Aloha and welcome to this LEGENDARY SURFERS chapter on surfing as it was, circa 1956.
Contents
Contents
Malibu Boards
Dave Sweet‘s 1st Commercial Polyurethane Foam Boards
Kenny Price’s Removable Fins
Hobie Alter & Polyurethane Foam
Quigg Paddleboards, August 1956
Dewey Weber 1
The Waterman Tradition (Mike Doyle 4a)
Tiki Mike (Mike Doyle 4b)
Doyle’s Messerschmidt (Mike Doyle 4c)
Lifesaving Down Under
Malibu Boards Seed Down Under
Surfari Down Under
Malibus Made Down Under
Surfing on Television, Later ‘50s
Greg Noll‘s 2nd North Shore Winter
Wave Spies
Huge Sunset, November 1956
Greg Noll‘s Hale`iwa Boards
Greg Noll Surfboards
Flippy Hoffman at Castle Rock
“There was a time there when nobody surfed…”
-- Phil Edwards on Hobie Alter’s development of polyurethane foam 1
“Now, suddenly, a new era had begun. The foam boards were unlimited. We could, in shaping them, put rocker effects on them and give them flying shape...”
-- Phil Edwards on the first foam boards by Hobie 2
“By the time I was fifteen [1956], I’d already accepted the old tradition of the watermen as my own, and I set about the long process of mastering each of the waterman’s skills. The tradition
of the waterman comes from Polynesia and is different from the tradition of the sailor. The waterman’s skills include surfing, paddling, rowing, and rough-water swimMeng. He might also be skilled at diving, fishing,
spear fishing, tandem surfing, lifeguarding, and handling outrigger canoes. But he isn’t necessarily skilled at sailing or navigation. The difference is that a waterman focuses on the coastal waters, while the sailor’s
realm is the deep water. By reading about the early days of surfing, I learned that the watermen who came before me didn’t just go to the dive shop or the surf shop and buy the latest thing on the rack. They designed
their own boards, their own dive gear, and their own outrigger canoes. They were constantly thinking and experimenting with other watermen about ways to perfect their gear. Nobody knew then how a surfboard should be designed.
The only way to find out what worked and what didn’t was to try it.”
-- Mike Doyle on the waterman tradition 3
“A lot of the California surfers from the Forties had served in the military in Hawai`i, where they’d learned about surfing and Hawai`ian culture. When they came back to California, they painted
girls on their surfboards, just like Duke Kahanamoku, the great Hawai`ian master; they had luaus on the beach, and carved Hawai`ian tikis for their bamboo huts. Their whole beach scene was set up just like it had been in
Hawai`i.”
-- Mike Doyle on Tiki Culture 4
“It was a tremendously prestigious thing to be a member of your local volunteer surf club.”
-- Nat Young on the Australian Surf Lifesaving Movement 5
“For about two years after that trip, I got letters every week from guys in Australia, pleading for pictures, templates, design information. It was a new frontier for them... It didn’t take the
Australians long to get on with the thing. The end result is that they have since produced some of the best surfers in the world.
“From the movies I took, I made my own surf film. That helped get surfers up here interested in surfing down there. Before that there wasn’t any traffic back and forth between Australian and
American surfers.
-- Greg Noll on the introduction of the Malibu Board to Australia 6
“On one particular show, we’d gone through several questions before Malone announced that he’d take one last call. Malone was in one of his distracted moods, so the question goes right
by him. He turns to me and says, ‘We have a caller who wants to know what the surfing term “beat off“ means.
“Right there on the air. The kids in the audience rolled in the aisles, hooting and laughing, and Malone gets red in the face. As soon as the words had left his mouth, he tried to stuff them back
in. I say, as calmly as possible, ‘Gee, Tom, that’s a new one on me.’
“For the next month, everywhere I went, I got razed about the new surfing term, ‘beat off.’
“After becoming established as a surfboard manufacturer and surf film producer whose films were shown on TV, all of a sudden all the teachers and counselors who wanted nothing to do with my ass during
school were wanting to kiss it. They’d be interviewed by a newspaper of magazine and their tone would change. ‘Oh yes, I knew Greg Noll. He was in my class. Fine, upstanding young man.’ What bullshit.”
-- Greg “Da Bull” Noll 7
“We had no idea during those first few winters that the North Shore would become the surf center of the planet Earth. We were just kids, blundering along. I was learning about surfing big waves and
getting hooked on them. All this time, Waimea was waiting for me...”
-- Greg Noll 8
“It sounds simple. But until 1956, the fear element was overwhelming, and most stayed away from the soup, if possible. Now we could forget about the rip taking us seaward on big days.”
-- Fred Van Dyke on pioneering the North Shore 9
“At one point, Flippy grabs an air mattress and says, ‘See you guys on the beach!’ and leaps into the water, and takes off on that very wave. They were almost vertical on the face, and
the wave broke with this great, thunderous crash. It sheared off the cabin and sank the boat. The rest of them all ended up in the water, and pretty soon they saw Flippy on the beach. He’d gone through the shorebreak,
which was about 20 feet and moving boulders the size of automobiles. Flippy’s directing them, ‘Over here!’ Well, they all ended up making it. Barely. It was just a scary, scary deal.
“I tend to believe the size of a wave can be mutated by the number of years that have gone by. But only a few years after those guys got sunk, I dived on the wreck. I found the screw, fuel tanks and
other wreckage on the bottom in about 60 feet of water. So that wave must have been about 60 feet.”
-- ” Bev Morgantalking about Flippy Hoffman at Castle Rock 10
Political highlights of 1956 included the beginning of the Cuban revolution lead by Fidel Castro and the emergence of Martin Luther King, Jr. as a leader in the campaign for desegregation in the United States.
Both were overshadowed, however, by events in Egypt. After Egyptian president Abdul Nasser was informed by Britain and the U.S. that they would not participate in the funding of the Aswan High Dam, Nasser seized the Suez
Canal. British and French forces bombed Egyptian airfields on October 31, but U.S. and U.S.S.R. pressures effected a cease-fire on November 6th. France and Britain withdrew and U.N. forces cleared the Suez Canal
for international traffic.11
In literature, the novel about suburban intrigues Peyton Place was published. The Pulitzer Prize in 1957 would go to Senator John F. Kennedy‘s Profiles in Courage also published in 1956. Popular films included The King and I and The Ten Commandments. The musical My Fair Lady could be heard everywhere.12
Music was alive with Rock ‘n Roll, as was dance. Elvis Presley rose to prominence with songs like “Blue Suede Shoes,” “Hound Dog,” and “Don’t Be Cruel.” Other
popular songs included “I Could Have Danced All Night,” from The King and I and “Que Sera, Sera.”13
In the surfing world, Malibu Boards were most prized, the golden age of Malibu was well underway, polyurethane foam experiments were in their infancy, and the California guys ruled O`ahu’s North Shore.
