Pete was the U.S. Mainland’s reigning contest champion of the 1930s, winning the Pacific Coast Surfing Championships (PCSC) – the major surfing contest of the period – four times out of ten; in (1932, 1936, 1938 and 1941). No other surfer came close to his dominance of Southern California waves throughout all of the 1930s.
Cliff Tucker, a winner of the PCSC one year himself, expressed the feeling of many of his contemporaries when he told an interviewer that his former schoolmate and surfing friend Peterson, “was the greatest waterman on the West Coast in those days. As far as I’m concerned, he was the best and maybe Lorrin Harrison was second best. I was hot one year and beat ‘em both, but I was just lucky.”
But Pete Peterson was much more than a competitive superstar. As Craig Lockwood wrote in his biographical article on Pete in The Surfer’s Journal, published in 2005, “Peterson defined what would become the paradigm of the West Coast’s classic waterman. Peterson’s life and livelihood were the sea. There was no ocean skill he didn’t possess. He swam competitively, surfed, bodysurfed, rowed, sailed, lifeguarded, tandem surfed, paddleboarded, dove hardhat, SCUBA, and free, water skied, did movie stunt work, served as a boat master and marine coordinator for numerous films, designed and shaped surfboards, rescue and racing paddleboards, helped test and later manufactured his friend and co-lifeguard Lieutenant Wally Burton’s pioneering flexible lifeguard rescue tube, designed and built the West Coast’s finest surf dories (molds of which are still in use today), fished commercially, ran a marine salvage business as a licensed skipper and contractor, and designed for this business one of the most sophisticated salvage craft on the West Coast.”
“He was muscular and lean, but didn’t look like anything special,” a contemporary noted, “But when he got in the water he was the best.”
Pete surfing the inside channel at Corona del Mar.
Photographer unknown but likely Doc Ball.
Francis Preston Peterson was born in April, 1913, in the South Texas coastal community of Rockport, not far from the major city in the area, Corpus Christi. His family operated the La Playa Hotel and Pete’s access to salt water was immediate. His family was defined by what was written in its letters of correspondence: “… You are what you do, what you say, and how you behave.” “… You are either upright and righteous, or you are not. There is no middle ground.” “… One either is, or is not a good person. And the choice is yours.”
Not long after his birth, two Gulf of Mexico hurricanes blew into South Texas causing great loss of life and property. The first one was in 1915 and the second and stronger one was in 1919. Consequently, the Petersons felt they stood a better chance at prosperity on the Southern California coast rather than the Texas Gulf Coast. Even so, the Texas Coastal Bend hurricane of 1919 was not the last storm to throw Pete’s life upside down and, for a while, the Petersons managed hotels in both states.
Within a year, Pete’s family was relocated in Santa Monica, California. They bought the Crystal Beach Bathhouse, off Strand Avenue, near the Santa Monica pier. It was a time when public bathhouses were popular and the Petersons prospered. By 1922, Pete was surfing on a board built by the bathhouse carpenter, under the tutelage of noted Southern California surfer Bill Herwig and influenced by Duke Kahanamoku and other visiting Hawaiians. “Among the customers at the bathhouse was a group of Hawaiians, some of the first to come to this country,” Pete recalled many years later that he “became intrigued with the Hawaiian’s surfboards and their watermanship, and at 9 years old became one of the first dozen surfers on the Pacific Coast.”
According to champion Australian surfer Nat Young, who talked with Pete before his passing, his first real surfboard “was 12’ long with an 11” wide tail, 18” at its widest point, and made of solid redwood which for some obscure reason had to be shipped from Oregon via Hawaii. It had no rocker, egg-shaped rails, and the redwood planks were held together with lag bolts running inwards from the rails.” It is unknown if this was the board shaped by the bathhouse carpenter or the board after it.
Santa Monica was a focal point of beach activity during the 1920s and 1930s, mostly due to its geographical location next to growing Los Angeles. The city included eight miles of beach out of a total of 85 miles of beach belonging to Los Angeles County. Nine-tenths of the county’s 1.8 million population in 1928 dwelt within thirty miles of the ocean. Santa Monica pier was touted as the “world’s largest municipal fishing pier” adjacent to an esplanade park, three different beach clubs and several hotels, not to mention the Crystal Beach Bathhouse. To the south, there was the Ocean Park amusement piers “lined with rides, arcades, stands selling hot dogs and hamburgers, souvenir shops, and restaurants. A little harbor offers refuge for commercial craft and yachts, and access by water taxi to the gambling ships just outside the three-mile limit.”
In an era before freeways, there was – believe it – mass transit available throughout Los Angeles County. Daily, over 200 inter-urban Red Car electric trains ran, linking Santa Monica with Newport Beach to the south and Riverside and San Bernardino to the east. Additionally, the bus line could take you from downtown Los Angeles to the coast in under an hour. Not advertised or publicly promoted, there were also several converted passenger ships offshore that offered gaming, alcohol and “fleshy delights” to the more daring during the period of Prohibition, when alcohol sales were against the law within the continental United States.
During the summer of 1928, at age 15, Pete briefly got a job as a City of Santa Monica lifeguard, having lied about his age. His friend Wally Burton did the same. They were both busted and had to sit-out most of the summer until they became of age. Meanwhile, Pete dropped out of high school at age 16 in 1929 and for approximately the next quarter century served in the lifeguard services for the City of Santa Monica. He would end up serving full time, interrupted only by military service during World War II, as a Lifeguard Lieutenant until 1955.
It was Captain Geoge Watkins who developed the City of Santa Monica lifeguard service into one of the first – possibly the first – truly modern lifeguard departments. Under Cap Watkins, technology was used to its maximum potential for the times. There was telephone communication between towers, the lifeguard station, and a central dispatcher who could route emergency calls to police and fire departments. Cap Watkins was also the first to adopt Tom Blake’s hollow board as a rescue board, in the spirit for which Blake initially developed it. The department had advanced resuscitation equipment, specialized rescue/patrol vehicles and high speed power boats that were later popularized by the 1990s hit television series Baywatch.
