Tuesday, September 17, 2024

“When we first met Simmons, we knew he was different. We knew he was somehow special, and we knew he was up to something. We called him a mad scientist.”

– Dave Rochlen

“It was the late 1940s. That’s when the first migration of what you call the haoles came. That was Joe Quigg, Tommy Zahn, Matt Kivlin, a guy they called Melonhead and Dave Rochlen. They were the first guys that brought down what we called the potato chip boards; the Simmons.”

– Rabbit Kekai

“In those first days, Simmons would glue the plywood, styrofoam and balsa parts together, then Matt (Kivlin) would shape the balsa rails and glass them over.”

– Joe Quigg

“Simmons was upset that Kivlin and Quigg were adapting his board design to the quicker, more maneuverable Malibu style. I remember his saying, ‘That’s not what you want to do.’ I later realized that he was building boards for himself. He thought that everyone should ride the way he did.”

– Greg Noll

“But during that time when Simmons’ followers were switching over from old-fashioned redwoods to his new plywood and Styrofoam models, I began to make a few really light 24-pound boards for my wife and some of her friends. For some reason, this got Simmons mad. He still had a thing about long and wide boards and couldn’t understand why I wanted to make such short boards.”

– Joe Quigg

“She probably thinks of herself as the original Gidget. She was at Malibu, really the first girl to buy a surfboard and buy a convertible and stick the surfboard in the back and drive up to Malibu and drive up and down the coast and learn to surf. Of the Malibu girls she was the first Malibu girl to really do it.”

– Joe Quigg talking about Darrylin Zanuck

“And about the same time, another local surfer by the name of Leslie Williams began borrowing my wife’s balsa board… In those days, Matt [Kivlin] was the best surfer around, so he made quite an impression on people who saw him on that light board. And Williams, he really got into my wife’s board. He started doing things nobody had ever seen before. He was the first guy I knew of who made radical bank turns. He would lay out on a wave and just generally rip.”

– Joe Quigg

“They took the same principles Simmons used and applied them to balsa wood and to the needs of the average surfer. That’s how the Malibu board evolved. Velzy came in behind them. I was behind Velzy by about three years.”

– Greg Noll

After World War II, surfboards underwent a period of radical change in weight, materials and shape. During a three year period, surfboards went from solid redwood boards and Blake-style hollowboards, to radical Simmons boards, and to Quigg fiberglassed balsa boards – what eventually became known as The Malibu Board. Not since Tom Blake first developed hollow boards in the late 1920s had wave riding vehicles gone through such metamorphosis so quickly.

Beginnings

Bob Simmons, the “Father of the Modern Surfboard,” was the first surfer to seriously utilize and experiment with new construction materials originally developed during World War II. These new materials – fiberglass, resin and styrofoam – resulted in significant surfboard weight reductions. Importantly, also, Simmons’ understanding of hydrodynamics resulted in surfboard designs that incorporated features we still enjoy, today.

Yet, Simmons was not alone in his experiments with war-generated technology to improve surfboard performance. In the second half of the 1940s there were other noted surfers like Brandt Goldsworthy, Preston “Pete” Peterson, and Jamison Handy, and then Joe Quigg and Matt Kivlin. Pete Peterson, in fact, was the first one to use fiberglass in surfboard construction, in 1946.

1946: New Materials

In many ways, although the development of the Malibu Board incorporated many elements and different personalities, it is the story of the dynamic tension between Bob Simmons and Joe Quigg. Curiously, the influence that Simmons would have on Quigg and vice versa did not show itself early on. In fact, not long after the war, in early 1946, Quigg and his former Santa Monica High School classmate Dave Rochlen visited Simmons at his garage and found Simmons interesting but not particularly innovative.

“Dave and I got curious about Simmons,” recalled Quigg. Rochlen was then on leave from the Marines. “We were still into surfing, and we heard he was building boards in his garage in Pasadena, so we drove over to see what he was up to.” They found Simmons in the processs of building three traditional redwood surfboards. “At that time,” said Quigg, “he was still selling and talking up big, heavy boards, the same kind we’d always used.”

Although Quigg wasn’t too impressed by Simmons, Dave Rochlen definitely was. “When we first met Simmons, we knew he was different. We knew he was somehow special, and we knew he was up to something. We called him a mad scientist.” Importantly, Simmons was just about “the only guy anybody could buy boards from during those [war] years.”

Around this time, both Simmons and Quigg separately got interested in what Brandt Goldsworthy and Ted Thal were peddling, and what the Bakelite Corporation was producing. Goldsworthy and Thal, in the guise of the Thalco Chemical Company, were the first to sell fiberglass and resin to the private sector and the Bakelite Corporation was the first resin manufacturer.

After initially scoring some catalyst through surfer Dave Sweet‘s uncle who was in the plastics department of Douglas Aircraft, Quigg established a regular connection for fiberglass, resin and catalyst through Ted Thal‘s office.

Fiberglass

The three main components of the modern surfboard are foam, fiberglass and resin. All three have their beginnings in the wartime technological advances made before, during and following World War II.

“Fiberglass,” Stephen Shaw wrote in the first published manual on surfboard making, “is a glass similar to window glass heated to a molten state and strained through very small platinum discs into the air and collected as very fine threads. These threads are immersed in an oil to keep the filaments from breaking as they are woven. The threads are woven on textile machinery, and the oil is melted out under high temperature. A finish, such as Union Carbide‘s ‘Silane‘ or DuPont‘s ‘Volan‘ are put on the cloth to promote flexibility and adhesion to the polyester resin. [Fiberglass] Cloth used in the surfboard industry is woven especially for surfboards.”

Resin & Catalyst

Fiberglass combined with resin – when activated by a catalyst – can add strength with a minimum of weight.