Malibu Boards
There is an excellent example of the Malibu Chip board in the collection of Mike McDonald of Malibu. Shaped by Matt Kivlin around 1955, it’s 10’3” long by 22 1/2” wide, it’s
one of a group of wider, more-progressively shaped balsa boards that were being made at that time by the likes of Joe Quigg, Bud Morrisey, Dale Velzy as well as Kivlin.14
When Matt and Leslie Williams -- both considered to be Malibu‘s best riders of the day -- began riding Quigg-shaped balsa boards and others modeled after it -- smaller, lighter balsa boards sealed with
fiberglass and resin -- all surfers within sight took notice.15
When Hawaiians saw these new balsa “chip” boards, the boards quickly became known as “Malibu Boards,” after the testing ground where they were first ridden.16
Dave Sweet‘s 1st Commercial Polyurethane Foam Boards
According to Grubby Clark -- the man who would become the single greatest source for polyurethane foam blanks for surfboards -- it was Lorrin “Whitey” Harrison who was the first one to build a
surfboard out of polyurethane foam, circa 1955.17 The first one to do so and make commercial polyurethane foam boards available was Dave Sweet.18
C.R. Stecyk wrote it was May 5, 1956 when Sweet first showed his work off in public:
“Dave Sweet, an idiosyncratic designer, paddles out on an unassuming looking marbleized abstract pigmented opaque surfboard. Astute local observers notice the change in Dave’s surfing style and
closely examine the stick discovering it to be unbelievably light in weight. Offering no explanations, Dave leaves with the mysto-prototype board. Insiders realize that Sweet has mastered the foam process. Next week he
will offer the first commercial polyurethane foam surfboard for sale. It will be two years before he has any competitors. Paradoxically, Sweet will never take public credit for his innovation. Not even such close friends
as Joe Quigg can get him to admit it. Even Dave Rochlen who vividly recalls having shaped foam blanks for Sweet back in ‘53 is unable to get Dave to discuss his contributions.”19
Kenny Price’s Removable Fins
It was George Downing that first came up with the first true removable fin. His Slot Board was basically just a Hot Curl board with a bottom slot built-in for attaching a fin or going without. It was this
board that convinced Woody Brown to re-embrace the skeg, which he had invented, on his own, shortly after Tom Blake had been the first one to attach one to a board. On September 23, 1956, the evolution of removable skegs
went one step further. C.R. Stecyk described the moment:
“The great kelp invasion has choked up the point. The only fins that will work in these clogged conditions are severely raked Oolie fins. Local board designers are openly perplexed as they desperately
try to come up with the best performance fin/board combinations. Jimmy Fisher and Tom Morey are playing chess. In between moves, Tom picks out progressive jazz drum patterns on his Martin ukulele. Suddenly, Kenny Greenwater
Price runs up excitedly holding an attache case within which he claims to have ‘the answer.’ Those present are somewhat skeptical, since they are all keenly aware of Price’s arcane sense of humor. In fact,
didn’t this master of mayhem steal the stuffed chicken from atop Fisher’s hearse just a couple of days before? Kenny patiently displays his latest project, a removable fin system which has been ingeniously crafted
from metal angle irons and fiberglass. Opening the case, Price reveals a set of different shaped fins with assorted rakes. The most brilliant concept he explained was how you could instantly change a fin by simply unscrewing
the wing nut at its base. On that day, Price, Billy Al Bengston, Morey, Fisher and Hoyle Schweitzer began taking turns experimenting with the quick change fin systems. In following years, Price and Bengston would be acknowledged
as leaders of the international art scene. Morey would pioneer a number of provocative surf design innovations (including a fully realized, high-tech, manufactured, interchangeable fin system, the first sprayable wax replacements
and, of course, the body board). Schweitzer would wait a decade more before unveiling his most dramatic contribution, the windsurf board.”20
Hobie Alter & Polyurethane Foam
After Phil Edwards came back to California from his first trip to the Islands -- “a kid alone,” as Ewards put it. “I flew back home considerably thinner and a great deal more knowledgeable
about wild wave riding.”21
“In my off-hours from Oceanside Junior College,” continued Edwards, “I began to experiment with boards... The mood had begun to hit California: Quigg and Velzy were on parallel courses,
turning out shapes and sizes of boards. We had begun to glass them -- working in fiberglass up to our armpits. Between all of us, we had ruined the inside of more garages up and down the California coast than anybody...
“Then came the revolution.
“It was subtle: We had been getting our surfboard blanks from Ecuador... Two thirds of the board -- about 35 pounds of it -- were ending up in shavings on the floor. Time was involved; precious time
when the surf was up and there were horrible moments when we would hover uncertainly over a board, knives poised in the air, looking first at the board and then at the open door where someone stood impatiently, saying, ‘Jeez,
you guys. Come on! The surf is good.’
“And it was an expensive process.
“Enter Hobie Alter... He had seen polyurethane foam before, and one day he stood looking deeply into a cup of the stuff. He saw that (1) its ratio of strength to weight was enormous and (2) that it
wouldn’t soak up water like balsa wood.”22
Here, Phil Edwards gets dramatic and maybe a little too exaggerated as to what took place:
“‘Surfboard!’ mumbled Hobie, and took his cup to a chemical company. ‘Dandy,’ they said, ‘except that you can’t control the stuff in the size you want. This cup
is about as far as you go, kid.’
“So Hobie did exactly what they told him not to do. He built a mold for the foam -- roughly the size of a surfboard -- and poured in a batch. He blew out the side of the garage.
“‘So much for the expansion properties of this junk,’ he muttered. Of course, there was a little trouble with his father about the garage...
“Hobie built a stronger mold and poured in another batch.
“He blew up the mold. He built more; blew them apart...
“He constructed some molds of plaster of Paris and added a touch of concrete. And Gordon Grubby Clark -- who had been to engineering school and knew all the right equations -- began to work along with
Hobie, figuring out the principles of molds and mixtures of foam...
“There was a time there when nobody surfed.
“Hobie was afraid Velzy or someone would find out what he was doing. It is rather hard to keep a secret with a garage that has only three walls, for one thing. So he and Grubby rented a shack high
up in a canyon outside town. It was the kind of weather-beaten, wind-scrubbed shack where the cowboys always hold the rancher’s daughter captive while they’re waiting for the ransom.
“They painted all the windows black and worked in a kind of eerie darkness.
“Finally, they came upon the idea of molding the boards in halves -- cut down the long way -- which proved more stable. They added strips of balsa or redwood in the center for stiffener, and we began
to turn out pioneer boards.”23
At one point, according to Edwards, “Hobie took a finished board up to Laguna, on a cliff high overlooking the sea -- and threw it over the side. We all craned over and looked down at it. It had bounced
on the rocks a few hundred feet below -- but it wasn’t in bad shape.
“Still, there were problems to overcome. Mixtures, for one thing.
