Sunday, February 14, 2021

Surfing Year 1962

The year 1962 will probably be most remembered in the American consciousness as the year of the Cuban Missile Crisis and the on-going battle for civil rights for Black people in the southern states of Mississippi and Alabama. It was also the year John Steinbeck won the Nobel Prize for Literature, Ken Kesey‘s novel One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest was published, and Lawrence of Arabia swept the box offices of the USA.1

This chapter in the LEGENDARY SURFERS series was drawn mostly from the auto-biographies of Greg Noll, Mike Doyle and Phil Edwards. We are endebted to them for documenting such a great time in surfing history. 



John Severson poster for his 1962 surf movie "Going My Wave"


 

Contents

 

Trailblazing Outer Pipe

Mike Doyle in Santa Cruz

     DON HANSEN & OFFICER WABLINSKY

Southern California

     THE CALHOUNS

     NAT YOUNG AT MALIBU, 1st Time

     MATT KIVLIN HANGS IT UP

Surfboard Industry

     1st POP-OUT

     SANTA MONICA SURF-O-RAMA

     TOM MOREY

     GREG NOLL SURFBOARDS

“Ride The Wild Surf”

8th Makaha International Surfing Championship

Phil Edwards and Heidi

 

 

 

Trailblazing Outer Pipe

 

On January 21, 1962, Ricky Grigg, Jose Angel and Australians Mick Hickey and Bob Pike rode Pipeline‘s outer reef for the first time.2

 

 

 

Mike Doyle in Santa Cruz

 

“I used to make a lot of trips up to Santa Cruz in those days,” remembered Mike Doyle. “Santa Cruz at that time, before the University of California was built, was a beautiful little retirement town. A lot of the old foks there owned immaculate, thirty-year-old cars that had spent most of their lives parked in the garage. There weren’t any used-car lots in Santa Cruz in those days, but every gas station in town had half a dozen classic cars for sale. The old folks had always bought their gas at that one station, so when the husbands passed away, their widows would take the cars down there to sell.

“Over a period of two or three years, I made something like twenty trips to Santa Cruz to buy old cars. I’d fly to San Francisco and hitchhike down the coast. Sometimes I’d stay with my friend Jack O’Neill, the wetsuit maker, who had a little shop on the pier. I’d spend a couple of days looking around for the best car deal in town; then after I’d made my choice, I’d take it to Pleasure Point, one of the best surf spots in town, and wax it down. After a few days of surfing, I’d drive down the Coast Highway with my new car, through Carmel and Big Sur, all the way home. I’d keep each car for a few weeks, sell it for twice what I’d paid, then go back and get another one. Eventually the Department of Motor Vehicles sent a notice warning me that if I sold any more used cars, I’d have to buy a dealer’s license.”3

 

 

DON HANSEN & OFFICER WABLINSKY

 

On a trip in the Spring of 1962, “I was in Santa Cruz during Easter vacation,” Doyle wrote, “hanging out, surfing at Steamer Lane, and sleeping in a car I’d bought there -- a 1936 Buick with beautiful mohair seats. I happened to run into Mike Zuetell, one of the guys from the old 22nd Street Gang in Hermosa Beach. He was in the army at Fort Ord, near Monterey. He introduced me to a chubby-faced army buddy of his, a guy named Don Hansen, who had a crash pad in Santa Cruz. Hansen was from Redfield, South Dakota, and his teeth were stained brown from some mineral they had in the water back there. He’d been surfing in California for a few years before he joined the army, and sometimes he shaped surfboards for Jack O’neill.

“Zuetell and Hansen told me that almost every night they would go AWOL, jump the fence at Fort Ord, party at their house in Santa Cruz, and be back on base for reveille. They said they’d never been caught.

“‘Hey,’ they said, ‘we’re having a big party at the house tonight. Why don’t you come?’

“It turned out to be one of the craziest parties I’d ever seen,” Doyle testified. “The house was packed full of people getting drunk and wild, and as the evening went on they became more and more out of control. At one point Don Hansen took a ceramic mixing bowl, threw it as hard as he could at Mike Zuetell, and hit him square in the forehead. Mike had a crescent-shaped scar on his forehead for the rest of his life.”4

“When I saw things were really getting out of hand,” Doyle continued, “I retired to one of the bedrooms to get some sleep. But I’d only been asleep for a few minutes when I heard a terrible commotion in the front room. All of a sudden the door swung open, Hansen ran through the room, dived over the bed, through the screened window, hit the ground outside, and kept on running into the night.

