Visitors did their part during the East Coast’s formative surfing years. New Jersey got the real laying-on of hands, with Duke Kahanamoku’s wave-riding demonstrations in Atlantic City in 1912, and Tom Blake, twenty years later, giving riding tips to Ocean City head lifeguard John “Bull” Carey.
World War II knocked the wind out of the small but viable East Coast surf scene—just as it did in California, Hawaii, and Australia—but for reasons that aren’t clear, the sport didn’t rebound in the postwar years the way it did elsewhere. Board designs like the pig and the chip were late getting to the East Coast or didn’t arrive at all. Mat surfing was a hit with the kids, and a Blake-style paddleboard or two could still be found leaning up against every lifeguard station. But by the midfifties, East Coast surfing barely had a pulse.
* * *
Things changed, and fast, during the boom. Southern California during this period was Rome to the sport’s growing worldwide empire, but nowhere else were the communi-cations so direct, the supply lines so open, the surf-citizenry so devoted, as the East Coast. From Narragansett to Boca Raton, legions of Atlantic-baptized grems looked west for their surfing equipment, instruction, and entertainment. Local surf entrepreneurs rushed in to service a market that was growing by the week including Ron Jon Surf Shop in New Jersey and Hannon Surfboards in New York; Atlantic Surf and Surfing East magazines. Homegrown items were always second choice, though. Hobie, Jacobs, Weber, Surfer, Katin trunks, O’Neill wetsuits . . . these were the products that sent kids running for the surf shops.
It didn’t hurt retailers that locals had more time to shop. East Coast surf, for a variety of oceanographic reasons—less storm activity, shorter storm fetch, a winter jet stream that typically pulls wave-making fronts away from the coast, a broad continental shelf that drains the energy from incoming swells—is smaller, weaker, and less consistent than it is on the West Coast. Hurricane swells arcing up from the warm equatorial reaches of the Atlantic, usually during autumn, can produce excellent waves, but are often fast-moving and erratic. Nor’easters—like the deadly 1991 Halloween monster that inspired Sebastian Junger’s The Perfect Storm—also pump out good surf, but the winter jet stream will typically route a storm (and its swell) toward Europe. Ten- or twelve-foot surf isn’t unheard of on the East Coast. But at a lot of beaches, particularly those south of North Carolina’s Outer Banks, an entire season might come and go without a single well-groomed eight-foot swell.
Then there were the weather and water temperatures. East Coast summers are hot, clammy, and often waveless. Winters along the upper two-thirds of the Atlantic Seaboard—which lacks a stabilizing feature similar to the Alaska Current in the Pacific—are cold beyond belief. The water at San Francisco’s Ocean Beach, for example, is usually 54 degrees during January. At Virginia Beach, the temperature can drop to a brain-numbing 39 degrees.
The 1960s East Coast surfer—with his depressed stock of good waves and an ingrained belief that the California dudes were holding all the high cards—started out as a creature of deference. “Our surfing boom is a mere cap-pistol shot compared to the West Coast movement,” one Floridian put it. The first quote in Sports Illustrated’s 1966 feature on East Coast surfing was a near-apology. “You have to understand,” Virginia Beach boardmaker Bob Holland said, “that the eastern surf is not all that good.” This was SI’s first surfing cover story, and to bring as much legitimacy to the subject as possible, the accompanying photographs—including the “Surfing’s East Coast Boom” cover shot—were all of California ace Phil Edwards.
On the other hand, East Coasters were more appreciative by far than their western counterparts for the waves that did come through. They were never blasé. This was especially true at Long Island’s Gilgo Beach, forty-five miles by car from midtown Manhattan and home to the debut East Coast Surfing Championships in 1962. The Gilgo surf didn’t so much break as dribble in, and beachfront parking cost a buck. But it was happening. Surfboard-maker John Hannon had a beachfront rental shack, and on summer mornings day-trippers from Queens to West Babylon lined up to rent boards and talk shop with Gerry Stewart—the stunning bikini-wearing blond behind the counter who not only out-surfed most of the guys but out-styled them as well, charging down Ocean Parkway in her Cadillac hearse with a full load of boards rattling around in the back. Gilgo wasn’t much to look at—a parking lot, a few rows of weather-beaten vacation houses, and a long spread of marshland to the west. But San Onofre wasn’t much to look at either. The scene is what counted, and the New York Times wasn’t being flip when it named Gilgo the “Surfing Paradise of the East.”