“Even nicely shaped and fiberglassed, the boards had a tendency to expand in the sun. Sometimes they got nicely rounded, like giant loaves of French bread. Hobie began painting test boards black --
to soak up more sun -- and stashing them out on rooftops all over town. Then a few days later we would make the rounds and see how fat they had grown. Some of them were like cigars; but the mixtures were starting to take
shape.
“Hobie came upon the system of forming the molds under high pressure; it made them more stable. And by this time the copiers were after him. Many of them were going through the same agonies of experimentation
and getting less stable boards.
“With the balsa boards, we had started with 40-pound blanks; had cut them to 15 pounds -- then built them back to 35 pounds with the rest of the work.
“Now, suddenly, a new era had begun. The foam boards were unlimited. We could, in shaping them, put rocker effects on them and give them flying shape...
“The other problems were minor.
“The early boards, for example, tended to be full of air voids. Great for floatability -- but not the thing for toughness. We would shine a strong light over them; crawl under the boards and look
up through them, and pop the bubbles with a screwdriver. Then we would patch up the holes... Trouble is, with all those air voids, you can’t get that splendid clear-foam effect and the boards must be painted solid colors.”24
You see these painted boards in Bud Browne surfing films of the era and some of the early films of Greg Noll, John Severson and Bruce Brown.
Quigg Paddleboards, August 1956
While Malibu Chips -- the fiberglassed balsa boards -- ruled California and the foam process was still being experimented with, still other boards were being shaped by masters:
“Joe Quigg built the last in his series of three hollow balsa paddleboards in August 1956,” wrote C.R. Stecyk; “many officianados feel them to be the ‘Stradavari’ of their genre.
Quigg considered #3 the best. Measuring 18’8” in length by 17” in width, this 23 lb. wonder is an amazingly complex, continuously curving form, incorporating no flat areas or straight lines. Original owner,
Tom Zahn, won the Catalina/Manhattan Pier races in ‘58 and ‘60 on it, setting a record which stood for years. The impeccably crafted balsa skinned bull is so thin and delicate that when placed in front of the
sun you can clearly see the shadows of objects on the other side. Hold it and you become aware of its precise balance. Place it in the water and you experience the sheer perfection of its glide and over all hydrodynamics.”25
“In 1956,” wrote surf historian Gary Lynch in a profile on Joe Quigg for Longboard magazine, “Buzzy Trent ordered a 12’ big wave board from Quigg
and in his letter asked Quigg to build a board that would be like a ‘Sabre Jet‘ or an ‘elephant gun.’ From this letter and board came the term ‘gun’ to describe big wave surfboards. Today,
most modern ‘guns‘ are pintails.”26
Dewey Weber 1
Out of the South Bay, Dewey Weber started wowing people onshore with his showmanship. In 1956, he was riding a Velzy 7’4”.27
“The first day I surfed Malibu I was 11 years old,” recalled Dewey Weber to Dewey Shurman. “Billy Meng, a very historical guy in surfing who has gotten very little publicity, loaded me
up in his ‘34 Ford pickup and took me to Malibu. We surfed, and then he got me a poor boy sandwich and said, ‘You call this a poor boy.’ And he handed me a bottle of Coors and said, ‘That’s
a surfer’s beer, and you may have half that beer.’ And, Christ, that really lit my life on fire.”28
The Waterman Tradition (Mike Doyle 4a)
One of the guys who would make a name for himself in the late 1950s, at Malibu, was Mike Doyle. In his autobiography, Doyle wrote of the period just before he first rode Malibu, when he wanted to be accepted
by the South Bay surfers:
“By the time I was fifteen [1956], I’d already accepted the old tradition of the watermen as my own, and I set about the long process of mastering each of the waterman’s skills. The tradition
of the waterman comes from Polynesia and is different from the tradition of the sailor. The waterman’s skills include surfing, paddling, rowing, and rough-water swimMeng. He might also be skilled at diving, fishing,
spear fishing, tandem surfing, lifeguarding, and handling outrigger canoes. But he isn’t necessarily skilled at sailing or navigation. The difference is that a waterman focuses on the coastal waters, while the sailor’s
realm is the deep water. By reading about the early days of surfing, I learned that the watermen who came before me didn’t just go to the dive shop or the surf shop and buy the latest thing on the rack. They designed
their own boards, their own dive gear, and their own outrigger canoes. They were constantly thinking and experimenting with other watermen about ways to perfect their gear. Nobody knew then how a surfboard should be designed.
The only way to find out what worked and what didn’t was to try it.”29
Writing about what he sees, today, Doyle went on:
“But the waterman tradition seems to be dying out with surfers today. A lot of younger guys are focused only on surfing, and they want to be masters of the sport before they’ve learned the fundamentals.
There are some good surfers today who can barely swim. And I don’t see much respect for the previous generations of surfers. When I was coming up, I didn’t laugh at the older surfers on their redwood planks,
because it thrilled me to think what they’d been able to accomplish on those old boards. They could paddle way outside and catch waves that surfers today wouldn’t even try for. And instead of being stuck in one
place on a wave, they could drive through the flat parts and pick up a new section. What a thrill it must have been to stand up on a big plank like that -- like riding a Cadillac downhill. I’m sure those huge redwood
boards were as much fun as the little five-foot sticks that came into style in the 1980s and ‘90s. And to my way of thinking, the old style of surfing was more beautiful and creative than all the slashing and tearing
that came along later. I realize that styles change, and that the slashing style fits the contemporary state of mind. But I think that surfers today are missing something really important when they don’t try to learn
from the watermen of the Thirties and Forties.”30
Tiki Mike (Mike Doyle 4b)
There’s a story Mike Doyle tells of this time in his life when he was nicknamed “Tiki Mike“:
“A lot of the California surfers from the Forties had served in the military in Hawai`i, where they’d learned about surfing and Hawai`ian culture. When they came back to California, they painted
girls on their surfboards, just like Duke Kahanamoku, the great Hawai`ian master; they had luaus on the beach, and carved Hawai`ian tikis for their bamboo huts. Their whole beach scene was set up just like it had been in
Hawai`i.”31
“Subconsciously,” writer of surf culture and music Domenic Priore wrote about tikis, “soldiers returning to San Pedro from World War II’s Pacific Theatre brought tiki culture with
them. Subversively, they introduced this provacative art to an American culture still dominated by Victorian and historically puritan values. The party had begun.”32
Tiki is a westernization of the Hawaiian word ki`i, which meant: image, statue, picture, drawing, diagram, illustration, likeness, cartoon, idol, doll or petroglyph.33
“The Polynesians revere them [tikis] to this day,” a 1994 BBC documentary Nomads of the Wind noted, “because they hold the spirits of their ancestors.