“Then, not far behind Hansen, came a great big cop. He looked around, but when he couldn’t see Hansen, he became furious; he came over to the bed and started hitting me over the head with his flashlight. I tried to protect myself with my arms, saying, ‘What’s going on?’

“Somebody turned on the lights, and I saw that the cop was even bigger than I’d thought. Then a woman ran in and stopped the cop from beating me. I looked up long enough to glance at his name tag. I’ll never forget it -- Wablinsky.

“I recognized the woman. She’d been with Hansen earlier that evening. Now I found out she also happened to be Officer Wablinsky’s wife. As I understood it, earlier that evening two police officers had been beaten up, supposedly by out-of-towners who had thrown one of the officers over a cliff. The officer was in the hospital in serious condition. So the cops were on the rampage, and Wablinsky was using that as an excuse to go after Hansen. I just happened to have been caught in the middle of it.

“That,” summed-up Doyle, “was my first experience with Don Hansen, South Dakota farm boy, soldier, and future pillar of the surf industry.”5

 

 

 

Southern California

 

 

THE CALHOUNS

 

“Sometimes on the weekends,” Mike Doyle told of his days in 1962, “I liked to drive down to Laguna Beach and stay with Marge Calhoun and her two daughters, Candy and Robin. I first got to know the Calhouns at Malibu, where they were regulars, and over the years I became pals with all three of them.”6

“Marge was a statuesque woman, extremely strong, with broad shoulders, narrow hips, beautiful skin, and penetrating blue eyes -- just an amazing looking woman who radiated health and beauty. Marge got her first lesson in surfing from Buzzy Trent at Santa Monica in the early Fifties and went on to win the women’s Makaha International Surfing Championships in 1958. Even though she was strong, she was still very feminine, and it was a wonderful thing to watch her on a surfboard.”7

“Her oldest daughter, Candy, was strong, too, with beautiful golden hair, blue eyes, and lovely brown skin. She was great on a surfboard and won the women’s West Coast Surfing Championships in 1963. But her real love was bodysurfing. She swam like a seal. When you saw her dive into the water and come up with her wet hair slicked back, you just knew this person was meant to be in the water. Some people are like that -- they’re more at ease in the water than out.

“The youngest daughter, Robin, was great in the water, too. She was taller -- all legs, with long, elegant hands. She, too, had the most gorgeous, penetrating, blue eyes.”8

“Their hair color, their skin, their physical strength and athletic prowess -- the Calhouns were like ocean goddesses to me. Over the years, at one time or another, I had a crush on each of them, though it never amounted to anything more than wrestling around in the back of the car and a few friendly kisses.

“The Calhouns and I became a tight little clique. When I came to Laguna Beach, I would stay at their little house on Glennaire Street, where they always made me feel welcome. It was a white beach cottage, very pretty, and decorated with sea shells and driftwood. We would surf all day at San Onofre, then go back to their house and make a big salad dinner, drink beer, laugh and tell stories until we fell asleep on the floor with our arms aching. What a wonderful feeling that was. Then we’d get up the next day and go do it again.

“I loved being with the Calhouns...”9

 

 

NAT YOUNG AT MALIBU, 1st Time

 

On April 30, 1962, “Australian Junior Champ, Robert ‘Nat’ Young checks in at the colony for an extended stay as a guest of Harry ‘Butch’ Linden,” documented C.R. Stecyk. “Lacking a board, Nat begins surfing on an old Simmons balsa spoon that has been stored, and long since forgotten, under the house of one of Linden’s neighbors... The concensus opinion is that by Malibu standards, Young is far superior to the stiff, ‘hang ten--crash and burn‘ types who seem to dominate American organized surfing of the period. In 1966, Young will return to capture the World Surfing Championship title utilizing a fast, functional power approach. His performance in the finals is credited with killing the poseuresque, ‘surfing in place,’ nose riding craze.”10

 

 

MATT KIVLIN HANGS IT UP, September 2, 1962

 

“Matt Kivlin,” wrote C.R. Stecyk, “kicks out on his balsa streamliner in his last go-out at Malibu as a board surfer. Intellectually he has found that he has little interest in conversing with the new teen-age ‘locals’ at the point. His ocean involvement is now fully centered around catamarans.”11

 

 

 

Surfboard Industry

 

With polyurethane foam came the beginning of what we know as the surfboard industry, today. While there were surfboard manufacturers during the balsa era and even the redwood era, the industry did not really get going until foam made mass-production a reality.