“Polyester resin,” wrote surfer and surfwriter Nick Carroll, “is... a liquid plastic, bulked up by styrene, a benzene derivative that makes up over a third of its content. Various other stabilizers, anti-UV compounds and the like make up the difference. It is turned into a hard plastic by the introduction of a substance known as methyl ethyl ketone peroxide, or ‘catalyst,’ as we professionals prefer to call it. A small amount of MEKP – just a few drops per cup of resin – sets off the hardening reaction...”

“The three resins used in surfboard manufacturing, laminating, hot coating and glossing,” wrote the king of polyurethane foam, Gordon “Grubby” Clark, “are made of a combination of phathalic, anhydride or isothalic acid, makeic and hydride propylene or ethylene glycol and styrene plus a promoter and a catalyst.”

These “are cooked together forming a long series of molecules. The material is then mixed in the cool state with styrene. With an addition of the catalyst and promoter, the styrene crosslinks the long molecules cooked earlier and form a solid.”

Beating most every other surfer to the fiberglass punch, Preston ‘Pete’ Peterson was the first to build a surfboard – a hollow board – using fiberglass, resin and catalyst, in June 1946.

Peterson had the help of Brandt Goldsworthy, whose plastics company in Los Angeles had supplied component parts for aircraft in World War II. “The board,” wrote Nat Young in his role of surfing historian, “was constructed of two hollow moulded halves joined together with a redwood central stringer and with the seam sealed with fiberglass tape.” Goldsworthy’s plastics company may have been the same place Bob Simmons scored his fiberglass and resin from, also.

1947: Darrylin Board

Although originally not considered any big deal andreally only appreciated until a few years later, the surfboard that would become the first in a long line of what became known as “Malibu Boards” was made in the Summer of 1947. Just before leaving for the Islands for the first time, Joe Quigg created his first breakthrough design, according to surf historian Craig Stecyk, on July 5, 1947. It was intended originally as a “novice girls board“ for Tommy Zahn‘s girlfriend Darrylin Zanuck.

Shaped out of balsa and sealed with fiberglass and resin, Quigg created “the board to satisfy Zahn’s expressed requirements that the board be short, light, and easy for a girl to carry, plus it must fit in the back of her Town and Country convertible.”

“She probably thinks of herself as the original Gidget,” Joe Quigg said many years later, of Darrylin Zanuck. “She was at Malibu, really the first girl to buy a surfboard and buy a convertible and stick the surfboard in the back and drive up to Malibu and drive up and down the coast and learn to surf. Of the Malibu girls she was the first Malibu girl to really do it.”

Quigg went to five lumber yards to find the lightest balsawood he could find. He then constructed a varnished redwood/balsa 10’2” surfboard with 50/50 rails, curved rail rocker throughout, a flat planing bottom, and a fin. It was tested by Dave Rochlen, Tom Zahn and Pete Peterson, and declared the loosest board on the West Coast.

The test was on August 5, 1947, when Malibu/Santa Monica area surfers surfaried down to San Onofre. “Perhaps intuitively sensing some hidden potential,” wrote Craig Stecyk, “Dave Rochlen borrows the ‘Darrylin Board‘ and proceeds to rip San O apart. It is immediately apparent that Rochlen is turning four times faster and making it into and out of what would previously have been inconceivable situations. Pete Peterson next borrows the board, and is instantly banking and turning in an obvious departure from his patented power trim, runaway style. Kivlin is intrigued and promptly decides to have one for his girl friend.”

The board weighed half as much as the lightest Simmons surfboard, had a flowing deck rocker with 50/50 rails and rail rocker from end to end. At first, Quigg named this board his “Easy Rider.” It’s better associated, today, with the girl for whom it was made and best known as “the Darrylin Board.” It was the first Malibu Board.

Quigg had incorporated in one board, parts of the best workable shapes he knew of. The Darrylin Board had “The Complete Combination,” as he put it, and is considered to be Quigg’s major contribution to the evolution of the modern surfboard.

Unlike the pintail balsa guns, that he also began shaping in 1947, Darrylin Zanuck‘s board gradually caught the eye of numerous surfers by the end of the 1940s.

1947: Third Wave

After World War II, Tommy Zahn returned to The Islands, which he had briefly seen when he had first enlisted in the military. His 1947 trip to the Hawaiian Islands sparked a new wave of surfing Mainlanders to the Islands: Joe Quigg and friends.

Theirs was what could be called the “Third Wave” – the second one being the Pete Peterson and Whitey Harrison grouping in the 1930s and the First Wave being the one that followed Tom Blake, Sam Reid and a few others, when they first hit it in the mid-1920s.

This Third Wave was comprised of Californians Joe Quigg, Tommy Zahn, Matt Kivlin, Porter Vaughn [aka Melonhead] and Dave Rochlen. They rode the latest in California surfboard design Simmons boards and Simmons-inspired designs.

“It was the late 1940s,” remembered Rabbit Kekai. “That’s when the first migration of what you call the haoles came. That was Joe Quigg, Tommy Zahn, Matt Kivlin, a guy they called Melonhead and Dave Rochlen. They were the first guys that brought down what we called the potato chip boards; the Simmons.” Quigg and Kivlin had, by this time, become associated with Simmons as kind of apprentices, so it was natural that they were riding his designs of all balsa wood, encased in fiberglass and resin. Boards made of wood that was 100% balsa had been made before, but never sealed with a compound that completely kept water out of the balsa.

Steve Pezman, founder of The Surfers’ Journal, gave me an insight into how Joe Quigg looked at this period years later. He said that Quigg considered “Zahn, the enabler” (he ordered the stuff), “Kivlin the test pilot” (best surfer) and “Quigg (himself) the builder.”