The early voyagers carried tikis with them to sea – for protection and guidance in their new homes.”34
“One visible example of the Tiki’s connection to surfing still exists,” wrote Priore. “Though the surf is mild and its carved images are restored by artists, there are about 20 Ki`i
(Tikis) on the palace grounds at Pu`uhoua O Haonanau (The Place Of Refuge), including two in the water. It’s been saved as a National Historic Park, and in late June they hold a traditional feast. These Heiau remain
as the link between the surfing sacrament of the ancients and the benedictions laid to Tiki at the behest of the hemispherically serene California surf cat. Dig…”35
“Because I was landlocked,” Mike Doyle continued in telling his own story of Tiki Mike, “I had to work hard at creating my own surf scene out in Westchester. Though I’d never been
to Hawai`i, I’d seen pictures of the tikis, the Polynesian wood carvings that represented ancient gods, and I got caught up in the symbolism and magic of these tikis. Because I was lonely, vulnerable, and in many ways
miserable, I figured I needed the magic of the tikis as much as the Hawai`ians did. I took two periods of wood shop, the only class except art that I really enjoyed in high school, and spent most of my time carving wooden
tikis. I started wearing them on leather thongs around my neck, like magic talismans, to ward off... [people who were] making my life difficult. I talked my mother into painting a beautiful full-length totem pole on my surfboard.
And one day I dragged an old telephone pole back to my house and started carving it into a big totem; when it was finished, I mounted it in our front yard.
“Deep down I suppose I hoped my tikis would win me some respect from the 22nd Street Gang, the group of guys I most wanted to be a part of. I thought the tikis would identify me as a true and devoted
surfer who was spiritually in tune with the Hawai`ian gods. But the first time I wore my tikis to Manhattan Beach, Dewey Weber, Mike Zuetell, and all the other bitchin’ guys humiliated me. One of them grabbed the tiki
around my neck, took a hard look at it, then flung it back at me. ‘Jesus, Mike, that’s really hokey. Did your mother buy that for you?’
“‘No,’ I said. ‘I carved it myself.’
“From then on I was ‘Tiki Mike,’ the laughingstock of the South Bay.”36
Doyle’s Messerschmidt (Mike Doyle 4c)
“When I turned fifteen and a half,” continued Doyle, writing about how he just didn’t seem to fit into the scenes surrounding him, “my mother let me buy a Messerschmidt, a three-wheeled
motorcycle with a bubble top. It was legally considered a motorcycle, but it could ride two people, one in back of the other. The whole bubble top would open up, like the cockpit of an airplane. I made a little rack for
mounting my surfboard on top of the bubble, and I was set. I had my own wheels.
“The first time I took my Messerschmidt down to Hermosa Beach, I parked it next to the sand, took my totem board off the bubble top, and went out surfing. While I was in the water, the 22nd Street
Gang pushed my Messerschmidt onto the sand and turned it upside-down. When I came out and saw what they’d done, I just about broke down and cried. No matter where I was, at school or at the beach, I just didn’t
fit in. I was frustrated and unhappy, and I felt so alone.”37
“I grew up in Westchester, by the L.A. International Airport,” Doyle recalled in Greg Noll‘s book Da Bull: Life Over the Edge. “In those days that was considered real inland. No one surfed at my school but me.
“I first became aware of surfing in 1956, at age twelve.38 Up until then, I skimboarded and even rode shorebreak waves on the same skimboard.
Early one morning at the Manhattan Beach Pier, when the surf was four to five feet I saw all these guys out riding waves -- I couldn’t believe it. That was when I started getting stoked on surfing. I went every day
to watch and to retrieve lost boards so I could get in a quick paddle before one of the surfers swam in for his board. Just touching these surfboards gave me a thrill. I had bruises all over me from these lost boards hitting
me, and I couldn’t care less.
“Later I became aware of who these guys were and their riding styles -- Dale Velzy, Greg Noll, Bob Hogan, George Kapu. Velzy was shaping and glassing boards under the pier. I became an avid watcher,
to say the least. I remember looking in each of their cars in the parking lot. One day I saw a big shiny trophy in Bob Hogan’s ‘41 Ford. On that same day, I saw Greg Noll turn around and ride a wave backwards.
Shit! I thought I’d die with excitement.
“Greg was skinny then, around nineteen, I’d guess. About five years younger than the rest of the guys. He was hot. You could sense it just watching him.”39
Lifesaving Down Under
Ever since Duke Kahanamoku had introduced stand-up surfing to Australians in 1915, wave riding grew as a sport within the country. Australian surfing during the first half of the Twentieth Century was fostered,
in part, by the strength of the Australian Lifesaving Movement.40
“It was a tremendously prestigious thing to be a member of your local volunteer surf club,” Nat Young wrote. “The new probationary member had to undergo a series of difficult tests in order
to gain his bronze medallion, which meant that he had qualified in the world’s most efficient method of rescue and resuscitation. Upon paying his club fees he was assigned to beach patrol duty on a roster system which
required him to sit on the beach for hours every weekend, keeping watch on the swimmers, setting up flags to show where it was safe to bathe, and occasionally rescuing people who got into difficulties in the surf.
“The surf was so new and exciting to the public in those days that the patrols were kept busy blowing their whistles at straying swimmers, dabbing iodine on crying kids’ bluebottle stings, sounding
the shark alarm, and rescuing the odd maiden in distress. As a reward for all this vigilance service the recruit gained access to ‘the club.’ By this stage almost every beach that had a surf club could also boast
a club house, which was usually paid for by donations from grateful rescued victims or handouts from smart [city] council officials who were willing to pay this small concession instead of having to employ lifeguards. Spending
time inside or around the club house was the best thing about being a member. It was here that you learnt how to walk and talk like a lifesaver, and if you proved yourself in the social aspects of the club you might even
be accepted into the boat keg on Sunday afternoon. Surf club men were traditionally big drinkers, and it was usually during one of these sessions that the recruit was introduced to the more social aspects of being a member.
Quite often the first thing that happened was the recruit was given a nickname. Everyone in the club had one, and the new name was usually a slingoff at some aspect of his physical appearance -- protruding teeth, big feet,
a big nose, the colour of his hair -- but the important question was whether or not he could take the name and the ‘baiting’ that went with it. For instance, one of the things the probationary member had to take
in his stride was having the hose periodically turned on him and his mates while they sat in the sun talking to the girls or watching the beach football!”41
“When I was a kid,” Nat Young wrote about the impact these nicknames often had on one’s life, based on his own personal experience in a later era, “I used to hang around the Collaroy
Surf Club, but I was too young to do patrol duty. At the time they called me Nat (it should be Gnat) because I looked so small on my board, which was named the Queen Mary [a well-known British ocean liner]. It was a secondhand
board made of redwood and balsa covered with fiberglass and had been built by Bill Clymer, an early Brookvale boardbuilder who now builds surfboats out of space-age materials. The Queen Mary has long since disappeared, but
my own nickname has stuck; even my close surfing mates forget my real name is Robert.”42
“Sometimes when the boat crew had consumed a little too much alcohol on a Sunday afternoon and needed a little exercise they dug a big hole in the sand and tried to bury the new recruits alive. Then
there were the stunts. ‘Legs’ Lane was always good for one, especially when he had had a few too many. Ambling over to a picnicking group of people who had arrived to enjoy their day at the seaside in buses,
Legs would climb into the driver’s seat, start the bus, and take off out of the parking area with the bus driver and passengers running up the street after him. That was a good stunt! Legs almost got to be boat captain
from that.
