The History of Surfing

by Warshaw, Matt

  Straight Outta Suburbia—Here Comes the Rebel Surfer

  Maybe it was his writer’s instincts, or just plain good luck, but Frederick Kohner’s Gidget dropped into a culture that had to an unprecedented degree become fascinated with its teenagers. Very shortly, there were going to be a lot more of them, as the first wave of baby boomers matriculated through junior high school. But it wasn’t just the bulging demographic that caught everyone’s attention. It was the new car-crazy mobility; it was rock and roll; it was the sense of entitlement that came from growing up in a singular age of wealth, ease, and security. Much of this didn’t sit well with older Americans who, having suffered through the Depression and fought two global wars, now expected the modern youngster to be, if not appreciative, at least respectful. Instead, they were apparently surrounded by what J. Edgar Hoover called the “juvenile jungle.” Newspaper headlines announced all manner of teenage assault, murder, drug crimes, and sex scandals, while weekend editions produced grim investigative pieces on reform schools and youth prisons. A 1957 Look magazine cover story on American teenagers promised to explain “why they go wild, why they don’t listen.” The latest popular entertainment certainly offered no relief: B-movies like Girl Gang, Dragstrip Riot, and Rumble on the Docks were cheap to make and bulletproof at the box-office; Jerry Lee Lewis onanisticly pounding away at his piano was just fractionally less shocking than Little Richard with his black-on-black eyeliner and screeched vocals.

  REDONDO BEACH, CALIFORNIA.

  California—ready to pass New York as the nation’s most populous state—had long been identified, in ways good and bad, as “the America to come” and was viewed as a beacon for the young and disaffected. On the West Coast, particularly in Southern California, just about everything and everyone was new, and all was change and motion and speed. Youth could stake claims—to highways, beaches, deserts, bars, nightclubs—and largely invent their own culture. Hot-rodders paired off for stoplight-to-stoplight boulevard drag races, and then spent the rest of the night dodging police. Bikers rolled in loose formation down highways from San Bernadino north to Bakersfield, Hollister, and Oakland. The nation’s runaways, according to rumor, were all hitchhiking for the coast and pouring in by the thousands. But California teens had their boosters, too. A 1957 Good Housekeeping article noted that in suburban Los Angeles “the problem of social behavior [among teenagers] has been largely settled.” Cosmopolitan magazine reported that the state’s youth showed an “exuberance” for school work, and that an all-year course of outdoor exercise had created a kind of teenage West Coast super-race: “bigger and more beautiful . . . longer of leg, deeper of chest, better muscled than other American youngsters.”

  Although surfing was one Cosmo’s body-beautifying outdoor activities, surfers were more likely to be grouped with bikers and hot-rodders than junior division skiers and tennis players. That was fine with surfers. Most mainland wave-riders played the rebel to one degree or another, starting with hairstyle and dress. The “surfer look” meant longer hair—all the way to the collar, in some cases—and to shortcut the natural sun-lightening process, the new style was to treat it with peroxide, ammonia, or bleach, leaving the product in until every last strand had turned blowtorch-white. At the local Salvation Army, surfers pawed through the women’s formal-wear racks in search of long fur coats, to be worn robe-like over surf trunks at the beach.

  Scavengry in general was a prized virtue. “Everything had to be discarded, or cheap, or free,” author James Houston wrote in A Native Son of the Golden West, a surf-world novel set in the 1950s. Surfers’ cars, Houston noted, were “rusty station wagons, rickety Model A’s, abandoned laundry trucks, and taxicabs, and hearses. They had to be old and battered and barely running. The closer to dead the better. The most treasured was the car that could travel the furthest on five cylinders, or four; three tires; or no lights.” Surfers loved the woody wagon because it doubled as a camper and was spacious enough to hold six boards—but cost was the real attraction. Termites got into the exterior wood paneling, and by the late fifties, California’s respectable middle-class drivers were willing to sell their gnawed and pitted cars cheap—ten-year-old woodies were available for $250, $100, even $75.