Zahn started the post-war California surfer “cross-pollination” by writing glowing reports back home. C.R. Stecyk wrote that “Tom Zahn... arrived in Honolulu in 1947“ and “immediately lured Joe Quigg, Dave Rochlen and Matt Kivlin to come down soon after. All were armed with provocative, finned balsa Malibu chip surfboards. These wide tailed boards were immediately suspect. Quigg remembers a recurrent phrase of the day being repeatedly uttered, ‘Oh, all that balsa, what a waste.’” Rabbit Kekai, who personally befriended the Malibu crew, rode their boards, but at that point, characterized them as “mushers.” The varnished balsa pintail with pine center stringer sported by Quigg employed a dead flat bottom, 50/50 rails and a turned down hard rail in the tail.

“We were amazed to see them on those boards,” Rabbit Kekai recalled, “they were just standing at the back end on them because they had those wide tails with just one skeg in the center or concave tails with twin fins. Rochlen and Quigg had twin fins. Kivlin had one of his own single finned boards with a narrower tail.”

“Tommy Zahn used to surf with us,” Woody Brown told me. “I remember him at Waikiki and he had a balsa board. It was a very light balsa board. See, my board was 80 pounds for those big waves. He had a little board. It couldn’t have weighed more than about 30 pounds; all balsa, nothing else. But, it was no good at all at Waikiki, see, with that trade wind blowing.

“We were out one day in pretty big waves; about 20 feet at Waikiki, there. It’s called Papa Nui. It’s a big blue water break between Queens and Canoes, way out. So, we were out there catching and he couldn’t catch ‘em. Every time he’d try to catch ‘em, the wind would blow him right off the top of the wave. But, with my [modified hot curl] board, I’d just pop in and go.”

Joe Quigg

Joe Quigg started out surfing in the Santa Monica area as early as 1931, at the age of six. In 1947, when he went to the Islands, he thought it was going to be a short visit. “I came over here to surf and relax for what I thought was to be a summer. Instead, I never went back, except from 1958 to 1968, when I was in the surfboard business in Newport Beach.”

To earn a living, Quigg was one of the many surfers who ended up working for Woody Brown on Woody’s catamarans. Quigg remembers the time as a romantic era. “We’d pull up on the beach at Waikiki and tourists would throw money at us and jump in. Woody would be stuffing money in his shirt and down his shorts and anywhere he could. He’d go to the bank in the afternoon and dump all this sandy money out of his pockets. It was a great business.”

“Joe and I were at Santa Monica at the same time,” Tommy Zahn told Gary Lynch in an interview in July 1990. “We used to hang around the same surfing beaches all the time; ditch school [at] the same time, with each other. That was our big bond. We both went into the Navy at the same time, down in San Diego. We tried to make our liberties and leaves together. We get a 36-hour leave [and] we didn’t sleep for the entire 36 hours. We’d hitch-hike until we meet some place, get our boards and go surfing. Then, spend the rest of the time trying to get back to the base before they put us in the brig [for being late] (laughs).”

“We corresponded – we were separated, finally, during the war. He was shipped to Florida and I was shipped overseas. And he’d send me pictures. He was with a Navy photography outfit… You know, he’s a crackerjack photographer… He was educated at Art Center school in L.A. But, he’d send me pictures, wherever I was, of what he was doing and we had big plans for after the war. We were gonna hang out at certain beaches and surf – which we did, of course.”

“Whenever we’d meet during the war, we’d just immediately go surfing someplace. We didn’t care whether it was flat or blown-out or cold or what we had to do. We did it. Everything was built around surfing.”

“After the war,” Zahn continued, “Dave Rochlen came back from the Marines and the three of us were sort of ‘The Triumvirate.’ We did everything together at that time. Surfing Onofre and Rincon, Mandos, Overhead. Anywhere there was surf, we used to go.”

“There was such a shortage of boards after the war! No one was manufacturing them at all. And Joe’s brother Jack – an excellent surfer; a gifted, natural athlete… but never went out for organized sports – Jack was one of the finest surfers of his time. Jack Quigg. He was surfing one of those Pacific Systems Homes boards; an 11-footer; redwood, spruce, balsa-type. You know, with a fin. Jack had another board; very light for its time. It was called ‘The Paper Plate.’”

“[Joe] Quigg was surfing The Paper Plate and (laughs) he surfed it so much, it was constantly in a state of being repaired, reshaped, repaired, reshaped… Well, [it got to the point where] it couldn’t be repaired and reshaped any longer. So, he took Jack’s board and started remodeling it – to Jack’s horror. Of course, Jack, by then, was backing off from surfing quite a bit cuz he was heavily into his university studies – which he excelled at, by the way.”

“He [Joe Quigg] kept reshaping the Pacific Systems Home board ‘till it didn’t even look like a Pacific Systems Home board anymore. This was about the same time Simmons was doing his early experiments. Quigg kept – it seems like he was reshaping that board once a week and revarnishing it and trying it out… we’re talking about 1946, here. In 1947, he started building his own redwood boards. The feeling at that time was – lead by Simmons – [was] that you needed a solid redwood board to make it across these waves. You needed weight. The avante garde at that, of course, was [Bud] Morrisey, who surfed nothing but redwood boards. And, also… Gard Chapin [and] Morning Miller. All those guys liked those big redwood boards with parallel sides. In fact, Morrisey’s boards were slightly ‘Pig’…”

“When I was heading for the Islands in ‘47, he [Morrisey] said, ‘That’s what you’re really going to need to to get across Publics and places like that.’ He was encouraging me to ride a real flat bottom, parallel side board. Morrissey had spent a lot of time in the Islands. He’s spent, I think, a couple of years over there. Mary Ann was with him, at that time.”