“Right from the start of the new member’s involvement in the surf club he was involved in competition. In the beginning it was play, but as he got better at the games he realised that club rivalry
was not just a game. The association encouraged this competitive involvement; they organised an extensive season of surf carnivals where all affiliate clubs would compete for the prestigious position of being Australian champion.
When a carnival was not scheduled for a particular weekend, club members would train relentlessly and compete against themselves. They would compete in every aspect of surf club ritual, from the regimented Rescue and Resuscitation
drill with its belts and reels to beach events such as the relay race and the greasy pole event, where two men would sit on a pole with a sandbag each and try to slog the other man off the pole. The surf club was an entire
way of life.”43
Throughout that time, however, surfing Down Under was mostly separate from the surf scenes and technological/design advances made in Hawai`i and Mainland U.S.A. First indication of change began in 1954,44
when Hollywood film star Peter Lawford brought a fiberglassed balsa board with him on a film shoot in Sydney. Lawford came to Australia to star in the film Kangaroo. However, although he brought his board along, no one in Australia remembers Lawford riding it.45 The real change point,
though, occurred in 1956 when a group of American lifeguards came to Melbourne for the Olympic Games.
Malibu Boards Seed Down Under
By the middle 1950s, “The surfing scene in Australia was ripe for a revolution in board design,” wrote Kent Pearson in Surfing Subcultures, printed in 1979. “For those persons wanting to ride waves, the requirement in boards was not paddling speed, but manoeuvrability while wave riding.”46
“In the latter half of [1956],”wrote John Grissim in Pure Stoke, published in 1982, “… the Australian Surf Lifesaving Association [SLSA] made the
disastrous mistake of inviting several Americans to compete in the national surfing championships at Torquay Beach, Victoria. Accepting the bid were Californians Greg Noll, Tom Zahn, and Tad Devine (son of actor Andy Devine)
who brought with them the first of the Malibu boards – shorter, lighter balsawood boards covered with glass resin.”47
Greg Noll, in his autobiography DA BULL: Life Over the Edge, recalled 1956 as the year that Australian surfing was really opened-up. A large part of bringing Australia
into the worldwide surf scene at that time was due to the visit to that country by Noll, Tommy Zahn, Mike Bright, Bobby Moore and Bob Burnside.48
“In 1956,” Noll wrote, “I was one of the lifeguards on the American paddling team that was invited to participate in the surf paddling contests being held during the Olympics in Melbourne,
Australia. For me, at age nineteen, the trip became one in a series of firsts.
“After having revived the sport in Hawai`i, Duke Kahanamoku had introduced surfing to Australia at Manly Beach, Sydney, in 1915, and introduced it to both coasts in the United States. Australian lifeguards
picked up the sport and used the long planks for rescue craft. By 1956 they had graduated to hollow surf skis that were all but impossible to stand on.
“Tommy Zahn, Mike Bright, Bobby Moore and I paid the extra freight to take our surfboards with us to Australia. By that time we had graduated from redwoods to the shorter, lighter balsa-wood boards.
We had come to race paddleboards. As it turned out, our surfboards became the real attraction. When the boards were first taken off the airplane and put on a flatbed truck, a head honcho from one of the surf clubs in Australia
came over to look at them.
“‘What are these for, mate?’ he asked us. I told him that we surfed on them. He couldn’t figure it out. To him, the boards were flat and funny-looking. Up to that time, the Aussies
had used a surf ski type of board, and the idea was to go out and take off on some whitewater and come straight in the soup, while all the girls on the beach squealed. That was their idea of surfing.
“The guy kept looking at the boards, touching them, turning them over. He finally said, ‘Give ya two bob for the works, mate.’ His way of saying they were worthless.
“We intended to take the boards with us to the paddle meets and, during our time off, try out the Australian surf. I had bought a Bell and Howell movie camera from Warren Miller. He was just getting
into making ski movies then... I thought it would be fun to show everybody back home what Australian surf looked like.
“During one event, we had noticed a little point break off to the side, off a rocky point... After the paddling events were over, we grabbed our boards and paddled out to the break. There had been
thousands of people watching the paddling events from shore, and they had started leaving. Ampol Oil was covering all the paddling events, and decided to stay and take films of us surfing. Word got around in the parking
lot as people were leaving, ‘The Yanks are surfing, you ought to see the Yanks.’“49
“Ampol Oil, the sponsors of the paddleboard race, have on film a free surfing session the Americans had after a race,” wrote C.R. Stecyk, dating the event as September 3, 1956. “The Malibu
boards‘ maneuverability and speed made immediate converts.”50
“They proceeded to blow the Aussies out of the water by consistently riding across the wave face, executing cutbacks at will and getting long nose-rides,” wrote Grissim. “The Californians’
razzle-dazzle display turned on thousands to the possibilities of board riding and generated an instant demand for Malibu-style boards, a need to which Greg Noll graciously and profitably responded.”51
“People turned around and came back to watch,” Greg Noll recalled. “An enormous crowd formed. Ampol Oil took films. When we left Australia, we also left our boards for the Aussies. Those
films were shown all over the country to different clubs. The films and our boards became the basis for the modern surfboard movement in Australia.”52
“The effect on Australian surfing was even more dramatic than the exhibition given by Duke Kahanamoku at Freshwater had been forty years before,” wrote Margan and Finney in 1972. “Every
Australian surfer who watched the Americans simply had to have a malibu board.”53
Significantly for Australian surfing evolution, underscored Pearson, “the malibu board… helped to freshen the winds of change into a revolutionary gale which eventually swept around Australia,
creating a surfing movement apart from that dominated by the SLSA.”54
Surfari Down Under
Australia has 12,000 miles of beautiful wave-bashed coastline. It was logical that it would beckon to the Yanks. So, while in the Land Down Under, the Americans also surfed outlying areas and even new spots
never before surfed in Australia.
“The idea of finding a surf spot in a remote area was not what it was all about in Australia in those days,” wrote Noll. “As we traveled from one [paddleboard] meet to another, we saw several
great-looking places along the way. I remember one spot we passed. You looked down off a cliff and about a mile away there were these beautiful lines stacked up, wave after wave. We were riding in the back of a truck with
our boards and I started pounding on the cab with my fist. The driver, an Aussie, stopped and asked me, ‘What’s the matter, mate?’