Cap Watkins also made premeditated efforts to link Hollywood work to his guards at the beach. He was successful not only by helping to get bit parts and stunt work for guys like Pete, Wally Burton and Chauncy Granstrom, but also received favorable press coverage of what they were doing at Santa Monica’s beaches.
During the 1930s, Pete reigned as California’s top surfer and paddler. The year 1932 was an especially memorable year for Pete. In that single year, he won the Pacific Coast Surfing Championship (PCSC), paddled to Catalina Island and surfed O‘ahu for the first time.
The Pacific Coast Surfing Championships had begun in 1928 at Corona del Mar, organized primarily by Tom Blake, lifeguard Captain and manager of the Starr Bath House D. W. Scheffield, and the Corona Del Mar Surfboard Club – the largest – and probably only – organized surfing group on the U.S. Mainland at that point. California’s best surfers competed in the Pacific Coast Championships eight times between 1928 and 1941, until World War II shut it down. Significantly, the annual event was dominated for 4-out-of-9 years by Pete; in 1932, 1936, 1938 and 1941. Other early winners of the trophy included Keller Watson (1929), Gardner Lippincott (1934), Lorrin “Whitey” Harrison (1939) and Cliff Tucker (1940).
Catalina Crossing, October 1932
Pete was also in on the landmark October 1932 Catalina Crossing, along with Tom Blake and Wally Burton. The speed test was not so much of a race as it was a trial of endurance and a promotion to spotlight Tom’s first production hollow board. “Blake did not consider the Catalina paddle a race,” emphasized his biographer Gary Lynch. “He said it was a demonstration of the ability of his new Rogers [manufactured] paddleboards. To prove how they could perform in long distance rescue work. Also it was to prove the stamina of men who paddled then... He said it was not a race and unfair to call it one. Wally and Pete did Tom a favor really [by helping him promote his boards].”
The Catalina paddle “was my idea,” California surfing pioneer Chauncy Granstrom recalled. “Pete and I paddled together quite a bit and there were two fishing barges out there [off shore from the beach]. We paddled out to the barges one day and I said, ‘Listen, let’s see who can paddle to the [Channel] Islands.’ So, Gary Halten [a lifeguard lieutenant] got a hold of the idea and made a big deal out of it. We started training harder [as a result]…”
Originally, there were four paddlers entered in what some people insisted was “a race from the California mainland to Catalina Island over a 26-mile course, across open water.” Pete, Tom Blake, Wally Burton, and Chauncy Granstrom were the original entrants. Chauncy pulled out, leaving the field to just the three. Out of the trio, Tom Blake trained the hardest for the feat and was first to cross, making the trek in 5 hours and 53 minutes. “There’s an average of about 5 miles per hour,” Blake wrote, “with only the hands and arms to propel the hollow surfboard.” Pete and Wally came in later, at about 6.5 hours.
Wally Burton’s memory of the crossing is somewhat contradictory, but worth a listen. At one point, Burton, who went on to become a Deputy Chief in the California Highway Patrol, claimed that Tom Blake got Pete’s and Wally’s permission to paddle ahead the last couple of miles. This is flies directly in the face of what we know about Tom Blake, one of the most intense swimming competitors of the early Twentieth Century. Also, another recollection by Burton at another, earlier time, states what is known. Perhaps Burton lamented getting seasick after 22 miles out. It was then that Pete, concerned about him, held back to keep an eye on him. Before he died in 2004, Burton said, somewhat incomprehensibly, that he felt Blake’s coming in first was “opportunistic, and a little headline grabbing.”
“Well, I didn’t see it exactly like that,” Wally Burton responded another time when told Tom did not consider the Catalina crossing a race but more an endurance test, “because we paddled constantly there, training for this thing. He along with Pete, myself and a guy named Chauncy Granstrom. There were four of us [who] were going to paddle over there; not as a race, but to see who could get there first. It was a competitive thing, really. And Tom was the best of the bunch of us, there was no doubt about it. He arrived there first. And Pete was second and I came in third. Chauncy refused to make the trip, so that’s the way that ended up.”
“We were more or less advertising that thing for Rogers,” Wally Burton acknowledged. “And it was my understanding at the time that we were actually trying to make the best times, all of us, all three of us. And, of course, Tom made the best time, Pete was second, I was third. There were only three of us that actually completed the paddle over there, but the time he [Blake] made was pretty darn good.”
“Well,” Wally Burton answered about how he felt after the Catalina paddle, “I’ll tell you, I was pretty pooped. At one time there [during the paddle], I thought, ‘I’m going to duck this whole thing.’ I got sick, seasick really, rolling around on that board. And the chop was such that you lay on your stomach for that length of time, or get on your knees a lot of the time and paddle. But I forget what the time was… I was sick and so was Tom. I’ve got pictures of Tom and myself on the boat, after we’d come in, there. We’re both sacked out in bed, and we’re both sick.”
The crossing was well publicized in area newspapers. “Blake Takes Paddle Board Catalina Race; 5 Hrs. 23 Min.” began one article that went on to print: “Battling rough and choppy seas most of the thirty-six nautical miles between Point Vicente, on the mainland, and Long Point, Catalina Island, Tom Blake crossed the channel on a paddle board yesterday in five hours and twenty-three minutes actual time…
“Preston Peterson was second, covering the distance in six hours and twenty-nine minutes, and Wally Burton third in six hours and fifty minutes.
“Blake is the Hawaiian paddle board champion and Peterson and Burton are members of the lifeguard crew of the city of Santa Monica.
“The contenders were accompanied by the 40-foot cruiser Gloria H. under command of Capt. O.C. Olsen with timers and a physician aboard. They were taken to Avalon, where they were awarded prizes.