Dave Rochlen

Dave Rochlen (rock-linn) was a contemporary of Joe Quigg‘s and, along with Zahn, Quigg and Matt Kivlin, was an influential surfer of the late 1940s. He was, as Zahn put it, part of the Triumvirate of Zahn, Quigg and himself. An early tale is told of an encounter between Rochlen and starlet Marilyn Monroe:

“A strikingly beautiful woman approaches Dave Rochlen on the beach,” wrote Craig Stecyk, “and inquires as to the maker of his surfboard. He informs her that he builds his own and she responds that she would like to place an order. That evening, the lady shows up at Rochlen’s board building area (located in his girl friend Honey Bear Warren‘s garage) with [a friend] ... The man orders up one as well, and is a friendly sort. This fellow finds it interesting that Rochlen is crafting surfboards in the garage of the Governor of the State of California. Dave finds it noteworthy that the fellow is none other than matinee idol, Gary Cooper.”

Another Marilyn Monroe tale is told of Tommy Zahn and Dave Rochlen surfing Malibu Point on August 16, 1947. “The point. Evening, full moon. Two surf dogs do a double date in a 1934 Ford Roadster, with boards in the back,” wrote Craig Stecyk. “The men: Tom Zahn and Dave Rochlen. The women: Darrylin Zanuck (daughter of ‘movie czar’ Richard Zanuck) and Norma Jean Baker.

“Tom and Darrylin have fixed ‘Rocky’ up with Norma Jean Baker, later to be better known as Marilyn Monroe.”

On September 3, 1947, Rochlen and Quigg surfed “flawless, five foot rollers” a couple of miles south of Sequit. Suddenly, armed company guards open fire. “The water is alive with the splashes of skipping bullets as the pair sprints for the safety of the famous rocks. Dave and Joe endure one quarter of an hour more target practice. The accurate shots of the aggressors are hitting the rock and showering the trespassing surfers with splintered fragments. Exasperated, Quigg yells, ‘Hey Rocky, do something.’ Rochlen, who had seen action in the South Pacific as a marine, pondered the appropriate action. Finally, he jumps in the water, takes of his trunks, and slithers up the backside of the rock to its summit. Boldly, he waves this impromptu flag of truce and the bullets cease flying. Rochlen and Quigg then escape far out to sea.”

Rochlen went on to be one of the first surfers to get into “surfwear,” inventing Jams in the 1960s.

Matt Kivlin

Along with Porter Vaughn, Kivlin was outside Zahn’s “Triumvirate,” but a good friend of Quigg’s. “Today, little is known about Matt Kivlin,” wrote Jeff Duclos in a profile of Kivlin for Longboard magazine in 1998, “yet he was a central figure in post World War II Malibu. He was the wave rider upon which Mickey Dora fashioned his style. He helped break the boundaries of surfboard design with Bob Simmons and Joe Quigg. Considered by many to be the best surfer of his day, he was the test pilot who took the Hawaiian hot curl riding style and transformed it into what became known as Malibu hot-dogging, paving the way for the era of high performance surfing that followed.”

“He was very much a turning point figure,” Joe Quigg told Duclos. “If you had to name the most important people of the time on your five fingers, he’d be in there.”

For his part, Kivlin notes the significant stylistic influence of O`ahu’s hot curl riders and specifically Rabbit Kekai had on him and all visiting Mailanders: “Rabbit Kekai ruled the beach down there [Waikiki in winter/spring1948]. He was the King of Queens, you might say.”

“When I first saw Rabbit Kekai,” recalled Kivlin, “he was light years ahead of anybody I’d seen. The Malibu style was set by those Hot Curl riders – stall, run to the nose and shoot the curl. We brought that kind of style back here [to Southern California]. Before that, everybody kind of stood on the tail and maneuvered the board around. To accommodate this new style, we began making the front of the board kind of pointy, so it wouldn’t pound. The center was flatter and the tail kicked up so it would be maneuverable, kind of like the longboards now.”

The first time Matt Kivlin surfed in Hawai`i, he got punched and Rabbit Kekai had to intervene. “You better believe it!” Remembered Rabbit. “That’s how I got to know Matt real well. And Matt, well... he catches waves and those guys drop in and they figure well, they’ve got territorial rights. And Matt’s a really good surfer, out of all those guys, I think he was the best.... He had a real stately stance, like straight up, you know? Real graceful. I used to watch him a lot. Matt gave me a balsa board that he’d shaped similar to our style, a hot curl but with a fin. He made that board for his wife and then I rode it and liked it and he gave it to me. That was in 1954. And I won the Makaha with that board in ‘56 and ‘57. I rode it in Peru and won with it there too. I ended up selling it to the President of Peru‘s nephew for $1,000.”

“The Islands trip[s were]... critical,” Quigg summed it up. “All of a sudden, it became important who could turn the best, or look the best.”

1947-49: Quigg Designs

Although the Malibu Board must be considered Joe Quigg‘s greatest contribution to surfboards, he also went on to shape breakthrough designs in boards made for big surf and paddleboards for racing; not to mention skimboards, canoes and outriggers.

Pintail Gun, Fiberglassed Skeg

During the summer of 1947, Joe Quigg shaped two other boards in addition to the Darrylin Board that were revolutionary in design.

One was a 100% foiled down wide pintail with the first fiberglass fin. It featured carved-in rail rocker, low sharp rails, flowing rocker end to end, and a 100% breakaway tail.

The pintail is documented in “A surviving historical sketch drawn by Quigg [made during a conversation with Kivlin] while on the way to Hawaii in 1947 (aboard the S.S. Lurline),” wrote Gary Lynch, “shows a streamlined, finned pintail gun that would be built as a series starting that year. This design was to be the first modern pintail gun shape with a fin.” What has been referred to as “Pintail #1“ was unveiled at Malibu, on June 11, 1947, just prior to the creation of “the Darrylin Board.” It was a lightweight balsa board designed for speed and maneuverability.

“On his way back to the mainland aboard the S.S. Lurline,” wrote C.R. Stecyk of Quigg’s initial trip to Hawai`i in 1947, “Joe decided to cut the center out of his pintail and reattach the rails, thus making a narrower board. Kivlin and Quigg returned to Malibu where they reported the virtues of finless hot curl sliding to a skeptical public.”