I said, ‘Jesus Christ, look at the surf down there! Has anyone ever surfed it?’ The guy thought I was crazy. He said, ‘Why would anyone want to go down there?’ Like, there wasn’t
a surf club down there, so what’s the point? He refused to drive us there. Today that spot is a well-known surf spot -- Long’s Reef, I think they call it.”55
Even so, Australian surf pioneer C.J. “Snow” McAlister recalls that the move was already afoot to branch out away from the surfbreaks close to the Gold Coast towns. By the mid-1950s, “the
word ‘surfari‘ became a reality; small groups of long plywood riders were turning from their home beaches to try other surfs nearby.”56
“This new mobile breed of surf riders,” Pearson wrote, “had the criteria for what made a good surf board and they were different from those of the SLSA. The emphasis was on wave riding
rather than paddling performance. This was more in line with the board designs in Hawai`I and the United States.”57
“For about two years after that trip,” Greg Noll wrote of when the Americans brought the Malibu Board to Oz, “I got letters every week from guys in Australia, pleading for pictures, templates,
design information. It was a new frontier for them... It didn’t take the Australians long to get on with the thing. The end result is that they have since produced some of the best surfers in the world.
“From the movies I took, I made my own surf film. That helped get surfers up here interested in surfing down there. Before that there wasn’t any traffic back and forth between Australian and
American surfers.
“I often wondered, as time went by, whether the Aussies would rewrite history to suit themselves or give credit to the Californians who introduced them to the modern surfboard. A couple years ago I
happened to be standing behind a guy in the airport who was struggling with a bunch of bags, so I gave him a hand. He said, in a recognizable Aussie accent, ‘Thanks, mate.’
“We got to talking and, as it turns out, this guy remembers the trip the Yanks made down there in ‘56. He tells me that one of the original boards is still hanging in his club. We end up having
a couple of beers in the bar and talking stories...”58
“The Californians,” wrote Nat Young in his History of Surfing, “... surfed their new boards all up and down the east coast from Avalon to Torquay and in
doing so utterly changed the nature of surfing in Australia.” Young, in his typical style, was quick to point out that, “Officially the local surfboard team thrashed them in the paddle races, but,” credited
Young, “what startled the local surfers was the way Americans could maneuver, stall, cut back and trim across the face of the eaves on their boards. A younger generation of Australian surfers watched them with as much
interest as their forefathers had watched the Duke.”59
Malibus Made Down Under
Virtually overnight, after the American lifeguards left and the Olympics ended, the demand for Malibu Boards in Australia sky rocketed.
“The materials for the construction of such boards,” noted Pearson, “were not available in Australia at the time. The first copies of the board were hollow plywood models.”60
“The Surf Life Saving Association didn’t take to the new boards,” wrote Nat Young; “they didn’t improve the techniques of surf rescue, and they certainly weren’t faster
to paddle. But no sooner had the American surf team departed than hundreds of younger surfboard riders were trying to buy fibreglass Malibu boards. It was almost as though, overnight, nobody wanted the old hollow paddle
boards any longer. Some quick-thinking Sydney board men had been able to buy some of the visiting team’s ‘hot dog’ boards; Bob Evans bought a narrow-tail 10-foot gun-style board from Greg Noll, Peter Clare
one of the Quigg boards, and Gordon Woods a 10-foot wide-nose wide-tail Velzy/Jacobs board and Bob Pike purchased Tom Zahn‘s 9’6” Malibu. The established board builders at the time were Bill Wallace, Gordon
Woods, Barry Bennett, Norm Casey and Bill Clymer, a boat builder from Victoria who had moved to Sydney, where all the surfboard manufacturing was taking place. By the summer of 1956 these manufacturers were inundated with
orders for Malibus -- a somewhat frustrating situation, because the balsa needed for the new boards was virtually unavailable.”61
“The only way the orders could be filled,” told Young, “was by building the boards in the established manner with plywood covering a light timber frame, then sealing it all with coats of
varnish. At the same time they began working on finding a source of balsa wood. The builders knew balsa was used in the making of model aeroplanes, but this was milled in short, thin sticks; balsa planks had been used as
life preservers lining the bulkheads of ships during the war, but this proved to be unavailable. Some balsa was also used as packing cases for ammunition and supplies dropped to the allied forces in New Guinea during World
War II.”62
“The first person to actually build a balsa board in Australia,” continued Young, “was Roger ‘The Duck’ Kieran, nephew of Barney Kieran, of boxing fame.
‘The Duck‘ was a keen surfboard rider but not an experienced surfboard shaper. The board he built was crude by manufacturers’ standards, but it worked. He had acquired enough balsa to build three boards
from Arthur Milner, a timber merchant in Melbourne, who supplied the trade builders for the war supplies mentioned earlier. The fibreglass and resin he had seen on the visitors’ boards was now easy to come by, but it
took much trial and error to cover the whole of one side of a board before the coating began to go hard. The Duck surfed all over Sydney, from Bondi to Freshwater, on his Australian-made balsa Malibu with just about all the
manufacturers looking on with envy.”63
Under these circumstances, “board manufacturers began to tool up for business,” Pearson wrote, “as inquiries were made in California about production techniques.”64
“By 1959,” wrote Margan and Finney, “the board makers were producing 1,500 malibu boards a year, a figure that had grown 5 times by 1962.”65
Surfing on Television, Later ‘50s
“In 1956,” recalled Greg Noll, “following my trip to Australia and the release of my surf movie, I was invited to appear on Bill Burrud‘s ‘Assignment America‘ TV show to
show part of the movie. Tom Malone, who also had a TV show, caught Burrud’s show and invited me to appear on his program. Malone used my surfing footage pretty regularly for a few years, and he and I eventually became
buddies. But at first the guy nearly drove me nuts.
“Burrud’s show had been very professionally done. Malone‘s show, which covered a lot of different sports, seemed to always be thrown together at the last minute. Malone was a little scattered.
He always was getting himself in a jam with his programming. He’d call me at the last minute and ask, ‘Could you bring me fifteen minutes of surf film?’
“I didn’t know anything about television. I just followed directions. On the first show I did for Malone, just as they began rolling my film and I started my narration, Malone signals to me
that he’s got to go fetch some papers. I continue my narration. The film ends. They run a commercial and Malone is still gone. This is live TV, so the crew starts motioning for me to begin talking. For a very long
minute or two, I’m going on about surfing and what we’re going to show in the next segment, blah, blah, blah -- I have no idea what I said -- and Malone comes rushing in to bail me out...
“As surfing became more popular, Malone‘s ratings went up. He started bringing in live audiences of twenty to thirty kids for the surf shows. I’d show a film, then Malone would open it
up for people watching at home to call in with a surf question for Greg Noll. Malone would first take the call, in case he had to censor anything, then he’d pass along the question to me. Kids would ask questions like
‘Would you ask Greg Noll to explain the expression “hang ten“?’ Or ‘What does “cowabunga“ mean?’