“The object of the contest, according to Capt. George Watkins of the Santa Monica lifeguards, was to show the efficiency of the paddleboard in life-saving work.”
Under a sub-heading of “Peterson Second,” another newspaper report focused a little more on the local guys: “Second place went to Lieut. Preston Peterson, of the municipal lifeguard service, who made the crossing in six hours, 31 minutes. Lieut. Wally Burton was third, finishing in 6 hours and 53 minutes.
“The three men were exhausted when dragged from the water by Guards Pat Lister and Bob Butts, who rowed a dory alongside the paddlers the entire distance, quite a feat in itself. The Capt. O.C. Olsen Co. boat, Gloria H., chugged ahead as a convoy…”
“It started out as a test, not a race,” Tom underscored. “It really put the board across as a rescue device... During the paddle, starting just after midnight, all of us separated. The convoy boat stayed with Pete and Wally. I moved on, alone. Finished alone, at Long Point.”
About the value of the crossing as a promotion of the hollow board, “The L.A. County and S.M. guard services,” Blake noted, “installed them soon after.”
“That’s when Rogers began that deal,” Wally Burton remembered. “And from my memory, Rogers used to come down to the guard station there in Santa Monica. George [Watkins] and he would talk about how to make a board for rescue work. And how it ever came into being I don’t claim any knowledge about that accurately, but it seemed to me like he worked with George with this idea about having struts like in the wing of an aircraft, and making hollow. And the first ones he built had plugs in the end of them because they leaked so bad. Then we’d have to stand them up on end and let the water pour out of them, after we got through with using the board. And those that we paddled to the Island [Catalina] were actually of that type.”
“George Watkins spearheaded a lot of Blake and Peterson’s designs,” Burton emphasized. “He was responsible for a lot of the lifesaving equipment being adopted.”
The first Catalina paddleboard crossing was a big deal in its time. The City of Santa Monica even recognized it as a major accomplishment affecting its lifeguard service and the community at large. This was evidenced by an article entitled “Guards Rewarded For Water Feat,” sub-titled “Mayor Pins Medals Upon Men Who Paddled to Catalina Island.” “Paddling one’s way across 29 miles of windswept and tumultuous ocean is no mean feat, Santa Monica city officials and civic leaders believe, so the three lifeguards who made the dangerous trip on paddle boards last Sunday were awarded medals yesterday for their ‘courage and accomplishment’ in an impressive ceremony at the municipal auditorium. Band music, commendation speeches and the cheers of the crowd of onlookers made the presentation a colorful affair.”
The article went on to quote that: “‘It was an accomplishment without parallel in the world of aquatic sports,’ Dr. J.S. Kelsey, Jr., chairman of the beach commission declared, as he introduced Mayor William H. Carter, who, in turn, introduced the recipients of the medals and lauded their efforts.
“Tom Blake, club guard, who won the paddle board race; Lieut. Preston Peterson of the Santa Monica service, who made the second best time, and Lieut. Wally Burton, who arrived third, stepped up to the mayor, bowed slightly as they received the medals, and then stepped back to the chairs on the rostrum of the bandstand.”
“‘The feat is destined to bring world wide renown to the Santa Monica lifeguard service,’” Dr. J.S. Kelsey declared.
O‘ahu, 1932-33
Pete Peterson was part of the first wave of California haoles to go Hawaiian, along with Lorrin “Whitey” Harrision and Gene “Tarzan” Smith, all of them following the U.S. Mainland surfer’s route set by Tom Blake in the 1920s.
Some accounts differ on the question of Pete’s relationship with fellow Southern California surfer Whitey Harrison at this point. Some say both of them went to Hawai‘i together, having already forged a friendship. Others say that they both traveled at the same time, but did not become close friends until financial crunching forced it upon them. According to legendary Australian surfer Nat Young, shortly after arriving on O‘ahu, Peterson, “ran out of money and ended up moving into the same house in Waikiki as ‘Whitey’ and they became close friends. Later, Whitey and Pete stowed away back to the US mainland on the U.S.S. Republic masquerading as members of a contingent of 1,000 soldiers being shipped back to California.”
Once at Waikiki, Pete quickly established a daily routine of getting up early, then paddling over eight miles from to Diamond Head and back. Along this route, he would sample the surf at Queens, Canoes, Public Baths, Popular’s and all the various reefs and breaks that were firing on a given day. This kind of dedicated discipline did not go unnoticed by the locals.
“See, Pete spoke little and listened much,” explained his good friend and surfing legend in his own right, Lorrin “Whitey” Harrison. “He could surf, all right. They liked that. And they liked the fact that he wasn’t just another rich haole off the Matson liner. He could use tools and make boards. His opinions were valued.”
It also did not hurt that some of the Hawaiians from the Olympic swim teams remembered Pete from when he was just a kid at the Santa Monica bath house.
“Back in the winter of 1932,” continued Nat Young, “Pete and Whitey surfed all over the south shore of Oahu, on every coral reef from Diamond Head to the entrance of Honolulu harbour. They rode waves all day long on both boards and outrigger canoes, enjoying the unfamiliarly warm Hawaiian water.”
“While surfing at Waikiki one morning,” Nat Young continued, “Pete spied an interesting looking board under another surfer. The statistics were about the same as his: 10’ long by 2’ wide, with a wide, square tail, but the timber was completely different. It was balsa. Back on the beach, Pete picked up one of these new blond coloured boards and discovered they were half the weight of his redwood one. Apparently they had been made in Florida, and the balsa came from South America. They had been given several coats of varnish to keep the water out, but this tended to crack under pressure, especially where they were knelt upon. The weight was the quality that made these boards fantastic: only 30 to 40 pounds. Who made them is a mystery, as are the surfers who rode them. But they represented such an advance on the old, heavy redwood boards that surfers began shaping their boards from the new timber, which soon began to be in great demand and hard to get.”