 

 

1st POP-OUT

 

In an evolutionary sideshow, the Dewayne brothers came up with a “pop-out“ surfboard with rubber rail circa 1962. The idea of the popout was to produce a relatively inexpensive, ding-proof, mass-produced surfboard. They were typically made by molding polyurethane foam and fiberglass together. They were cheap because there was little-to-no handwork (shaping & finish coats) involved. But, because they were heavy and weak, it didn’t take long for the process to be abandoned.12

The Dewayne brothers popout, made in Huntington Park, was 9-feet long and 20-inches wide. At the Santa Monica “Surf-O-Rama“ that year, the Dewayne brothers took a hammer to their board to demonstrate it’s ding-proof qualities. The demonstration left more of an impression on the surfers assembled than it did the board.13

 

 

SANTA MONICA SURF-O-RAMA

 

“It was for surfboard manufacturers and others in the surfing industry to show off their latest products,” explained Mike Doyle about the Surf-O-Rama. “The surfing craze hadn’t really hit the country, yet, although surfing was getting to be a big sport in Southern California, and the surf industry was just starting to become aware of its influence. As I walked around the trade show, filmmakers Bud Browne and young Bruce Brown were there showing their movies, and there were bands like Dick Dale and the Deltones playing a lusty rock ‘n roll some were calling surf music...”14

 

 

TOM MOREY

 

“Tom Morey had a booth at the trade show, too,” continued Doyle. “Since the old days when I used to see him surfing at Malibu, Tom had gotten out of aircraft engineering, had teamed up with Carl Pope, and had opened up a surfboard shop in Ventura called Morey-Pope. Together they started coming out with a lot of innovative products... Slip Check, an abrasive material in a spray can that you could spray on your board for traction... the first molded polypropylene fin and fin-mounting system -- until then fins had always been made of wood, which was much less flexible... Tri Sec, a collapsible, three-part surfboard that folded down into a suitcase. (In those days surfboards were eleven feet long, and some airlines refused to accept them as baggage.).”15

“When I stopped at the Morey-Pope booth, Tom Morey was standing in front of a small crowd describing a new surfboard he’d designed. At that time the rails on all surfboards were rounded symmetrically, what we used to call ‘egg rails,’ and the nose always turned up so the board wouldn’t pearl. Well, on Tom’s board the rails were turned down and were flat on the bottom, and the nose turned down as well... At the time, I didn’t really understand everything Tom was saying, but he definitely stretched my mind. We were used to making surfboards in the same old way, and if we experimented at all, it was more in the outline of the board, rather than with the rocker or the rails. And rather than working from theoretical concepts, we were still plodding along with trial and error, which was a lot of fun, but slow. We didn’t even realize that nobody really knew how to design a surfboard. Tom Morey at least understood that when it came to surfboard design, the whole thing was still wide open. (And he was certainly correct about the turned-down rails, because that’s they way all surfboards are made today.)”16

 

 

GREG NOLL SURFBOARDS

 

Greg Noll was now solidly into the manufacturing end of surfing, as well as still producing his surf movies. Dick Metz recalls Noll and the surf industry as it was in the 1960s, in Noll’s book DA BULL, Life Over the Edge:

“In the early sixties there weren’t that many retail surf stores anywhere. Most of the guys making boards sold them where they made them, so the common surf shop was also a surfboard factory. Hobie Alter‘s first store in Dana Point was like that, until he moved the board-making operation down the road a ways and converted the store to retail only.

“In 1961 I opened the first retail surf shop in the Islands, Hobie Sports, in Honolulu. There was another surf shop there at the time, Joe ‘Kitchens’ Kuala‘s Inter Island Surfboards, but this was also a factory. At the Hobie Sports shop, you could order a custom board, but most of the inventory was ready to go.