  For surfers, as with most of America’s youth, the fashion basics consisted of T-shirts and rolled-cuff Levis jeans. Beyond that, style was generally a matter of subtraction. No watches, rings, or necklaces. No shoes, whenever possible. Often no underwear. And the surfers’ trademark less-is-more statement—no shirt. Hardcore surfers have a specific build: thin legs, well-defined but not overblown arms and pecs, and a huge triangular rack of latissimus dorsi—the paddle-driving back muscles. They also have little body fat; partly from the exertions involved with the sport itself, but also from the massive calorie burn that comes from waiting cross-armed and shivering for long minutes between rides. Schoolyard basketball players of the 1950s wouldn’t dream of going shirtless. Neither would runners, softball players, even a good portion of nonsurfing beachgoers. The surfer’s almost perpetual state of semi-nudity—not just in the water, but on the beach and sidewalks, while driving, at the corner store, the market, the laundromat—wasn’t exactly scandalous, but it struck many as perhaps a too-literal example of rude good health. It was also, clearly, an inducement to sex (bikinis were getting smaller, too), which added to the public’s growing discomfort with the sport.

  KEMP AABERG, MALIBU.

  Tweaking that discomfort became a game in itself. Young Greg Noll picked a decomposing anchovy off the beach, dropped it into the pocket of his trench coat, sat down in the back of his eighth-grade homeroom class, and waited to see how long it would take for the stink to waft up to the teacher’s desk. Mooning was a favorite surfer prank. Lots of kids mooned, but surfers had the technical edge; trunks came down easier than pants, and there were no shirttails getting in the way. “Neat,” as slang, didn’t cut it anymore, and the illicit-sounding “bitchin’” became the surfers’ all-purpose word of approval. “Things had changed from the era of the Palos Verdes Surf Club,” Noll later summarized, “when the guys were polite and behaved like gentleman, to something else where we just wanted to raise hell. And it wasn’t a gradual change. It was like someone threw a switch, and all of a sudden guys didn’t give a shit about society, or what other people thought of them.”

  * * *

  The wildest surfers on the coast were from a San Diego beach town called La Jolla. Unlike Malibu, San Onofre, or Palos Verdes, where surfing had to a degree been hidden from the public at large, the sport in La Jolla developed in plain view of an upscale palm-lined neighborhood. South La Jolla’s beautiful four-mile sandstone bluff beachfront is fronted by an extensive reef system. Windansea is the area’s best known wave—a lumbering but consistent two-way peak, surfed for the first time in 1937 by Woody Brown, who soon moved to Hawaii and became one of the original hot curl gang. More famously, Bob Simmons died here in 1954. (La Jolla surfers by that time had built a palm-frond shack just in front of the beach. It eventually became a local landmark used for surfer weddings, christenings, and funerals. In 1998, the shack was recognized as a San Diego Historical Site.)

  The surfers who put La Jolla and Windansea on the map in the late 1950s included Butch Van Artsdalen, a three-sport letterman at La Jolla High School; Hawaiian transplant Bobby “Flea” Patterson, who had small-wave foot speed second only to Dewey Weber; and boardmakers Mike Diffenderfer and Pat Curren, who were already turning out some of the North Shore’s finest big-wave guns. The Windansea gang displayed a genuine dedication to surfcraft, but were better known as surfing’s loudest, roughest, drunkest partiers. Summer barbeques at the shack drew fleets of San Diego police cruisers to break up crowds of five hundred or more. Heading toward Malibu in a bus full of Windansea surfers and hangers-on, Pat Curren was lowered from an open window and suspended, naked and urinating, a few feet above Pacific Coast Highway. They cherished their reputation as fighters. “We’d walk into a party,” a Windansea local o
nce recalled, “and everyone would go, ‘Here come the Windansea guys.’ Nobody ever said, ‘Oh, here come the Malibu guys.’ They were a bunch of pussies and they still are.”

  Baja was just a short drive down the coast, and there were plenty of lost weekends spent in Tijuana’s Long Bar drinking beer and tequila, and passing around a shared vial of amphetamines. Van Artsdalen was called outside on one such occasion to see about a pair of Long Beach surfers being held in the Tijuana jail. From their seats at the Plaza Monumental bullring, one of them had lobbed a tequila-soaked watermelon, which hit the ground next to aging matador Luis Procuna and sprayed red pulp across the front of his suit of lights. It was a small miracle the surfers made it from the bullring to jail without being assaulted by the crowd. Van Artsdalen told the pair not to worry and to give him whatever money they had; he’d gas up, drive back to Windansea, and raise bail from the gang back home. Instead, he returned to the Long Bar and used the money to buy another round.