“There’s one error I’d like to bring out,” Pete told Peter Dixon, former Santa Monica lifeguard, screenwriter, and surf writer. “Some of the fellows who are supposed to be old-timers talk and write about the heavy redwood boards they were riding back in the ‘30s. They make it seem like we all lugged around those hundred-pounders. Well, gosh, that just wasn’t so. A couple of guys from Florida, in the early ‘30s, built the first balsas and shipped them to Hawaii… and they were really keen.
“And when I came back [to the U.S. Mainland], after trying them [at Waikiki], I started building balsa boards – ten-foot balsa boards that weighed under 20 pounds. They were that light because we didn’t have fiberglass to cover them with. Later on, we added redwood noses and tail blocks (and rails) for strength, and that brought the weight up.”
Pete’s first balsa board, built in 1932, was 12-feet, 20 pounds, varnished with a hardwood deck patch.
While on O‘ahu during the winter of 1932-1933, Pete and Whitey touched on the promise of what the North Shore of the island had to offer, although that seven-mile stretch of beach would not be known for its big surf until five years later.
Pete and Lorrin heard about the North Shore from Waikiki surfers who already knew there were waves out there, but generally never went out that far because there were plenty of waves already on the South Shore. Pete’s and Whitey’s first visit to the northern side of O‘ahu ended up being a three-day adventure that involved them walking and hitchhiking to Schofield Barracks and then hiking along the old Oahu Railroad tracks through cane and pineapple fields toward Haleiwa.
Hiking further along a stretch of wagon track northeast of the tiny plantation town, they later landed on a stretch of beach that they remembered, years later, as being the place much later to be known as “The Banzai Pipeline.”
“Pete, there’s no way you could surf that, but you figure we could survive a swim out there? Lorrin asked. As lifeguards back home, they readily recognized the danger of the spot, but as surfers they were drawn to it.
“Golly, Whitey,” said the thoughtful Pete, shaking his head. “I don’t know. That’s some wave, isn’t it?” Pete rubbed his chin. “If we don’t, we’ll always wish we had.”
Fearing they might lose the only swimming suits they own in the churning ocean, and seeing no one else around, they bodysurfed Pipeline naked.
This may have happened. I don’t know. It’s a pretty fanciful story written by Craig Lockwood. However, hot curl surfer Fran Heath told me that he and his buddies were bodysurfing Pipeline way before anyone knew about the spot, so maybe they found out about it from Pete and Whitey? We’ll probably never know. Certainly, although glowing accounts must have been repeated more than once, the real potential of the North Shore of O‘ahu was not fully realized until Whitey and Gene Smith rode it with surfboards six years later. According to legendary hot curl surfer Wally Froiseth, the North Shore was first ridden by non-locals around 1937 or 1938 and it was only then that its big wave potential was really recognized.
“This is the way it happened with us,” Wally told me. “A guy named Whitey Harrison – he and Gene Smith went out to Haleiwa one day. This was, like, around ‘37 or ‘38, whatever it was. They went out to Haleiwa. It was a big day. And they both almost drowned.”
Remember, both Whitey and Tarzan were experienced lifeguards and already recognized outstanding surfers in the 1930s.
“So, Gene Smith was telling us about this. ‘Oh, Christ! You ought to see these waves!’
“Me and my gang, we hear that – ‘Hey, let’s go!’ So, the next weekend we go out there, you know, but Haleiwa wasn’t that good, but Sunset Beach was good, so we just went Sunset.
“At that time, there wasn’t a name or anything. We just saw a good surf and went out. It was just when we started to have our Hot Curl boards.”
“Who started going out to the North Shore?”
“Well, like I say, Whitey Harrison, Gene Smith... Whitey came over to the islands two or three times. He came in the early ‘30s. We were surfing Castle – ‘31, ‘32, somethin’ around there. I mean, he was a good surfer...”
And so was Pete Peterson. George Downing recalled hearing about Pete while Downing was still a kid, before he met him after World War II: “The local surfers of that time [at Waikiki] were a pretty selective group. They didn’t just accept anyone. But Pete was not only accepted, he was respected.”
Mid-to-Late 1930's
In 1934, Pete became one of the first surfers to be photographed riding Malibu. Tom Blake and Sam Reid had been the first ones to surf it in 1926, and since that time, surfers slowly started to gravitate to it, despite the access problem. Even by 1934, entry onto the Adamson Ranch and Malibu Point was still restricted. It was Willie Grigsby, a surfing pal of Pete’s already for a decade and a fellow lifeguard that arranged to get in. Grigsby formed the Pacific Coast Paddle and Surfboard Association and talked Mrs. Adamson into giving the club keys to the gate into Malibu. In the rotogravure section of the Los Angeles Times for September 16, 1934, there’s a shot of 21 year-old Pete Peterson trimming across a clean Malibu wall. Dropping in on the same wave were Gardner Lippencott and Bill Dillehunt.
Another photographic moment was captured in the July 30, 1939 Houston Chronicle gravure section. There is a picture of Pete demonstrating a paddleboard rescue. On his board is his Scottish Terrier Huey crouched on the board’s nose, playing the role of the victim.
Surf writer C.R. Stecyk wrote about Pete on a “training exercise” on November 21, 1939:
“The Palama Kai, a mahogany masterpiece of a boat, and the flagship of the Santa Monica Guards, motors north along the coast. The occasion for this journey is what was euphemistically referred to as a ‘training exercise.’ On board, Preston ‘Pete’ Peterson and cohorts scan the horizon scoping out a massive west swell. Malibu and Dume have size, but the tides aren’t quite right. Pete is anxious to try out his newly built racing paddleboard, so he convinces his associates to drop him off at the far end of Anacapa Island. Alone, Pete paddles/rides the massive open ocean bumps all the way back to Santa Monica Pier, a distance of over 30 miles. The next day back at the point, Peterson tells the boys, ‘Yesterday I figured out how to railroad.’ Pete describes gliding on the crest of open ocean swells at high speeds for extreme distances. They surf and later motor the Palama Kai up to the teaming lobster beds north of County Line to capture dinner. Santa Monica Guards trained hard and played harder.”
