adults are the real troublemakers in Gidget, and passing reference is made to absent parents, crooked therapists, and abusive husbands. Gidget herself meanwhile races back and forth between her two new loves, Jeff “Moondoggie” Griffin and the Malibu surf, and her voice throughout the book has a humor and bite that is entirely missing in the movie version.

  “Just then the bamboo curtain to the hut was drawn open and this bum came out,” Gidget says early on, trying to sound unimpressed as she gets her first look at the great Kahoona, emerging from his beach shack after a big night:

  What I mean, he wasn’t a bum but then he wasn’t exactly the kind of guy that would drive a girl mad with desire either. He was on the oldish side—around the end of the twenties or so. You got the impression that he had just gotten up or something. Of course all the surfers in this enclosure wore only shorts or Hawaiian print trunks but this superannuated Huckleberry Finn had on a pair of jeans that were cut off just beneath the knees and looked more like an old rag bleached by the sun. Jeez, he was tanned. You’ve never laid your eyes on a tan like that. Like one of those suntan ads you see in magazines—only more so. He had a beard growth of at least three days and he stood there and scrat
ched his stubbles and had this kind of empty gaze like he was full of booze.

  “I WAS JUST A GIRL WHO SURFED, AND THE GUYS AT MALIBU NAMED ME GIDGET. NO BOOK, NO MOVIE, NO MYTH. I WAS ONLY DOWN THERE FOR THREE SUMMERS. THEN I LEFT AND EVERYTHING KIND OF WENT CRAZY.”

  —Kathy Kohner

  G. P. Putman’s Sons published Gidget, the Little Girl with Big Ideas—the subtitle was dropped for later editions—in mid-fall 1957. It earned reasonably good notices (the Times called it “touching and entertaining”), made the West Coast best-seller lists (outperforming Jack Kerouac’s On the Road, which came out a few weeks earlier), and eventually sold more than a half million copies. Kathy Kohner was profiled in the Los Angeles Times less than a month after Gidget hit the bookstores, and two weeks later she and her father were both featured in a Life magazine article, which announced that they had just signed a movie deal—which would eventually become a separate, bigger part of the Gidget phenomenon.

  More than fifty years later, it’s easy to see why Kohner’s original work scored such a bull’s-eye with its nonsurfing audience. Gidget is a quick, easy, fun read, and it contains the double novelty of a surfer-populated beach setting and a female lead who’s tough and cute. Kohner did a fine job of presenting Gidget and her surfer friends as “nice” (the Times reviewer used the word three times in a quick three-paragraph review), but not too nice (all that sex talk, some drinking and smoking, a few mild swear words). This neatly split the difference between the two prevailing views of American youth: the juvenile delinquent and the bright, spirited teenaged “hi-fi citizen.”