“Over the next couple of years, as different surfboard manufacturers from the Mainland came to the Islands, they saw how well Hobie Sports was doing and decided that they wanted to do the same. Some of them asked me to carry their boards in my shop, but since it was called Hobie Sports and specialized in Hobie Surfboards, I thought it might be a conflict of interest.

“To solve that problem and also be able to do business with other surfboard manufacturers, I opened a second store...”17

Tak Kawahara, cofounder and president of T&C Surf Designs, recalled Greg Noll and the surfboard industry of the ‘60s. He also recalled Con Conburn, Dewey Weber, Hap Jacobs, Wayne Land, Rich Harbour and Noll’s surfboard production 1961-71:

“I grew up surfing in Malibu during the late fifties. I started out patching surfboards, then worked my way up through laminating to shaping. Over the years, I worked for several different surfboard manufacturers, including Con Conburn, Dewey Weber, Hap Jacobs and Greg Noll. I was fortunate to have been surrounded by many great shapers of that time and learned a lot from them. I shaped boards up until the early seventies.

“Back then, the typical surfboard factory was tiny and always dirty. Full of foam dust and resin, which would build up on your clothes and shoes. Greg’s big factory [built in 1963] was a state-of-the-art operation from start to finish. I remember thinking, when we first moved in, ‘Everything is so new and clean!’ Greg’s office was plush, nicely carpeted with several tropical fish tanks. The first time I went into his office I was covered with foam dust and resin. I thought the least I could do was take off my shoes. This became a sort of tradition, to take off your shoes, Hawaiian-style, no matter who you were, before going into Greg’s office.

“The Hawaiian style is a big part of Greg. For all practical purposes, Greg is Hawaiian. I think everybody adopts the Hawaiian style when they go to Hawaii, but Greg especially. He picks up their way of talkin’, he loves Hawaiian food and he loves talkin’ stories Hawaiian-style with all da boys.

“Guys who worked at surfboard factories did it for one reason -- as a means to surf. You were close to something that you really loved. In the early days, the best part about it was, when the surf was up, nobody was working. By the time Greg opened up his new factory, the surf work ethic had changed. No matter if the surf was up, you had to work. Heavy deadlines. Making surfboards had become big business.

“To combat the urge among the workers to grab our boards and hit the surf, there was a huge picture in the laminating room of Greg dressed in a sombrero and serape, holding a big machete. Underneath the picture, in large letters, it said, ‘WATCHETH, FOR YE KNOW NOT WHEN THE MASTER COMETH.’ With Big Brother always lurking not too far away, we worked!

“During early production of the Mickey Dora Cat board, Wayne Land was the exclusive shaper. As demand increased for Cat boards, other shapers got involved, including myself. The step deck on the Cat board was copies by several other surfboard makers. Rich Harbour called his model the Spoon.

“There was, and still is, a camaraderie among the guys who were around in the old days. We all surfed and worked together. Today there are so many people involved in the surf industry that you know very few. Back in those days, guys were rowdy without the drug element we see today. There was more fun to it. In partying and image presence, there were some real legends back in those days. Greg ranks right up there with the best of them. His size alone was something to talk about. He was larger than life and made such great contributions to the sport. He was one of the great pioneers, not only in surfboard building but in big-wave riding as well.”18

Personal changes were going on in Noll’s life, also. “Laura had been working at the shop for a little over a year when we first got involved,” he wrote. “A bunch of us were at a party one night and I asked her to dance. The twist was the big dance then. I’d had a few beers, everybody was dancing and about halfway through the dance I just stopped, grabbed Laura and started kissing her. It was the damnedest thing, I just couldn’t help myself.

“About two weeks later, things just started happening between us. We really never did get caught, unless you consider being busted after seven years as getting caught. Beverly walked into Laura’s house and caught me in my skivvies, cleaning the fish tank. I had built this huge tank out of a jet canopy and the only way you could clean it was to get inside. That’s what I was doing when Beverly walked in. What a way to get caught. Standing inside a six-foot-high fish tank, looking like a goddamn grouper blowing bubbles and trying to explain myself. Later Beverly asked me what I wanted to do about the situation. I said I would try to do whatever I could to keep everyone happy.