“The quiet and reserved Peterson was also a first-rate craftsman,” wrote Matt Warshaw in his Encyclopedia of Surfing. “He designed and built a popular line of surfboards and paddleboards for Pacific System Homes in the late ‘30s, working mainly with balsa and redwood, and also made and sold boards out of his home for $35 (or $45 with a five-coat spar varnish finish).”
One time, “Pete Peterson had a naval architect design a paddleboard for him,” recalled one of surfing’s great surfboard shapers and characters Dale Velzy. “He glued up a giant block of balsa wood to make it from and he had it lofted by a marine engineer,” Velzy told, using the shipwright’s term for laying out on paper the exact three-dimensional measurements of a vessel. “Tulie Clark had one of those boards. LeRoy Grannis shaped his own boards and so did Lorrin Harrison. They were both good paddlers. The guys who were winning the races were mostly on custom-made balsa boards, and everybody copied that one Pete Peterson had made.”
“He was a neat freak,” recalled early surf photographer Don James, “who never used any wax on the surface of his board for traction because he felt it violated the pristine look he so admired.”
Surf writer Matt Warshaw pointed out, however, that as good a craftsman as Pete was, “… his reputation…was built on his rescue work as much as his surfing and paddleboard accomplishments. Peterson invented a galvanized rescue flotation device, resembling a small buoy, which evolved into the modern rubber rescue tube…”
Pete was also known for his work in the film industry. Beginning in the 1930s and continuing throughout his life, Pete played numerous bit and second-unit parts in a variety of films that required someone skilled at handling small water craft or “fighting” sharks or crocodiles or even just wearing a monster costume – all of which Pete did and more. As he grew older, he also had roles to play in films and shorts, but more as an advisor than an actor.
“My father could hold his breath a long, long time,” recalled Pete’s daughter Lisa, “so he often got parts where he played a ‘floater’ – a dead man.”
“That ability to adapt, adopt, improvise, and make believable” is a reputation Pete maintained right up to the end of his life, asserted surf writer Craig Lockwood. A list of most of the movies, shorts and documentaries Pete had roles in, include: Unsung Heroes (documentary, date unknown); All Aboard (Mentone/Universal, musical short, 1937); Wake of the Red Witch (Republic, 1948); Fair Wind to Java (Republic, 1953); Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea (Twentieth Century Fox, 1960); Poseidon Adventure (Twentieth Century Fox, 1972); Towering Inferno (Fox/Warner, 1973); 99 and 44/100% Dead (Twentieth Century Fox, 1974); Jaws (Universal, 1973-74); Lucky Lady (Twentieth Century Fox, 1975); Airport77 (Universal, 1977); Beyond the Poseidon Adventure (Twentieth Century Fox, 1979).
Other work included the Oscar-winning Pete Smith Specialties (MGM) that ran in the late 1940s and early 1950s as shorts in theatres as filler for the main movie. Notable stunts during this period include putting an elephant on water skis and jumping the Santa Monica Harbor breakwater on water skis.
“Pete may have earned an additional credit for being the first tow-in surfer,” wrote Craig Lockwood, “using a ski boat to tow him into waves at Palos Verdes Cove on a unique ski-shaped board.”
Les Williams remembered this stunt and even witnessed some of the preparation for it, like Pete steam-bending a 24-inch-wide piece of plywood in his shop one morning. “Its nose curved up, (so) from the side it looked like a water ski. With a low camera angle, it looked exactly like a side shot of a water ski, but was in essence a short board that had been towed into the break.”
Pete also worked on the immensely popular television series of the 1950s that stared Lloyd Bridges: Sea Hunt.
World War II and the 1940s
When the United States entered World War II, in 1941, Pete initially got a deferment due to the fact he was married, had a young son (John, four years old in 1940) and worked in public safety. Just as Pete’s marriage to his first wife Arlene was not working out, he was inducted into the U.S. Navy, on February 18, 1943.
By June, Pete had passed all his training in San Diego, testing well in no small amount due to the fact he was already an accomplished waterman. Because of his lifeguard lieutenant experience and being skilled at handling small craft, Pete was sent to New Orleans to qualify as a Ship Fitter, with the non-commissioned rank of Petty Officer Third and Second Class.
Pete completed the New Orleans training and took a two-week leave to visit his son in Santa Monica. Cap Watkins reinstated him at the beach for five days so he could earn a little extra money. In a significant generational hand-off, Pete took young Matt Kivlin with him to ride Malibu for the Pete’s last time before going back on duty with the Navy. This may have been Kivlin’s first taste of Malibu, the break he would become synonymous with.
Pete went back to train in New Orleans and earned his Petty Officer First and Chief. By November 1944, he had completed both the Navy’s extremely demanding Diving School, its Firefighter’s School and Velocity Power Tool School, going on to qualify as a Diver Second Class.
Pete again had a short leave back in Santa Monica where he lifeguarded for a few days and then shipped out on the U.S.S. Pandemus bound for the Philippine Islands. By March 1944, the U.S. Navy was operating out of Olongapo in Subic Bay in the liberated Philippines. Pete was stationed here as well as on board off the islands of Saipan, Iwo Jima and Okinawa. Pete’s skills were in high demand and his crew of fitters and divers worked around the clock, often times right next to other crews removing dead bodies from the areas to be worked on. If the repairs were successful, the ships are put back in action. If not, they are sent back to Subic for further fixing. Pete was responsible for heavy repair work, often working underwater, also helping to remove bodies, welding in had-hat diving gear under conditions so difficult and traumatic that he would never talk about them afterwards. “My dad never spoke of the war,” afterwards, recalled his son John, “even about his service.”