“This pintail was a forward thinking innovation which featured an absolutely flat bottom with low rails rolling down to a sharp edge in the rear,” wrote Craig Stecyk. “This revolutionary board was basically ignored by all those present. Furthermore, if it were not for Quigg’s considerable surfing ability, an outside move like this design could have led to total ostracization from the point elite.”

No doubt the pintail gun shape was influenced by the Hot Curl designs then popular for big wave riding in Hawai`i. The gun shape would go on to be the basic template for all big wave surfboards.

Foam Prototype

Another revolutionary Quigg board from 1947 was an extension of what Pete Peterson had done just the year before and what Simmons was working on in terms of weight reduction applied to boards. Quigg shaped an all-foam surfboard. It was four feet long with four ounce fiberglass.

Multiple Fins

Following up on his three significant 1947 designs, Quigg built “Pintail #2“ on May 20, 1948. Quigg noted it as a “speed board” and the “first narrow pintail, later called a big wave gun.” It was a pintail with a spear-like look, a flat bottom, low sharp rails and a 100% breakaway tail. “Unfazed by the... negative reception,” he and his pintails received at Malibu, “Joe cuts the pintail board in half longitudinally, removes the center area and re-glues it producing an even narrower, gunnier board. The result, a very fast sinker. The reaction: total rejection... Only Gard Chapin has a few kind words to offer. He was intrigued over the board’s exotic features such as its fiberglass fin (the first ever). Quigg’s experimentation with the fins on this board included multiple configurations (The first tri fin).”

Grey Ghost

Quigg built other boards, also. One board that he shaped that eventually fell into the hands of a young hot rider in the early 1950s named Phil “The Guayule Kid” Edwards was nicknamed “The Grey Ghost.” It was a Hot Curl design, but untraditionally fiberglassed, pigmented and made from solid balsawood. The Grey Ghost was 10’ 11” long and 20 1/2” wide. Quigg made it in an effort to re-evaluate the Hot Curl shape and Edwards later rode the board for nearly two years.

Malibu Perpetual Surfboard

While on the Mainland, Quigg built a couple of other demonstrator Hot Curls around 1949/50, “‘just to prove the point,’ C.R. Stecyk paraphrased Quigg. “One Kivlin project from this period, a redwood replica of Rabbit’s board was an absolute sinker. Joe remembers it as being ‘unpaddleable... at least for us.’ This board was then recycled into a trophy hence the birth of the ‘Malibu Perpetual Surfboard.’“

Nose Rider & Ridicule

Joe Quigg followed his pintail designs with a later refinement of the pintail design. In 1949, he came up with his first “Nose Rider.” This last board had a straight flat front, with “all the curve in the back, even the deck turned up in back.”

Like most all other surfboard designers who shaped themselves into new design territory, Quigg’s boards were viewed skeptically. In fact, his shapes were initially looked down upon. Even Bob Simmons dismissed Quigg’s direction and their partnership would end because of them. “The guys at San Onofre and Hawaii ridiculed me so bad that I was embarrassed to take the board to the beach,” recalled Quigg about the reception he received when he took his new narrow and extremely pointed nose and tail design to the beach. “I built the pintail design so early on,” he added, “that later many people mistakenly gave others credit for the design.”

1948

Meanwhile, by October 9, 1948, Tommy Zahn was “so deep into riding Darrylin Zanuck‘s board,” wrote C.R. Stecyk of Zahn and his girlfriend’s board, “that he is continually borrowing it. Frustrated that she seemingly can never go surfing on her own stick, Darrylin plots revenge, and on this foggy eve a group of friends on clandestine assignment breaks into Zahn’s garage and liberates her board.”

By December 19, 1948, “Shorter, lighter more responsive Malibu’s by Quigg are making inroads into the [Malibu] point surf culture,” continued Stecyk. “A new technique of lower trim surfing around the pocket is developing. [Bob] Simmons in his direct social style becomes increasingly critical of these boards, feeling that higher trimming, wider, heavier, displacement hulls are the correct direction. Eventually, Bob will become so angered that he will cease speaking to Joe [Quigg] for over a year.”

1949

By 1949, Hot Curls and the use of foam were the main topics in surfboard design in the Malibu area.

Hot Curl Experiments

The 1949 “arrival on the mainland of [George] Downing, [Wally] Froiseth and Russ Takaki demonstrated to many doubters the viability of the finless, hot curl surfing. It was on this trip that the Hawaiians met Bob Simmons who introduced them to his concepts of composite material construction using foam, wood and fiberglass.”

“Simmons condemned Hot Curls,” Simmons friend and biographer John Elwell wrote me. “The history of the Hot Curl is that they cut the tail down, veed the bottom, had no fin, and a flat deck. The planks they were riding had thick wide rails (like five inches) that give resistance to the side way push of soup. They were getting pushed sideways. [Tom] Blake experienced a different problem in 1935 surfing his narrow tail paddle boards that yawed. He asked around and was told to try a fin like speed boats have. Blake was actually going side to side from uneven side pressures from a narrow tail...mainly to one side. The fin corrected this.”

“All early photos of hot curl boards show extreme resistance from eddy flow drag that increases with speed,” John Elwell continued. “In simple terms like Lindsey Lord, MIT Phd. – who wrote the book on planing hulls – wrote: the ‘more fuss (wake), more resistance.’ Hot Curls sent out a shower of a wake. Throwing water is resistance!

“Simmons watched them and told [Dale] Velzy they were cutting a hole in the water. Velzy agreed. Simmons also said they make the wave break sooner. The trench of resistance from the wake made the wave break sooner causing the rider behind distress...like [it did] Simmons.”