“By the time we moved to Crescent City [RMW guess: around 1971], Beverly and Laura had become good friends, and still are. I consider myself to be very fortunate to have two such very special people care enough to spend part of their lives with me. There were many times over the years when people just couldn’t understand our unusual lifestyle. I always figured that was their problem, not ours. I think people are threatened when you don’t fit into one of their little cubbyholes.”19

 

 

 

“Ride The Wild Surf”

 

“Then in November and December of 1962,” wrote Fred Van Dyke of the surf situation in the Hawaiian Islands, “Waimea broke constantly. The jet stream had altered its course temporarily, and we kept getting these huge west swell surfs. They kept up, sporadically, clear through February ‘63. That was when the Columbia film company came over to make the movie Ride, Ride The Wild Surf.

“We all made money surfing and doing fill-ins for the actors. They went so far as to duplicate Greg Noll’s famous black and white striped bathing suit. That Hollywood film started an avalanche of new surfers to the North Shore...”20

 

 

 

8th Makaha International Surfing Championship

 

“The fall of 1962,” wrote Mike Doyle, “I was back in Hawaii to compete in the Makaha International Surfing Championships. The Makaha was the oldest and most prestigious contest in surfing, but there was a lot of talk, particularly among California and Australian surfers, about how the thing was rigged, that you couldn’t win it unless you were Hawaiian, or at least haole Hawaiian. If you looked at the contest results, you could see there was some truth to that. Since 1954 the contest had been won by Rabbit Kekai, and Buffalo Keaulana, both Hawaiians, and by Wally Froiseth, Peter Cole, and George Downing, haoles who now lived year-round on the islands. Personally, I didn’t think it was rigged. It was just that the judges were all local guys from the Outrigger Canoe Club -- they knew all the local surfers, knew their families, had watched the surfers grow up, had even taught some of them how to surf. Naturally, the judges wanted to see their local boys win. The judges couldn’t be impartial.”21

“Makaha was the first place where surfers rode really big waves,” continued Doyle, “years before the surf spots on the North Shore were pioneered. It’s on the lee side of the island, so when the North Shore gets blown out, Makaha can be sunny and tranquil. It’s also drier there, with lots of cactus and thorn bush, and the water is usually a calm aqua blue, while the water on the North Shore is often a turbulent shade of green.

“Even though it was a fine surf spot, very few of us haole surfers ever went over to Makaha because we were going to get shafted there. The communities near Makaha, like Nanakuli, were almost entirely native Hawaiian, and a lot of the people were unemployed, living on welfare and food stamps. A lot of the locals at Makaha made their living stealing from haoles, breaking into cars. They had spotters up on the hill above the parking lot, and as soon as you got out of your car and hit the water, your car was stripped. Sometimes haoles would get beat up for even trying to surf at Makaha. So, like most haole surfers, I hung out on the North Shore. But I knew that if I was going to compete in the Makaha International, I would have to surf Makaha at least a few times beforehand.”22

“The first thing I did when I went to Makaha,” continued Doyle, “was befriend the king of Makaha, Buffalo Keaulana. Buffalo, who was sort of a folk hero in the islands, had grown up around Nanakuli and knew everyone who lived there. He was a great surfer, a big guy with massive shoulders and sun-bleached hair. He looked like one of the drawings you see of the old Hawaiian kings.

“I went to Buffalo’s house and presented him with a case of beer. A lot of locals liked to gather at his house in the afternoon to have a few beers, so I knew it was a gift he would appreciate. I mentioned a few friends he and I had in common, and he invited me to stay awhile. When I left, Buffalo let me know I was welcome at Makaha, and none of the locals hassled me while I practiced for the contest.

“Later though, I was at Makaha with Dick Barrymore, a photographer and filmmaker. Within the first twenty minutes, our car was broken into and a bunch of camera equipment and surfboards were taken. Altogether, probably $15,000 worth of stuff was gone. So I went to Buffalo and told him what had happened. I knew if anybody could get our stuff back, he could. Buff said, ‘Don’t you worry. You go surf and have a good time.’