After the United States dropped two atomic bombs on Japan, Japan surrendered unconditionally on August 15, 1945, bringing an end to the war. Germany had been defeated earlier in the year. Even though the war was now over on all fronts, it took Pete a while to get back home.
On the way back, at one of the islands the U.S.S. Pandemus visited, Pete bartered for an outrigger canoe that he was allowed to keep on the foredeck of the ship’s cargo hatch. In his off-watch hours, when other crewmen relaxed in their bunks smoking, reading or playing cards, Pete would lower the outrigger overboard and sail around the various lagoons, diving and trading odds and ends to villagers in exchange for breadfruit and coconuts.
It took the U.S.S. Pandemus seven months to finally return to its home port of New Orleans. Pete was discharged with $142.01 separation pay, of which $99.65 of it had to be used for transportation to get back to Santa Monica. Fortunately, his old job as Lifeguard Lieutenant on the beaches of Santa Monica was still waiting for him. Finding housing was a different story. With thousands of G.I.’s returning home before him, local housing was nearly nonexistent.
Cap Watkins again came to the rescue. He offered the use of one of Santa Monica’s rescue boats so that Pete would not only have a place to stay, but also bring his son John under his wing again. John, then eight years-old, had been staying with family friends since 1943. Now, father and son reunited in a small new home, albeit small. They had tiny berths in the rescue boat’s cabin, a tiny galley and showers at the lifeguard headquarters.
Even though gasoline was no longer rationed, automobiles, like housing, were hard to get. No matter, Pete was still able to score a clean 1941 Plymouth coupe and it didn’t take father and son long to use it to hit favorite surf spots and rekindle friendships amongst those who were lucky enough to make it through the war alive. When Pete got together again with Whitey Harrison, his surfing shifted more to the south, with San Onofre being a focal point. It was not long before Pete was surfing San Onofre with Whitey and his group on a regular basis on weekends when Pete and John could overnight.
Pete found a small house and he and his son made the move from the rescue boat to terra firma. It seemed that their lives and those of their friends were getting back to normal, despite the intense disruption of the Second World War. Yet, there was no returning to the good old days of the 1930s. The post-war period was markedly different than the pre-World War II era. The Depression was a thing of the past and its passing appreciated by everyone. The productivity the war had spurred continued unabated as the United States became not only the leading country on the planet, but also its richest. In California, this prosperity was most readily seen by the state’s burgeoning population and massive growth in buildings and highways. These would prove to be double-edged swords, but in the post-war period, everyone embraced the country’s manufacturing might.
Pete’s Plastic Board, 1946
One of the changes taking place that was beneficial to water sports was the development of “plastics” – specifically fiberglass, phenolic, mono and polyester resins that had begun during the war and had already significantly aided the war effort. Pete found himself on the inside track of the use of these materials in the repair and making of surfboards due to his friendship with Brant Goldsworthy.
“One small Southern California company owned by an acquaintance of Peterson’s, Brant Goldsworthy,” wrote Peterson biographer Craig Lockwood, “had been a wartime aircraft parts sub contractor. Goldsworthy had developed a practical working knowledge about resins and fiberglass application and had been in touch with the marketing departments of chemical firms such as Owens-Corning, who had patented ‘Fiberglas’ (one ‘s’) in 1936, and Dupont’s chemical engineer Carleton Ellis, who had patented the first polyester resin the same year.”
The large corporations who manufactured the fiberglass and resin, like Owens-Corning and Dupont were converting their industrial facilities from wartime production into civilian. Market research indicated their best bet for sales would be in the building industry, commercial aviation, and the small boat industry.
“Brant Goldsworthy is certainly the ‘godfather of fiberglass’ in the world,” attested Hobie Alter who, in the late 1950s, became the key man in the development of the polyurethane foam surfboard for mass production. “He is looked at as the ‘godfather’ of reinforced plastics.” Goldsworthy and his partner Ted Thal would, a little later on, become the first ones to sell fiberglass and resin for surfboard construction.
Tom Blake protégé, champion paddler and legendary lifeguard Tommy Zahn said of the Brant Goldsworthy/Pete Peterson connection that Pete and Goldsworthy were more than just acquaintances. “Pete had been a lifetime friend of Brant Goldsworthy’s.”
Pete recognized the potential for lighter boards using fiberglass. Before the war, he had made balsa boards to that end. These had to be coated with varnish to keep them from getting water-logged. Varnish, however, while flexible and organic, succumbs to ultra violet rays, breaking down in sunlight and lacks tensile strength. Not so with fiberglass and this is how Pete’s famous “Plastic Board” came about:
Working with Goldsworthy, Pete used a release coat on an existing paddleboard, laying up two halves in a clamshell configuration. They pulled the two parts off and used these to create a female mold. The subsequent male molds were then bonded to an inch-and-a-half redwood stringer, sanded and glass taped to seal the joint. According to Nat Young, the seam was sealed with fiberglass tape. The result was the first hollow fiberglass paddleboard. Hollow board creator Tom Blake was so impressed; he soon drew up board plans for “all fiberglass construction” of his own designs.
Pete’s first fiberglassed board was constructed in June of 1946. Brant Goldsworthy helped and Joe Quigg along with Pete tested it out in the water.
“Pete had two boards,” at the time he made his fiberglass paddleboard, recalled Tommy Zahn. “One was ‘The Pete Board‘ and the other was this [prototype of the hollow fiberglass] board, which was redwood/balsa… It was just balsa wood with redwood rails. It wasn’t ‘The Pete Board’ which was balsa with a redwood deck. And this prototype, which was wood, was the one he used in big waves. He didn’t use ‘The Pete Board’ in big waves.