In 1949, “Quigg returned to the Islands with his pared down balsa quiver. Additionally, he personally investigated hot curl theory while building a couple of boards for himself in Wally’s shop. Kivlin and Rochlen were also in and out of the scene with Dave hooking up an occasional old redwood plank which could be reshaped by himself, Matt or whoever, into a suitable hot curl.”

Plywood & Foam

Joe Quigg remembered that it was 1949 when Matt Kivlin began talking to Simmons about the idea of making lighter, hollow plywood rescue boards.

According to Quigg and Kivlin, Simmons was – at that time – concentrating on creating a new generation of redwood boards that were stronger, more streamlined and faster. Kivlin says he began toying around with different war surplus materials in 1949, eventually leading to the Simmons’ concept of the sandwich board.

“You couldn’t buy any wood right after the war,” Kivlin remembers. “So we cut up these old surplus life rafts and made side rails with the balsawood, then we filled the inside with foam. It was just something to hold the insides together. We built a big table to clamp them down – it was all kind of Simmons’ idea. I’d shape and fiberglass the rails and do the deck planing. There was a little input from me as to what the board should be shaped like. We sold them for $35 and sold quite a few. They were kind of a temporary thing. I’d be surprised if there were any that didn’t de-laminate in a year.”

“The plywood board was Matt’s idea,” Quigg insisted. “Matt talked to Simmons into going into business building them. He thought it would be a good lifeguard rescue board. Now, everyone refers to them as Simmons’ boards, but it’s not true. It was Matt’s idea.”

Sandwich Boards

Joe Quigg was in the Islands when Simmons wrote saying that he had built his first light board in the 25 pound range. “He had never built anything like this before and that was late 1949,” wrote Nat Young. “Simmons had had fibreglass and resins for three years but did not choose to use these materials for their lightness but only as protection around the nose of his redwood boards.”

Simmons “was familiar with a light fibreglass cloth which gave him the possibility of making lighter boards, but he didn’t use it until 1949. Ironically Simmons delayed using the cloth because he believed that heavier boards were faster and he fastidiously stuck to this idea.”

Bob Simmons, like Tom Blake before him, had begun thinking that heavier boards would work better, but like Blake, he later spent much of his design and development time aimed at lightening his boards.

“Simmons thought that” Kivlin’s idea of a plywood rescue board “was interesting,” wrote Leonard Lueras, “but instead of simply making the boards hollow he began sandwiching styrofoam between plywood and glassing the whole thing over. He had gotten some samples of styrofoam after the war.” The drawback with styrofoam, however, was that it would dissolve once catalyzed resin was poured onto it, so the two together turned out to be impractical. By sandwiching styrofoam in between plywood, however, Simmons made it viable.

“The first couple of boards of this type,” wrote Elwell, “had 50/50 rail lines, but by ‘49 he had them down to 60/40 and as low as 80/20. The tails were so thin as to be fragile.”

At one point, the styrofoam core sandwich board looked like it would be the one to replace the old redwood/balsa‘s. Yet, at this critical juncture, it was the combination of light weight materials with light weight wood (i.e. balsa) to comprise the Malibu Board that changed everything. Weight and materials were not the only change agents. Not only would redwood become a thing of the past, but the traditional surfboard designs and old plank shapes would give way to newer designs featuring scarfed noses, pulled down rails, concaves and skegs.

The first Simmons-made Sandwich Boards were simply sealed plywood over a styrofoam core. Later, he added light and shapable balsa rails to streamline the shape.

“The lifeguards, unfortunately, never would buy them,” Joe Quigg remembered, “but the surfers Simmons’ followers thought they were neat and started buying them.” Demand for Simmons boards subsequently continued to increase. Simmons sold about 100 in the Summer of 1949 alone – a record at that time.

To satisfy demand, Simmons set up a surf shop in Santa Monica. “In those first days,” said Quigg, “Simmons would glue the plywood, styrofoam and balsa parts together, then Matt (Kivlin) would shape the balsa rails and glass them over.”

Simmons’ new board-building business became too big for he and Kivlin to handle alone, so they asked Joe Quigg to return from Hawaii to give them a hand. Quigg came back and, while Simmons maintained his original Santa Monica shop, Quigg and Kivlin organized a separate glassing and finishing shop to support Simmons’ operation. “Matt and I rented a shop space up the same road from Simmons’ shop,” recalled Quigg, “and it was there that we did all the finishing work. At that time, Simmons had lots of orders. We did maybe a hundred boards.”

1950

After shaping the first Malibu Board in 1947 and seeing Tommy Zahn‘s success with Darrylin’s board later on, Joe Quigg followed up by shaping a similar board for his girlfriend Aggie, several years later, on September 1, 1950. What subsequently happened is told by C.R. Stecyk in terse style:

“Joe Quigg fashions a couple of extremely light 9’0” surfboards for his wife Aggie and his friends. Quigg frequents ten different lumber yards to get the lightest balsa possible. These twenty-four pound boards were an immediate curiosity. Les Williams, a guy from Santa Monica, borrows Aggie’s board, and promptly begins to surf in a manner never before seen. The Birdman starts laying out full banked turns on the wave’s face, and is cutting back from the wave’s top all the way through the curl and then bouncing back into a bottom turn. Matt Kivlin has bought some balsa from Joe and has fashioned a 9’6” streamlined stick for his girlfriend and starts surfing it for fun. Being the best surfer around, people are acutely aware of these light boards performance capabilities. The extremism of Williams and Kivlin set the new style.”

“Leslie Williams was the first one to cutback,” Steve Pezman, editor of The Surfer’s Journal stated it simply to me in 1998.

Nat Young, in his History of Surfing put it another way, writing that even though this second of what would later be termed Malibu boards was built by Joe Quigg for his girlfriend Aggie, “she was not the person who ended up surfing it. It was a radical nine-foot-six-inch long board and eventually wound up in the hands of a local surfer named Leslie Williams. He ended up wailing on that board, becoming the hottest surfer in the area and turning faster than anyone else.”