“When we came out of the water the second time, everything that had been stolen was back in the car.”23

“An unbelievable thing happened at the Makaha International that winter,” continued Doyle, writing of Winter 1963-64. “Midget Farrelly, an Australian, only seventeen years old and almost unknown, won. Even more incredible was the fact that almost everyone who saw the contest thought he should have won. Maybe, we thought, the judges were finally getting sensitive to the criticism that the contest rules at the Makaha were outdated. Maybe the judges were ready to put down their pencils and just watch for a change. But nobody expected the winner to be an Australian.”24

The lack of big waves for the 10th International Surfing Championships at Makaha, in 1962, helped contribute to the Australian win. “That suited the Australian contingent,” agreed Nat Young, “which included Midget Farrelly; they also had an extra year of competitive surfing behind them. Because of the small waves the judges extended the time limit. At first the waves were breaking on the outside, dribbling through to the inside, but eventually all the surfing was being done on the inside shore break. All the contestants were very evenly placed, with Californians John Peck and Chuck Linnen trying to keep up with Midget Farrelly. When the results were announced Midget had won -- the first Australian to ever take out a major surf title! But, more important, Midget’s victory indicated that Australia had at last caught up with California and Hawaii in modern surfing.”25

“In Hawaii,” continued Young, “a controversy over the judging system used at the international surfing championships erupted. The judging system allotted points mainly for the size of wave and length of ride; the manoeuvres were taken into account, but they were overshadowed by whether a surfer could take off at the point, ride through the bowl and through to the beach.”26

Addressing the Hawaiians vs. Aussie issue, Mike Doyle pointed out that “The friction between Hawaiians and Australians had been growing for years. The Californians, because they had grown up surfing in crowded conditions, had evolved an ethic about not hogging all the waves and not cutting off another surfer -- it was a matter of survival to try to reduce tensions in the water. The Hawaiians were generally easygoing by nature and were used to having plenty of waves for everybody. But the Australians tended to be very aggressive in the water. They were rightly proud of the great advances their surfers had made in recent years and were eager to demonstrate that they were now equal to any surfers in the world. But sometimes they pushed things a bit too far.”27

“At any rate, Midget Farrelly’s performance was brilliant,” continued Doyle. “The surf was usually big at Makaha, but that year it was only four or five feet and breaking on the inside reef. So Midget just stayed inside. I was in the finals, too, and while I rode maybe five outside waves in an hour, Midget rode thirty inside waves, just ripping and tearing upside-down and sideways. He didn’t score a lot of points on each wave, but he got so many waves that after a while he burned an impression on the judges’ minds. He did everything wrong to win, everything against the rules, but it set him apart from the rest of us, and he ended up changing the rules.”28

But, the rules didn’t immediately change. “The real crux of the problem,” Nat Young claimed, “was the all-Hawiian judging panel... they... tried some outside judges and Midget Farrelly had won.” But, for the Hawaiians, “This was regarded as an error which could not happen again, because the judges responsible, namely Dick Brewer and Buzzy Trent, had been removed.”29 The Outrigger Canoe Club-sponsored event, Young noted, would come back the following year with a return to a Hawaiian son -- Joey Cabell -- winning the event.30

 

 

 

Phil Edwards and Heidi

 

Phil Edwards was still the recognized stylist of the era. Like Noll, big changes were happening in his personal life and they took place right at the time of the Makaha International Surfing Championships. Rabbit Kekai‘s tandem partner grabbed Edwards’ heart.

For “the first time in my life,” Edwards recalled, “I did a romantic double take... We were all sharing a house on the north shore, lurching back tiredly at night to sit on the front porch and do all sorts of wild things. Like drink a can of beer and stare at the ocean in absolute exhaustion. Then one evening in the group there was Heidi. Nineteen years old. So tiny you wouldn’t believe it; a native of Hawaii, a student home on leave from one year at Arizona State.

“Strange thing: Heidi did not surf a great deal. Still, she had won the Makaha contest -- which is surfing’s big-time affair. She had been a tandem partner (small, supple, tightly packaged girls make wonderful tandem partners) with a beach boy named Rabbit.”31

“Heidi’s dad, Dr. Stevens, and her mother had been down to watch the contest, and could hardly bring themselves to look. At one point, when Rabbit was slicing shoreward, holding Heidi up over his head in a flying stag or something, Dr. Stevens blinked nervously. But there was no need to worry. Before the contest Rabbit had assured the Stevenses his grip on their daughter would not fail. ‘These arms,’ he told them, ‘are made of gold.’