“And so, when the fiberglass first came out, he thought, ‘hey, it would be a real neat idea to reinforce the nose of all these boards with fiberglass’ and [he] started doing that. Then he covered the whole [prototype] board with fiberglass. Then, he said, Brant talked him into making an all-fiberglass board. So he used it [the redwood/balsa big wave board] for a male mold and pulled that – this board [the ‘plastic’] off that one; then, put a center dividing strip of redwood, here, and nailed it on and glassed over that. Then, the whole board was effectively fiberglass except for this dividing strip – you could see light through the whole board.”
It is possible that the first fiberglass paddle or surfboard could have an even earlier start date. Twentieth Century surfing innovator Tom Blake told his biographer Gary Lynch that “Before the war [World War II] started… [noted swimmer Jim Handy] had sent a board back East and had it fiberglassed… that’s what Tom swears. I’ve asked him three times about it, cuz everyone says it couldn’t be true. But, he said that before World War II, Jamison Handy already had a fiberglass board. I don’t know why he’d tell me that if it wasn’t true.”
Early surfboard shapers who used fiberglass – guys like Hobie Alter tend to dismiss this East Coast question, maintaining that fiberglass was developed on the West Coast for the war effort. Sending a board back to the East Coast to have it fiberglassed would not have made any sense. However, it is true that the Whitmans, in Florida, were early on into fiberglass. It is possible that they got a hold of some before the war, after it and resin were invented in 1936.
Irrespective of Pete Peterson being the first surfer to fiberglass a board, this innovation went virtually unknown among surfers of the day. Even Hobie Alter admitted, “I always thought Simmons was the first guy to use fiberglass on a surfboard.” Anyway, Pete did not produce further fiberglass boards in any number that would have been noticed.
In 1948, Pete married a second time, but this second marriage – like the first – was not long in duration.
By the late 1940s, both Tommy Zahn and the four years-younger Matt Kivlin – two guys who had first been introduced to surfing by Pete – were regular surfers at Malibu and considered by many to be the best on the West Coast.
The 1950s
By the early 1950s, stories about Pete Peterson had shifted from surfing, shaping, lifeguarding and water safety to boating and tales of the open water. Here are two of the most dramatic, both during 1952:
On a day off, Monday, July 7, 1952, Pete took his 28-foot sports fisher Mike out to Santa Barbara Island for some White Sea bass fishing. Mike was a fast, deep V-bottom hull that Pete had set-up for charter – diving and fishing, mostly, as surfing the Channel Islands would not become popular until nearly two decades later. Along with him on the trip were his nephew, Santa Monica lifeguard Mark Peterson, Jr., 21; Ed Campbell, 32; Eddie Booth, and Ernie Henderson, both 17.
The trip was fine until they headed back in very early morning, around 3:00 a.m., Tuesday morning. That was when they ran into a fog bank about fourteen miles offshore. Craig Lockwood wrote about what happened next, when the boat hit something:
“At the wheel, Pete feels the impact and reflexively cuts the engines. Water’s surging up through the cabin floorboards.
“’I had to look in the bilge,’ he explained some years later to Peter Dixon, “and there was our bait tank sitting atop the hatch.’” The bait tank had been set aft against the transom.
“To get at the hatch requires moving the 500-pound bait tank. ‘It’s funny what you can do when your life depends on it. Anyway, my partner and I grabbed that tank and had it over the side in seconds.’
“Peering below into the bilge with a flashlight, Pete sees the water gushing in through a three-foot crack just to the left of the keel.
“To paraphrase Pete, what a quick-thinking man can do in a life-threatening emergency may defy reason. Most people wouldn’t think of knocking a hole in the bottom of a sinking boat to let the water out.
“Peterson does.
“Realizing instantly that staunching the flow into Mike’s hull was impossible, he grabs a hatchet, dropping to his knees in Mike’s stern.
“’Well, this was a pretty fast boat so I knocked a hole about six inches in the transom.’
“He spints back to the throttles, jamming them forward. With the tach redlining, Mike sluggishly lurches forward.
“(I) took off for Santa Monica, right through the fog, by gosh. I had to go fast so the water would run out. Else we’d have foundered in about three minutes.’
“Realizing he has to get the bow up higher, Pete yells at the crew to get aft. With their weight transferred, Mike’s bow lifts and the powerful 200-horsepower engine responds…”
“They were 12 or 14 miles offshore in the dark,” told Pete’s daughter Lisa. “Dad knew that if Mike went down they probably didn’t have a chance, so my dad took a good look at the sky and his compass and headed right toward Santa Monica.”
“Ed Campbell, a former airman, had survived an 18-day ordeal of being adrift in a life raft during the war. His level of apprehension begins rising.
“’Pete didn’t have a working radio aboard Mike, and honestly, I was listening to every rev that engine made, hoping it was going to make it.’
“’Just past dawn they sight the outline of Santa Monica Pier,’ Lisa recounts. ‘But nobody was up and moving around. So Dad zoomed in with a big sweeping pass and beeped Mike’s horn.’
“No response. Pete makes another inches-close pass. Seventeen-year-old Edward Booth jumps onto the lower deck’s landing and rushes up to find the hoist operator while Pete circles. Roused, the operator runs onto the pier and lowers the hoist’s sling deeply into the water.
“Peterson aims straight at them, darts in, cuts the engine, threads the needle, and Mike sinks placidly into the waiting slings.
“’Then,’ as the Los Angeles Examiner’s account breathlessly relates, ‘triumphantly – cruiser, crew, and all were hoisted onto the pier.’”
It was a month to remember for Pete Peterson.
Tragedy struck only three weeks later, on Sunday afternoon, July 27, 1952, when Pete’s friend Wesley Wiggins was returning home from a charter in his 33-foot Spare Time.