“On one particular show, we’d gone through several questions before Malone announced that he’d take one last call. Malone was in one of his distracted moods, so the question goes right
by him. He turns to me and says, ‘We have a caller who wants to know what the surfing term “beat off“ means.
“Right there on the air. The kids in the audience rolled in the aisles, hooting and laughing, and Malone gets red in the face. As soon as the words had left his mouth, he tried to stuff them back
in. I say, as calmly as possible, ‘Gee, Tom, that’s a new one on me.’
“For the next month, everywhere I went, I got razed about the new surfing term, ‘beat off.’
“After becoming established as a surfboard manufacturer and surf film producer whose films were shown on TV, all of a sudden all the teachers and counselors who wanted nothing to do with my ass during
school were wanting to kiss it. They’d be interviewed by a newspaper of magazine and their tone would change. ‘Oh yes, I knew Greg Noll. He was in my class. Fine, upstanding young man.’ What bullshit.”66
Greg Noll‘s 2nd North Shore Winter
“There are two Hawaii’s,” wrote Phil Edwards. “There is the Hawaii of soft, hot guitars and lush sunsets and willowy girls with orchids in their hair. And... There is Action Hawaii,
a land punctuated by the inner beat of restless, blue-green water and stalked by hot-eyed surfers, their hair bleached blond in the sun. It takes years to find them both...”67
“The second winter we were in the Islands,” Greg Noll recalled, 68 “we went to Sunset more often. That was also
the year we discovered Haleiwa, and I met Hanalei -- Henry Preece -- who was to become my lifelong friend.
“We had no idea during those first few winters that the North Shore would become the surf center of the planet Earth. We were just kids, blundering along. I was learning about surfing big waves and
getting hooked on them. All this time, Waimea was waiting for me...”69
“Bud Browne went back to California with his new film,” recalled Fred Van Dyke of this time, “and it was an instant success -- with one drawback. Crowds came to the North Shore -- or what
we considered crowds -- about 20 new guys in all...”70
Van Dyke continued: “Jim Fisher and Mike Stange were returning. The boards were from 10’6” to Buzzy‘s 12’6” -- which he soon cut down to about 11 feet. Joe Quigg was
the master of shaping and Tom Zahn the paddling star, in top physical condition. (We all learned our basics in nutrition from him.) Pat Curren, a new shaper, was learning all he could under the tutelage of Quigg and Downing.
“Greg Noll came over with a 9’4” square tail, and many theories why it would work better than a longer board.
“Downing and Froiseth created a new scoop which eliminated pearling and chop problems.”71
Wave Spies
Bud Browne, surfing’s first commercial film maker and originally a contemporary of pioneer surf photog Doc Ball’s, was into his fourth full year shooting the surf scenes mostly on O`ahu. Hawai`ian Surfing Movies (1953), Hawai`ian Holiday (1954) and Hawai`ian Surfing Movies (1955) now lead up to 1956’s offering, Trek to Makaha.
Surfing’s second commercial film maker was Greg Noll, who was just starting to get into it. Fred Van Dyke revealed the inside photographic duel that now took place:
“Greg Noll was going to make a surf film, and Bud Browne was bitching about that. They, the only two photographers on the North Shore, would sneak around like spies, trying to out-angle each other,
until one day they emerged from the same clump of bushes, speechless and looking more than embarrassed.”72
Huge Sunset, November 1956
“November came,” recalled Fred Van Dyke, “and with it a huge Sunset surf. Fifteen guys were out. I was disgusted with the crowd and paddling in when I ran into Fisher paddling out. ‘Come
on, Fred, just one more.’ I couldn’t resist surfing with my friend and paddled back out; I was glad that I did, for we made a major breakthrough that day. On previous days, if you lost your board you’d
swim for the channel and try to make it through the rip. If you did not, someone would paddle fins or a board out to you, but this day there were so many people wiping out and excited that suddenly Buzzy made an observation.
“Everyone was making it into the beach, immediately, by staying in the soup.
“It sounds simple. But until 1956, the fear element was overwhelming, and most stayed away from the soup, if possible. Now we could forget about the rip taking us seaward on big days.”73
Father of Modern Surfing, Duke Kahanamoku had nothing but respect and praise for the emergent North Shore surfing crews. “There can’t be too much said about the surfers who ride the more mammoth
surfs with their Elephant Gun boards,” wrote Duke, later in the 1960s. “Those out-sized boards are simply called ‘Guns‘ by some surfers. They are a lot to handle. The Gun guys are heroic, gutsy,
canny and talented. Heroic writing should be employed to aptly and justly describe them...
“The longer, heavier boards which carry this nickname are made for surf of out-sized dimensions and proportions. Sometimes it is said that it takes a special breed of men to handle such boards in the
kind of surfs for which they were designed...”74
Greg Noll‘s Hale`iwa Boards
“Although Mike Stange and I spent a lot of time together in the Islands, living with different guys who had also come over from the Mainland to surf,” recalled Greg Noll, “a lot of my spare
time was spent with the local Hawai`ians. As a result of my friendship with Henry and Buff, several other local Hawaiians became interested in surfing and asking me to make boards for them.
“All the guys chipped in for materials. I bought enough balsa wood from McGwain’s Marine Store in Waikiki to make about ten boards. We set up the wood on sawhorses outside of Henry’s shack
at Hale`iwa. I used a hand planer and a drawknife. Balsa shavings were blowing in the wind all the way down to thrive around time, there must have been about thirty Hawai`ians there, watching and helping. We even glassed
the boards inside the shack. It turned into sort of a community project.
“I had no idea what the far-reaching results of this goodwill gesture would be. The Hawaiians were, and are, very appreciative of things like this. A few of the guys still have their boards and never
miss a chance to let people know, ‘I have one of the original Greg Noll boards that were shaped at Hale`iwa.’ It was a big deal and it gave the Hawaiians a few surfboards that they could really surf on, rather
than using some of those old junk redwoods they had been riding...”75
Greg Noll Surfboards
“One of my proudest accomplishments in making surfboards was making signature boards for Duke Kahanamoku,” Greg Noll wrote about his surfboard making in the 1960s. “The board was called
the Duke Kahanamoku Nollrider and commemorated the Duke Kahanamoku Invitational Surfing Championships, which started in 1965. The Duke was an Olympic swimMeng champion, an all-around great waterman and the absolute embodiment
of Hawai`ian charm and spirit. In 1967, after I had finished an order of these boards, one of his friends asked me if there was anything I wanted from the Duke. I told him that I’d love to have something I could keep,
something inscribed. A couple of months later, I made a trip to the Islands and was given a wristwatch inscribed ‘TO GREG, FROM DUKE, 1967.’ This was just before the Duke died.”76
Writing further about his surfboard-making, Noll went on to tell the abbreviated story of Greg Noll Surfboards and his personal life:
“During high school, I met my wife, Beverly. We both were sophomores. I was the high school letch and she was a beach gal, a very good-looking gal, and I was really attracted to her. She had, and
still has, a really strong personality. Beverly and I went through all the stages of the surf thing together. She became the motivational force behind the whole surfboard operation, kept all the pieces in place as the business
grew and expanded.