Joe Quigg recalled that these 9 foot balsa boards were considered small, but were a big hit with his girlfriend Aggie (whom he later married) and her girlfriends. “So Matt (Kivlin) bought some balsa from me and made his girlfriend a nice, streamlined nine-six board. That was Matt’s first light, all-balsa board.”

It was out of curiosity and fun, Quigg said, that Kivlin began surfing on his girlfriend’s smaller board. “And about the same time, another local surfer by the name of Leslie Williams began borrowing my wife’s balsa board.”

“In those days,” continued Quigg, “Matt was the best surfer around, so he made quite an impression on people who saw him on that light board. And Williams, he really got into my wife’s board. He started doing things nobody had ever seen before. He was the first guy I knew of who made radical bank turns. He would lay out on a wave and just generally rip.” Together, Kivlin and Williams made quite a splash and began setting the style for everybody who watched them.

Meanwhile, Kivlin and Quigg were working with Bob Simmons in what turned out to be an uneasy alliance. “Simmons had tried working out of his own house, but he didn’t get along with his brother, so he opened a shop in Santa Monica at 20th and Olympic among a bunch of sheet metal shops. He built a little box in the back which was his room and he lived there. There were other shops available and they were very reasonable, so I rented one and Joe rented one. Joe and I did a lot of things together. We got along real well. I’d build some boards. He’d build some boards. We’d try something a little different each time and take them down to Malibu, one-or-two a week, and try them out. We’d go surfing at Malibu every day at five o’clock. If they worked well, someone would usually come up and ask to buy them.”

Kivlin’s friend Dave Rochlen was now a Los Angeles county lifeguard and he, too, began building boards. “I used to play around with tints to make the boards look a little bit different,” admitted Quigg, “but Dave was the first person I recall who began applying modern-style, colorful designs on to surfboards.” Rochlen remembers building custom boards for actors Gary Cooper and Peter Lawford, “and other movie industry people.”

Simmons-Quigg Rift

The tale of the Malibu Board would be incomplete without further consideration of the Simmons-Quigg group rift that culminated in 1950. The bad blood between these two camps only thickened over time.

“Kivlin and Quigg were from Malibu and they worked together,” Rennie Yater told me. “Joe always made boards that rode better. They were much easier to ride. He wouldn’t be as radical as Bob [Simmons]. Kivlin’s boards were even quite a bit different. His style of surfing you ever seen in the museum, the real thin 90 rails? Boy, he could really ride ‘em, too. Really good. So, he just went off and did his own thing. You know, Kivlin and Simmons didn’t like each other, either. But that was the admiration part of it, too.”

“Simmons got very upset about this board,” wrote Nat Young about the surfboard that Joe Quigg built for his girlfriend Aggie, based on the Darrylin Board, “and his partnership with the others broke up over it, especially when Matt Kivlin wanted to build a ‘potato chip‘ for his girl. Matt was a big guy, about 6’3” tall, who organised all the parties for the Malibu Yacht Club (the first Surf Club in the area) and was by far the most consistent surfer at Malibu in the late ‘forties and early ‘fifties. When he started to ride his girl’s nine-foot-four he reached the height of excellence.”

Greg Noll put it a different way; more insightful. “Simmons was upset that Kivlin and Quigg were adapting his board design to the quicker, more maneuverable Malibu style. I remember his saying, ‘That’s not what you want to do.’ I later realized that he was building boards for himself. He thought that everyone should ride the way he did.”

Quigg acknowledged that long before he and Simmons began experimenting with foam and balsa, there were light redwood/balsa and balsa surfboards around. “In the early California and Hawaii surfing days they were considered beginners’ or girls‘ boards. The bigger and older waveriders wouldn’t be seen on a light board, and when a kid or a girl would paddle out on one, they’d chase them away and make them surf on the smaller, inside waves.

“Like Quigg said,” John Elwell defended Simmons, “he tried everything because he did not know. No one ever won an argument with Simmons. Simmons never went up and down the coast preaching his theories. It was Quigg who used to cut Siimmons and his boards. Simmons had a reputation of being a loner. He only spoke to a selected few privileged surfers. That is why so little is known about him. Like Quigg said: Bob would not speak to him.

“Quigg to Simmons was off the wall. Simmons deserves fault for not being able to communicate to people with lesser intelligence. Geniuses are like this, they are often rejected and misunderstood. Quigg said, ‘I copied his rails.’ That is all you had to do. Cutting tails down and changing the nose and adding more fin did not do anything. Multiple fins became the thing like Simmons. Today, no one has figured out yet a lot of things Simmons did – like balancing the boards, the equation for weight displacement, and the exact foil for high pressure rails and the least resistance…”

Joe Quigg and Matt Kivlin, “did some shaping in Simmons’ shop,” recalled Greg Noll, who was just starting out as a surfer in the late 1940s. After the Darrylin Board started to turn heads and the Birdman and Kivlin started ripping on the girls boards, “They took the same principles Simmons used and applied them to balsa wood and to the needs of the average surfer. That’s how the Malibu board evolved. Velzy came in behind them. I was behind Velzy by about three years.”

“During that time,” Noll noted of when Bob Simmons revolutionized surfboards by introducing lighter materials and fiberglass in the mid-to-late ‘40s, “surfboards went through some rapid design changes. Within a three-to-four-year period, we’re talking about going from redwoods to the Simmons-type board to the Malibu board. The Malibu board was a lightweight, balsa board designed off the Simmons theory of reducing the weight, but it also went one step further by improving the shape and thus the maneuverability of the board.”

“What they did,” continued Noll, “as far as I’m concerned, busted the whole surfing thing right open. When other surfers saw what Matt and Leslie were doing, it was the beginning of the end for old-fashioned and crude surfing. After that, no hot surfer ever built an old redwood or paddle board again. And surfing left its ‘crude’ period.”