Unnoticed by the Times, Sports Illustrated, and the rest of the media, the really hot East Coast surf action was mostly taking place in Central Florida, on a long, thin, sticky, suburbanlined ribbon of beachbreak peaks between Daytona Beach and Melbourne. The waves weren’t all that great here, either, but it was a lot warmer, surfing was an all-year activity, and the streets of Flagler, Ormond, New Smyrna, Cocoa Beach, Satellite Beach, and Indialantic were filled with allowance-rich teens, many of them the sons and daughters of a huge aerospace workforce hiving around Cape Canaveral. Boardmaker Dick Catri of Satellite Beach—a decade or so older than the boomers—had already taken on the big stuff in Hawaii and been featured in two or three West Coast surf movies, thus demonstrating that an East Coaster could run with the world’s best. Yet Florida would be put on the map as a surf-talent hothouse by a group of school kids, most from Cocoa Beach. Bill “Flea” Shaw and Mimi Munro were youngest. Shaw, a comically freckled eleven-year-old Huck Finn lookalike, had a show-stealing cameo in 1965’s The Performers, and later that year he was named as the East Coast’s runner-up best surfer by International Surfing magazine. Munro was a noserider with gyroscopic balance; she won the 1965 East Coast Surfing Championships at age thirteen, and the following year finished third in the 1966 World Championships in San Diego. Claude Codgen and Mike Tabeling were both smooth, fluid, stylish teen surfers. Codgen had his own hot-selling West Coast–made signature-model surfboard. Tabeling was the first East Coaster to make the cover of Surfer, and in 1968 he placed runner-up in the U.S. Championships.
Gary Propper of Cocoa Beach, though, was the East Coast’s real boom-era surf star. A hyper white-blond fireplug of a surfer, Propper had blinding foot speed and picked up the latest tricks faster than anybody. At the 1966 East Coast Championships he hotdogged his way past visiting surf icon Dewey Weber to take first place. On land, he talked constantly, hustled and promoted—“Yes, I’m Gary Propper” read the front of his T-shirt—flashed his wide cherubic smile for the cameras, and lost his temper on a dime. A poor swimmer who never got over his fear of big waves, Propper rarely ventured out when the surf was over eight feet. Otherwise he was a model of drive and ambition, channeled for the most part into his surfing career—the Gary Propper signature model Hobie was America’s top-selling board of the decade, by a mile, thanks to Propper’s nonstop efforts on its behalf.
In the early seventies, Propper became the voice of East Coast regional pride. The East Coaster, he wrote, should be “stoked to say they’re from Cocoa Beach, or Belmar, or Long Island,” and not have to “fake it and say he’s from Hermosa or Santa Cruz. It’s a phony trip, putting together pieces of things we dig from California and using them for our East Coast bag. We can still be influenced. But people can also be influenced and impressed by us.” Future generations of East Coasters would accept this idea as their surfing birthright, until eventually the East Coast bag was not only influencing and impressing the surf world at large but dominating it.
* * *
Much of the East Coast boom was of a piece with the West Coast boom. Surf moviemakers flew in from Los Angeles during summer, rented a car, and barnstormed the beach town auditoriums and VFW halls, just like they did in California. A Stomp party was a Stomp party, whether in Mission Beach or Jacksonville. The herding instinct was the same. A Time magazine reporter counted three hundred surfers in the water at Gilgo on a week
end morning in 1965 and “900 more catching their breath on the sand.” In Miami, seventeen thousand people turned out when WQAM disk jockey Roby “Big Kahuna” Yonge ordered all surfers within the sound of his voice to meet at South Beach.
Nevertheless, East Coasters had their own flair. At a beachfront wedding ceremony in Kitty Hawk, North Carolina, the groom stood before God and family in a competition-stripe Weber Surfboards T-shirt, and after kissing the bride, escorted her up an “aisle” made of crossed surfboards. A New England band called the Trade Winds had a minor hit in 1965 with a surf music gem called “New York’s a Lonely Town.” The harmonized chorus, accented with a few notes of sublime Beach Boy–like falsetto, was the lament of the northeastern surfer in winter: “My woody’s outside, covered in snow/New York’s a lonely town, when you’re the only surfer boy around.”