“He was right. And the girl was 24 karat also, I might add.”32

“Surfers have this special thing, life’s big test: Anything that will make them give up a day in the big water has got to be something real. No other sport can make that statement. It is an advantage, really, a biting, true test nobody else has. For the next few days we splashed around the water, Heidi and I, or strolled along the beach holding hands.”

Edwards was chastized by his surfing brahs:

“Edwards, you’re not surfing. You sick or something? Jeez, man, look out there at the water. Cripes! It’s this high.” Edwards would respond with something like:

“Uhhh, yeah. Well, Heidi and I, we thought we’d just walk along here instead...”

When Phil Edwards left Hawaii, he wasn’t the same. He was in love and made the move. “I got on the phone to Hawaii. Heidi was not home.

“So I proposed to her mother. ‘I want to marry your daughter,’ I said. I don’t know; it was something appropriate. Who can remember things like that? I was stoked.

“We were not exactly the Montagues and Capulets; still there was every reason for Heidi’s folks to be a little worried about me. They liked me well enough. But I was... uhhh, well, I was just a surfer, and what father wouldn’t choke at a prospect like that? But they gave their consent.”33

“I flew back to the islands,” continued Phil Edwards, “and we staged one of the grand weddings of all time. My mother came along. Heidi’s dad invited about fifty fellow doctors as guests. All my surfing friends -- suitably dressed and firmly averting their eyes from the sea -- were there.

“Grubby Clark -- of Clark Foam fame -- was to be my best man. But the first thing he did was get into a car crash on the way to the wedding and go to the hospital. Shafer stepped in and took over.

“It was February [1963].34 Heidi and I had made arrangements to honeymoon back on the mainland, up in the Big Sur country. And by May, I was to be off to Australia for the first World Surfing Championship.”35

 

 

ENDIT

 

–––––––––––––––––

 


1   Grun, 1991, pp. 548-551.

2   Surfer Magazine, Volume 33, Number 12.

3   Doyle, Mike. Morning Glass, ©1993, p. 102.

4   Doyle, Mike. Morning Glass, ©1993, p. 102.

5   Doyle, Mike. Morning Glass, ©1993, pp. 102-103.

6   Doyle, Mike. Morning Glass, ©1993, p. 105.

7   Doyle, Mike. Morning Glass, ©1993, p. 105.

8   Doyle, Mike. Morning Glass, ©1993, p. 105.

9   Doyle, Mike. Morning Glass, ©1993, pp. 105-106.

10   Stecyk, C.R. The Surfer’s Journal, ©1992, Volume 1, Number 3, p. 42.

11   Stecyk, C.R. The Surfer’s Journal, ©1992, Volume 1, Number 3, p. 60.

12   Cralle, 1991, p. 90.

13   Santa Monica Historical Museum exhibit “Cowabunga!” February 1994. The Dewayne popout on exhibit s in the collection of Jerry Pierce, Agora, California.

14   Doyle, 1993, p. 104.

15   Doyle, 1993, p. 104.

16   Doyle, 1993, pp. 104-105.

17   Noll, Greg. DA BULL: Life Over the Edge, ©1989, p. 117. Dick Metz.

18   Noll, Greg. DA BULL: Life Over the Edge, ©1989, pp. 113-114. Tak Kawahara.

19   Noll, Greg. DA BULL: Life Over the Edge, ©1989, pp. 119-120.

20   Van Dyke, 1989.

21   Doyle, Mike. Morning Glass, ©1993, p. 106.

22   Doyle, Mike. Morning Glass, ©1993, pp. 106-107.

23   Doyle, Mike. Morning Glass, ©1993, p. 107. This may have been 1963.

24   Doyle, 1993, p. 115.

25   Young, 1983, pp. 91-92.

26   Young, 1983, p. 94.

27   Doyle, 1993, pp.115-116.

28   Doyle, 1993, p. 116.

29   Young, 1983, p. 94. By this I interpret that Brewer and Trent had ardently recognized Farrelly in the 1962 contest and were removed as jusdges the following year.

30   Young, 1983, p. 94. Farrelly won the Makaha in 1962 and Hawaiian Joey Cabell won the following year, in 1963.

31   Edwards, 1967, p. 120.

32   Edwards, 1967, pp. 120-121.

33   Edwards, 1967, p. 121.

34   The first World Surfing Championships, held in Australia, took place in 1963.

35   Edwards, 1967, p. 121.

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