  If someone drew a line, there was always a surfer who’d want to cross it. In the 1959 film Search for Surf, three La Jolla locals dressed in Nazi stormtrooper uniforms—allegedly stolen from a Hollywood backlot—marched across the sand with blank-loaded automatic weapons, and “shot” anyone wearing a bathing suit. Then they lowered themselves into a nearby storm drain with a pair of Flexi-Flyers and sledded back down to a beach outfall, where friends were standing by cheering and waving a Third Reich flag. One of the Windansea surfers involved said later that goose-stepping across the beach at La Jolla “had nothing to do with anti-Jewish sentiment; it was just the act of putting on a uniform and strutting around.” Greg Noll explained further. “We’d paint a swastika on something, for no other reason than to piss people off. Which it did. So next time we’d paint two swastikas, just to piss ’em off more.” (Surfing’s flirtation with Nazi imagery would return. During the midsixties, renegade youth culture purveyor Ed “Big Daddy” Roth sold tens of thousands of Iron Cross pendants to surfers, and the term “surf nazi” was used throughout the 1980s to describe any young wave-crazed surfer—and that, mercifully, brought the trend to a close.)

  Surfing bred a certain amount of genuine rebelliousness. But mostly it produced a lot of rebel posing. Even with their bleached-blond hair, moldy fur coats, and spray-painted rattletrap cars, America’s teenage surfers as a rule remained contented sons of suburbia. On hot summer days they lobbed water balloons at their girlfriends and had doughnut-eating contests on the beach. They didn’t drop out at a rate any higher than that of the high school population at large. They didn’t carry weapons. They didn’t thrill ride themselves to a gory death on the streets and highways.

  Gidget herself learned as much during her first days with the Malibu gang, when she found out “Lord Gallo” was really a Pomona College student named Stan Buckley. As Gallo explained, a bit sheepishly, the rest of the guys, not counting the great Kahoona, were “all sort of seasonal surf bums.” That included Moondoggie, a rich man’s son who secretly drove a Corvette and who in the end courts Gidget by giving her his fraternity pledge pin.

  Teenage nonconformity during the 1950s, in other words, played out across a broad continuum—and surfers were for the most part way over on one side. While James Dean and Marlon Brando brooded and sulked, surfers grinned and mugged. They’d jump screaming off the pier, drink in the afternoon, and do whatever they could to escort your school-age daughter into the back of the nearest woody wagon. They weren’t fatalistic, dissatisfied, angry, or even moody. The wave-rider’s rebellious act was rarely anything more than an expression of vulgar contentment. Surfers looked out at the rest of the world with a feeling not of oppression, but of superiority. The sport of kings had produced a generation of self-indulgent young princes.

  Hobie Alter and the Business Of Boardmaking

  While plenty of surfing trendsetters scavenged and hustled their way through the 1950s, the fast-growing majority in what was already being identified as America’s fastest-growing sport consisted of teenagers on generous weekly allowances, with decent-paying summer jobs, whose middle-class parents were themselves enjoying an unprecedented amount of discretionary income. Surfers were becoming a market. They wanted to look good on the beach. They were ready to be entertained. But most of all, and most profitably—at least at this early stage of the surf-business game—they needed boards.

  A rudimentary form of surfboard retailing began in 1949, when longtime Southern California surfer/boardmaker Dale Velzy opened a tiny factory-storefront in Manhattan Beach. His operation really took off in 1954, when he opened a bigger shop in Venice Beach, with fellow shaper Hap Jacobs, and they introduced the popular Velzy-Jacobs “pig” model.