FLORIDIANS MIMI MUNRO
AND GARY PROPPER (FAR RIGHT).
The East Coast was also distinguished by some genuinely hardcore antisurfing legislation. New Jersey’s Asbury Park issued a complete ban on surfing. Same thing for all Boston-area beaches—with the Massachusett’s General Court chipping in with a provision against night-surfing. Town officials in Florida’s Palm Beach Shores didn’t just ban surfing but made surfboard possession itself a misdemeanor offense.
From there, things just got weird. Rhode Island surfers had to use the buddy system, ride only when conditions were deemed safe by the director of natural resources, return to shore in the event of heavy fog, and wear a full wetsuit from December 1 to March 31. The New York State Legislature tried and failed to pass a bill requiring all surfers to wear “a life preserver, lifebelt, or similar device.” Council members in Long Beach, Long Island, passed a measure that gave surfing privileges only to notarized, permit-issued, fee-paying, swim-tested, ID-tag-wearing town residents. Plus every surfer under twenty-one had to get a waiver signed by at least one parent.
It’s hard to understand why East Coast surfing legislation in general was so heavy-handed. Compared to the West Coast, there was more beach to go around, and East Coast surfers in general weren’t nearly as loud, confrontational, or lewd as their West Coast peers. Comfort around the ocean probably had something to do with it. East Coast beachgoing had its own long history, but it wasn’t an art form, the way it was in Southern California, and the ocean here was still regarded first and foremost as place of danger. Surfing laws having to do with buddy systems, life jackets, parental approval, and so on were probably sincere if misguided attempts to keep young people safe from what lawmakers regarded as untenably high-risk behavior.
Pocketbook politics also likely played a role. West Coast teenagers held a lot of economic and cultural power. As thousands of surfers massed on Southern California’s beaches, lawmakers reacted strongly, but so did movie studios, music producers, radio DJs, and TV programmers—all of whom profited hugely from the teen trade. This explains how a place like Huntington Beach could lay down some heavy surf restrictions, then turn around and enthusiastically support the West Coast Championships. California was invested in the business and promotion of surfing. As such, most beach city surfing regulations deemed unreasonable were quickly modified or struck down.
Most East Coast surf laws, on the other hand, remained on the books for years—decades, in some cases. Groups like the Eastern Surfing Association (created in 1967) patiently, state by state, took on antisurfing beach codes and regulations. The going was slow, but the trend was in the surfers’ favor. It was in the political realm, in fact, where East Coast surfers first distinguished themselves from their West Coast counterparts. After all those rallies, petitions, newspaper write-in campaigns, city hall hearings, and grassroots lobbying, East Coasters emerged as the best-organized surfers in the world. “We’re the backbone of the sport,” Florida boardmaker Dick Catri drawled in 1970, justifiably, right after putting together a successful drive to get Sebastian Inlet—the hottest off-limits break in the state—opened to surfers.
GERRY STEWART (RIGHT), GILGO BEACH, 1963.
Stocking Up: The Rise of the Surf Shop
The late-fifties surf shop was an exercise in minimalism: a countertop and a few boards in a bare-walled showroom attached to a fumy garage-sized workspace stocked with a drum of resin, a roll of fiberglass, some cardboard mixing buckets, and two or three sets of boardmaking racks. This was all reconfigured during the boom. By the midsixties, surf shops were mostly clean (if never fully sanitized), decorated, and fully provisioned. The “gone surfing” sign that used to hang from a locked front door was retired. Normal business hours were generally kept. Credit cards were accepted, layaway programs available.