“One of the reasons that Kivlin and Quigg were so successful with the Malibu board,” concluded Noll, “is that they had the perfect testing ground. The Malibu wave is like a made-to-order perfect tube. They could test their designs on these uncrowded, machinelike waves, then come in and make improvements. During that short period of a few years, surfboard design made a leap like going from horse and buggy to motorcars.”

Legacy of Joe Quigg

By the start of the Fifties, the garages of increasing numbers of home shapers that once slithered with both corkscrew slivers of redwood and balsa, were now replaced by balsa only. Joe Quigg, instrumental in combining balsa with fiberglass and resin to make the new Malibu Chips, continued his shaping.

In 1950, Quigg introduced further changes in board design. At a time when most boards weighed between 35 and 100 pounds, and measured 10 to 12 feet in length, Quigg began building a series of progressively shorter and lighter boards for Malibu area surfers. The lengths of boards seemed to come down month by month. From 9-feet 6-inches to 9-feet to 8-feet and shorter. By March of 1951, Quigg had the Malibu Board length all the way down to 7 feet.

Quigg‘s Malibu Boards were the first to have what Quigg called the “complete combination“ of basic features all integrated into one board. This combination of elements continues to comprise the basics of surfboard design to present day, with the exception that balsa has been replaced with foam and single fin design has evolved to mostly tri-fin Thrusters.

When Quigg was refining his designs in 1951, the specifications and construction included: all light balsa with one layer of 4 ounce glass, low rails, flat bottoms, deeper and thinner fiberglass fins, smooth flowing rail and tail rocker, and a bottom rocker template that can fit many modern boards, today. The 7-foot board weighed 19 pounds. Its elliptical, rounded pintail shape caused some surfers to call these designs “egg boards.” By 1953, young innovative surfers like Mickey Muñoz and Bobby Patterson promoted the “egg board“ up and down the surfing beaches of Southern California.

Because of his development of the Malibu Board and his other progressive designs, Joe Quigg must be considered one of surfing’s greatest “crossover” shapers. Using a sense of hydrodynamic design and fiberglass, he made the transition back and forth between wood, foam and fiberglass. He did so for not only surfboards, but paddle boards, canoes and catamarans, as well. In fact, Quigg’s paddle boards set many records. Because of his improved hydrodynamic designs and use of lighter materials, Quigg was partly responsible for changing the racing paddle board from its Tom Blake era of 19 feet in length down to its current 12 foot length.

After he moved to The Islands, Joe Quigg became best known for his paddleboards, outrigger canoes and catamarans. His Hawaiian class racing outrigger canoe shapes dominated the majority of races during the later half of the Twentieth Century and can be found all over the world to present day. Quigg became a member of the Outrigger Canoe Club and Quigg-inspired shapes can be seen on any day in the waters off Waikiki.

In 1985-86, Quigg built the Kaoloa, a 6-man “Hawaiian Class Racer“ made of koa wood. “Commissioned by the Outrigger Canoe Club,” wrote Gary Lynch, “Quigg transformed a koa log into a gold medal winning racing canoe. This work of art is testament to the fact that Joe Quigg is a rare perfectionist and a master craftsman. The ‘Kaoloa’ is considered to be one of the finest koa wood canoes ever built and is the pride of the Outrigger Canoe Club.” The Kaoloa scored another victory by winning the 1990 Molokai to O`ahu race, beating defending Californians by about two miles. Big wave surfer-turned-politician Fred Hemmings expressed the feeling of many when he declared, “Joe Quigg is a great Hawaiian natural resource. Quigg, more than anyone else in Hawaii has dedicated himself to seeing to it that the great canoe-building craftsmanship of the ancient Hawaiians isn’t lost for future generations.”

Quigg’s talent with hull shapes was not limited to canoes. Having been introduced to catamarans through his time spent with Woody Brown, Quigg went on to design his own. One of his catamarans, owned by champion surfer Joey Cabell, set a record sailing from Hawai`i to Tahiti.

Curiously, while Quigg’s contributions to paddle board, outrigger canoe and catamaran designs continued to be recognized, what he did in terms of his breakthroughs in surfboard design were somewhat forgotten in the later eras of the 1960s, ‘70s and 80s. This is perhaps because, as surf writer Gary Lynch puts it, “Close friends will shout in anger while jealous has-beens and wanna-bees distort the historical record on who did what and when they did it.” Noted Gary with insight, “This phenomenon of not agreeing will likely remain a permanent factor in the historical discussion of the 20th century surfboard.”

Quigg was not phased by the neglect of his contributions. Downplaying his offerings, he wrote, “I’m not trying to claim the surfing world wouldn’t have gone right on with out me... of course it would have. Someone else would have built those first (1947) foam boards and experimental models... built the first glass fin... introduced those shape combinations. Someone else would have built the first stand-up skim boards, polyethylene foam belly boards, and the first modern pintail gun with fin. Someone else would have made all those improvements on paddle boards and racing canoes. Probably most important of all: My motive before, during and after was to make stuff that was happy, more fun. Nobody else wanted girls or young kids in surfing.”

Going beyond the realm of surfing, Quigg declared the question of who did what when was actually just a small matter. “It’s just a lot of trivial stuff, stages of development. I really don’t care what you write. Nobody else cares anyway. I’m not an exhibitionist. Besides, I’m really into astronomy and astrophysics. Space and time is much larger than the physicists claim. Our universe is just a small spin off of something much larger, where gravity, time, and speed of light are different.”

Joe Quigg passed on in 2021.

To read more about Joe Quigg and his contributions, please read Kevin Kinnear's interview of Joe for Breakout magazine in 1984, located here:

https://drive.google.com/file/d/0B6eoqhh0Pt9vZGZqLWdMUjFHOU0/view?resourcekey=0-BPjsN1WM3s7B3JowKiVg6g