  Velzy soon had competition from a twenty-one-year-old boardshaper named Hobart “Hobie” Alter, who was as sober and organized as Velzy was flamboyant and impulsive. Alter was the son of a successful and politically well-connected orange farmer, and he didn’t begin surfing until he was sixteen; the summer of that year he made and sold his first board, and within months he was taking custom orders from friends and diligently plowing balsa out of the family garage in Laguna Beach. He built eighty boards over his first three years; nothing close to Velzy’s numbers, but more by far than any other Orange County shaper. Not only were the boards were well-crafted—even at this early stage, before Alter had come up with a decal, before he even signed his work—they were reasonably priced (at $45) and always delivered on time, unlike the typical Velzy-Jacobs job.

  In 1954, after two or three quiet surveillance trips to Velzy’s shop, and with a $1,000 gift from his father, Alter bought a weedy vacant lot in an unincorporated Dana Point/Pacific Coast Highway “retail district” that featured just two other stores. Alter then built an L-shaped building, with a small but bright glass-fronted retail space and a windowless cement-walled factory attached to the back. He’d been the local boardmaker of choice for the past year or so, and his new business, Hobie Surfboards, was in the black from the moment it opened. The factory was designed to make six boards a week, and that was the production rate almost exactly: Hobie sold fifteen hundred boards between 1954 and early 1958, at a time when the total number of surfers in California wasn’t much above five thousand. Almost every board had a see-through fiberglass finish (as did Velzy’s), which allowed the wood grain to show beautifully, and Alter now ink-stamped a tiny “Hobie” logo on the deck near the tail. The boards had to look sharp, as there was virtually nothing else in the showroom—no beachwear, no posters, no wetsuits; not even decals or surf wax.

  HOBIE ALTER, LAGUNA BEACH, 1952.

  Velzy swooped down from Los Angeles in 1955 to open a new outlet in San Clemente, on the Pacific Coast Highway five miles south of Hobie’s shop, for the express purpose of siphoning off potential customers driving up from San Diego. Velzy liked Alter well enough, and the Hobie boards were impressive. But this was business. More than that, it was the start of the first great boardmaker’s rivalry. Customers lined up behind one brand or the other, giving their allegiance not just to a company but to a form of surfing leadership. Alter was earnest and respectable, and his shop was as clean as Alter himself was clean-cut. Velzy smoked cigars, wore a huge diamond pinky ring, and kept a fat roll of hundred-dollar bills in his back pocket. In 1957, to celebrate a big sales year, Velzy paid cash for a 300SL Mercedes; pulling up in front of his San Clemente shop, he’d swing open the gullwing door and walk toward the factory jingling the keys in one hand and holding a half pint of bourbon in the other.

  Their salesmanship styles differed, too. Alter described his boards in a bit of ad copy as having “evolved through careful and original changes, using proven principles and vast experience.” Velzy, as even his most loyal followers would admit, was a hustler. He’d sidle up to a mink-coat-wearing divorcée looking to buy a board for her teenage son, touch her elbow, lean close, lower his voice, and say, “This here’s a good-riding son of a bitch, ma’am.”

  Meanwhile, as the Hobie-Velzy rivalry grew, Califor
nia’s list of boardmakers expanded by the year: Gordie in Huntington Beach; the Surf Shop in Santa Cruz; Gordon and Smith, the first shop of its kind in San Diego; Greg Noll Surfboards in Manhattan Beach; Bing Surfboards a mile or two down the road in Hermosa; and Dave Sweet Surfboards in Santa Monica, just a few blocks over from shaper Con Colburn’s ill-named Con Surfboards. Still, Velzy and Hobie remained the two boardmakers who really mattered, and Velzy—older and more experienced than Alter, a better craftsman, and charismatic enough to make his rivals seem all but invisible—was by and large regarded as first among equals.

  Except when it came to finances. True to form, Velzy wasn’t just bad with money, but spectacularly bad, as he ignored creditors, snubbed the IRS, and threw away all notices and warnings. Then, in late 1960, his entire mainland operation, five outlets in all, collapsed overnight. Velzy recalled that federal agents “hit all the shops at the same time and padlocked the doors.” Showroom boards, tools and machines, even his beloved gullwing Mercedes—everything was confiscated and put up for auction. Local surfers meanwhile “broke windows [at the shops], got in and took decals, pencil sharpeners, order blanks, posters, whatever they could put their hands on.” Velzy would return to commercial boardmaking, but never again as a kingpin.