What hadn’t changed was the idea that the shop had to function as a clubhouse and salon as well as a factory-retail outlet. A hot local surfer or two could usually be found on premises, either making boards or working the counter; gremmies dutifully shuffled in after school or on weekends as much to be in the presence of greatness as to check out the new merchandise. A dozen or so name-brand shops were fairly good size; in 1966, Greg Noll moved his operation to a custom-made, nineteen-thousand-square-foot building in an industrialized area of Hermosa Beach. Most shops, though, were small and located in their town’s medium-low-rent commercial district. Attrition was high, but it seemed that for every two shops that closed, three new ones opened. Southern California alone had fifty surf shops in 1963; by 1967 the number was probably closer to seventy-five. They all smelled like resin and neoprene and had linoleum or cheap-carpet floors, paneled walls trimmed with faded surf posters, and surf movie handbills taped to the front window. Two or three racks of gleaming new house-brand boards were positioned at the front of the showroom; a haphazard collection of used equipment could be found along the back wall. Competition trophies won by the shop’s team riders were displayed on a shelf, usually behind the counter, along with a set of thumbtacked 8x10 prints of the same guys ripping up the local break, or better yet, charging the big stuff in Hawaii.
The number and diversity of surf goodies was developing nicely: surfboard car racks, ding repair kits, swimfins, surfwear basics (trunks, shorts, T-shirts, sandals), wetsuits, 8mm home-projector surf reels, a modest selection of books (Peter Dixon’s The Complete Book of Surfing sold more than 300,000 copies), posters, stickers, magazines, wax, surf calendars, and more.
Huntington had more shops than any other beach town in the world, but Hermosa had the most big-name outfits—Noll, Jacobs, Bing, and Rick. Dale Velzy was still on the scene, but never regained his commercial position after the IRS shut him down in 1960. Hobie continued to produce the most boards and had the best reputation; by 1966, the company had four shops in California and Hawaii, and another two dozen authorized dealers, mostly on the East Coast.
The surf shop was a growth industry, like everything else having to do with the sport. It was also a case study in boom-time economic relativism. Unit sales on Beach Boys LPs, Jantzen trunks, and Beach Party tickets were tallied by the hundreds of thousands. Hobie, in 1965, sold less than seven thousand boards.
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The sport’s cheapest and best-selling item by far was surf wax. It came in a three-ounce square about the size of a drink coaster, but it was thicker and fit nicely into the palm. Wax was rubbed across the deck of the board for traction—a one-minute task that had become a presurf sacrament. “Surfing is a kind of religion,” as one true believer phrased it, “and surf wax is like our communion wafer.”
Grip had always been a fierce little surfing problem. Too little and the ride ended with a slip and a splash. Too much and the rider’s feet didn’t have the necessary free play across the deck and any skin-to-board contact areas were rubbed raw. In the 1920s and 1930s, you might score a pattern onto the deck with a hammer and chisel and hope for the best. Or put a dusting of sugar across a still-wet coat of varnish and manfully accept all those angry cherry-red patches of skin on your thighs, knees, stomach, and chest. Or glue on a thin layer of hard-rubber matting—and, again, take
the pain.
In 1935, a Palos Verdes teenager named Alfred Gallant ran across his mother’s just-waxed hardwood floor and realized that the half-tacky hold beneath his socks might be just the thing for a surfboard. Floor wax, it turned out, wasn’t quite right. A kitchen pantry staple called Parowax, used mostly for canning jams, did the job—even though it was brick-hard and required a strenuous fifteen or twenty minutes of rubbing to work up a decent coating. It took a while to catch on, but Parowax eventually became a surf-world essential. Aussies could also get wax from the local hardware store, where it was chiseled off a huge block and sold by the ounce.
Surf Wax and Competition Surf Wax—little more than dye-treated, repackaged Parowax—were sold in American shops by 1964. Waxmate, the first specially formulated surf wax, arrived in 1967. It was the best aftermarket product of the year: malleable in a way that Parowax never was (thanks to a top-secret softening agent later revealed as 30-weight Pennzoil), available in both warm- and cool-water versions, and cut with enough bayberry oil that a single bar, removed from its paper-and-cellophane wrapping, could scent an entire room. An aggressively marketed epoxy-based aerosol spray called SlipCheck, designed as a wax undercoat (or a wax replacement for the board’s nose section) was introduced at the same time, but failed utterly. SlipCheck was rough on the skin, and that was part of it. But mainly, surfers had already been drugged and seduced by the smell of Waxmate.
The History of Surfing Page 33