“We got married almost a year after high school, a few months after I got back from competing in the paddling championships in Australia. We lived in a little house... in Manhattan Beach. During the
summer, I worked as a lifeguard at the Manhattan Beach Pier, for about a dollar forty-four an hour. At the time, those were good part-time wages.
“As soon as I got home from working as a lifeguard, I’d go back to work in my garage, shaping new boards. I was grinding out about ten boards a week from this little two-car garage. I had an
automatic router machine, the whole deal. This was the late fifties, and surfing was starting to get very popular. I outgrew the garage operation within a year or so.
“We rented a small shop on the highway in Manhattan Beach and moved the business there until we outgrew that space. Found another place in Hermosa Beach across from a school and stayed there for about
five years. We were so busy that we’d be making surfboards out in front of the shop, almost overflowing into the street. Surfers would hang out, watching us work. One day, the building inspector came by while we were
outside, gluing up boards on sawhorses. He just shook his head. We were causing too much of a commotion, he told us, and causing traffic snarls.
“That and the fact that surfing had caught fire on the East Coast prompted us to build out twenty-thousand-square-foot surfboard factory and shop... in Hermosa. It opened in October of ‘65 and
became the permanent home for Greg Noll Surfboards until we closed up shop in ‘71.”77
Flippy Hoffman at Castle Rock
“Bud Hedricks tells this story about the time,” recalled Bev Morgan to Dewey Shurman, in a tale entitled ‘Intense Flippy Hoffman Story No. 1345.’ “It had to be 1956 or somewhere
around there, that he was on a dive boat out at San Clemente Island, holed up at Northwest Harbor with Flippy Hoffman. Junior Knox was there, too. Northwest Harbor is the corner of the island. It sticks right out and there’s
nothing between it, Alaska and Hawai`i. If there’s any swell at all, it hits a place called Castle Rock. On this day there were great big waves breaking outside, so they decided to take the boat, about a 35-footer,
and go out and look at Castle Rock. They were way over on the shoulder, about a half-mile over on the shoulder, just looking at these huge waves breaking. Big smokers. Then they looked outside and the biggest set they’d
ever seen was coMeng in at them. These were guys who had ridden the North Shore. As this wave came up, they tried to power the boat up the face of it.
“At one point,” Bev Morgan said, “Flippy grabs an air mattress and says, ‘See you guys on the beach!’ and leaps into the water, and takes off on that very wave. They were almost
vertical on the face, and the wave broke with this great, thunderous crash. It sheared off the cabin and sank the boat. The rest of them all ended up in the water, and pretty soon they saw Flippy on the beach. He’d
gone through the shorebreak, which was about 20 feet and moving boulders the size of automobiles. Flippy’s directing them, ‘Over here!’ Well, they all ended up making it. Barely. It was just a scary,
scary deal.
“I tend to believe the size of a wave can be mutated by the number of years that have gone by. But only a few years after those guys got sunk, I dived on the wreck. I found the screw, fuel tanks and
other wreckage on the bottom in about 60 feet of water. So that wave must have been about 60 feet.”78
ENDIT
3 Doyle, Mike with Sorensen, Steve. Morning Glass, The Adventures of Legendary Waterman Mike Doyle, ©1993 by Doyle and Sorensen. Published by Manzanita Press, PO Box 720, Three Rivers, CA 93271, p. 27.
10 Surfer Magazine, October 1993, “Intense Flippy Hoffman Story No. 1345,” told by Bev Morgan to Dewey Schurman, p. 60.
14 Santa Monica Heritage Museum “Cowabunga!” exhibit, February 1994. See also Gault-Williams, “Malibu Boards.”
19 The Surfer’s Jounrnal, Volume 1, Number 3, C.R. Stecyk, pp. 41-42. Unclear where this took place. Malibu is assumed.
20 The Surfer’s Jounrnal, Volume 1, Number 3, C.R. Stecyk, p. 47. Note: Tom Blake was the first one to add a sail to a surfboard, in the mid-1930s.
21 Edwards, Phil (1938- ). You should Have Been Here an Hour Ago: The Stoked Side of Surfing; or, How to Hang Ten Through Life and Stay Happy, ©1967 by Phil Edwards with Bob Ottum, Harper & Row, New York, NY, p. 91.
25 The Surfer’s Journal, Volume 2, Number 3, Fall 1993. “Joe Quigg’s Paddleboards,” by C.R.Stecyk, p. 28. Includes picture of the board with current owner
Roy Bream who, himself, is a multiple winner of the Catalina Race in the 1960s.
29 Doyle, Mike with Sorensen, Steve. Morning Glass, The Adventures of Legendary Waterman Mike Doyle, ©1993 by Doyle and Sorensen. Published by Manzanita Press, PO Box 720, Three Rivers, CA 93271, p. 27.
38 Doyle’s stated age contradicts his own recollections in his autobiography, where he recalls being 15
years of age in 1956. Also, he was interested in surfing well before ‘56.
39 Noll, 1989, pp. 19-20. Mike Doyle quoted. Noll’s age of 19 in 1956 confirmed by Noll’s own
writing in his autobiography, of being 19 when he first went over to Australia in 1956.
48 Noll, Greg and Andrea Gabbard. DA BULL: Life Over the Edge, ©1989 by Greg Noll and Andrea Gabbard, p. 70. Noll doesn’t mention Burnside, but that’s probably because Burnside didn’t bring
a board. Nat Young, in his History of Surfing does not mention Bobby Moore, but does mention Bob Burnside. Also, Grissim mentions Tad Devine, but no one else does.
See Young, 1983, p. 88. See also C.R. Stecyk‘s write-up in The Surfer’s Journal, Volume 1, Number 3, p. 43, and Grissim, 1982, p. 67.
68 Noll’s first winter was 1954-55, when he went to H.S. there for the year. During the winter of 1955-56,
he and Billy Meng and the guys surfed Rincon on a regular basis, living close by in Carpinteria.
70 Van Dyke, Fred. Thirty Years Riding the World’s Biggest Waves, ©1989 by Joseph Grassadonia, Ocean Sports International Publishing Group, Inc., 204 Poo-Poo Place, Kailua, Hawai`i, 96734,
p. 30.
74 Kahanamoku, Duke P. (1890-1968). World of Surfing, ©1968 by Duke Kahanamoku with Joe Brennan, Grosset & Dunlap, New York, NY, p. 136.
78 Surfer Magazine, October 1993, “Intense Flippy Hoffman Story No. 1345,” told by Bev Morgan to Dewey Schurman, p. 60.