Even though Wiggins was a safety conscious skipper and a skilled seaman – always double-checking and logging course changes – accidents can happen to the best. After seeing to it that his thirteen passengers were comfortable, were enjoying themselves, and had various fishing grounds and kelp beds to draw plenty of catch-able fish from, Wiggins experienced a dramatic turn of events on the trip back home that afternoon.
With Santa Monica’s skyline in view, two of his passengers were cooking on the galley’s two-burner butane stove when suddenly the cabin exploded, killing the deckhand and one passenger instantly. Everyone else was blown overboard. Worse yet, the bait and fish they had had on board quickly attracts sharks. Deciding the best thing he could do was get help, Wiggins told everyone that he was going to swim in to get help. He was never seen again. Throughout the remainder of the daylight hours, the floundered passengers saw several boats, but were not able to get their attention. Thus the stage was set for a horror-filled night.
“Lieutenant Peterson is on duty that night,” wrote Craig Lockwood. “He knows Wiggins, knows Spare Time, and knows that when boats don’t show up it’s usually engine trouble. Procedure was to wait three hours and then inform the Coast Guard, which he does at 23:02 hrs. And a C.G. radio Urgent Bulletin is posted at 0055 hrs.
“Los Angeles County lifeguard boats have joined the search, but the radio call comes in that a light fog is hampering their efforts…
“His watch over, Pete waits for dawn and heads out on his own with his son, John, in Mike.
“’I owed Wes that favor, since Wes had towed me back from Port Hueneme several weeks before.’”
“At 14 miles out,” Craig Lockwood continued, “Pete spots wreckage. ‘Little chunks of wood… the (back) of a skipper’s chair. As soon as I saw that, I knew the boat had blown up. I turned and ran upwind and updrift until I found more wreckage… spread over a wide area with tooth marks on it, but no people. On the other hand, there were plenty of sharks. Big blues. Active, and more than I’d ever seen out there.’
“Taking a fix on his portable RDF, he notes where the triangulated beams cross, and heads back. Alerting all the available local boat operators, he gives them the course, alerts the sheriff’s five plane Aero Squadron, grabs a pal, Ray Heath, and heads out again…
“Spotting the wreckage, Pete runs five-minute grids, and at 0930, spots the first survivors.
“’I almost missed them, but Ray spotted them.’ With the two survivors aboard, he heads east and finds a third clinging to a long, flat board. ‘He really gave me hell for not getting there quicker.’
“Hoping to find more survivors he presses on. “I picked up a lot of empty life jackets with teeth marks of sharks all over them, but I didn’t find any more people. The jackets were still tied, and we could tell by looking at them that their owners had been eaten right out of them. Wesley Wiggins had looped his belt through part of his. That’s all we found of him; his belt and the jacket.’”
Later, parts of bodies with lifejackets were also found. Pete’s friend Peter Dixon summed-up Pete’s role in the rescue of who remained: “One man who knew what he was doing accomplished more than the combined air and water hunt of dozens of aircraft and hundreds of boats. That’s the kind of canny and quiet determination typical of Pete.”
Over the years, Pete had gotten interested in photography. In a direct line from Tom Blake to Doc Ball, Pete produced several prototype camera housings for his own use and experimentation. His most notable experiment was “an underwater housing that George Downing mounted on his board and on his back like a butt pack,” wrote Craig Lockwood, based on what Pete’s son John told him. “Shot at Makaha in the mid-1950s, these may be the first-ever shots of a board taking off underwater.”
In the mid-1950s, some friends of Pete’s – “Two farmers from Oxnard” is how Frank Lyons and Jack Ecoff described themselves – hired Pete to film an in-air travelogue of Baja California using a Cessna single-engine airplane. Baja California by Air covered “Twenty-five hundred miles, at 15 miles a gallon – no flat tires,” according to its narrator. “In following the beaches, bearing east and south, we usually fly low so we don’t miss anything… There’s always a beautiful landing strip.”
In 1955, Pete resigned from the Santa Monica Lifeguard Service and married a third time; this time to Alice, who had worked in Esther Williams films. Their daughter Lisa was born in 1958 and this third marriage of Pete’s was a lasting one.
Even as late as 1960, at age 47, Preston “Pete” Peterson was referred to as, “probably the smartest and most capable underwater and open sea sportsman in the Pacific today.” A waterman in his free time and professionally, Pete was a diver of high repute and, after his lifeguard days were over, shifted into deepwater salvage in order to make a living. “If you ever needed a job done,” one contemporary said, “you called Pete. Once Pete set his mind to something he did it, no matter how tough it was.”
Dick Jappe, a lifelong friend of Pete’s, noted that his friend “cast a long shadow, but left little ego-wake.” “Pete’s modesty was one of his most obvious traits. He never tooted his own horn. Never made any claims. He did everything well but never bragged about anything.”
All along, he kept up his craftsmanship.
Pete continued to manufacture lifesaving equipment, paddleboards, surf dories, work in the motion picture industry, run his marine salvage business with his son John, and even maintain his championship in tandem surfing through most all of the decade. His daughter Lisa especially remembers the early-morning coffee stops at the old Porthole Café on Santa Monica Pier. “People greeted him warmly, respectfully, and Pete was always polite in return. He was an ongoing source of information.”
“Often times,” surf writer Craig Stecyk wrote, “people forget about Pete Peterson’s steady output of ocean vehicles and lifeguard rescue equipment. His racing paddle boards, soft rescue tubes, revolutionary all-fiberglass boards and foam/plywood/balsa sandwich surfboards were all noteworthy achievements.” Included in this list was his innovative salvage boat Nordica, 51-feet long and powered by twin Caterpillar diesel engines.
Family was important to Pete, but as a father he was strict. “He liked to be in control of his environment,” recalled his daughter Lisa, mentioning how Pete would make sure the kids did not bring sand into the car after being at the beach and also about his punctuality. “Time, tide, and Pete wait for no one.”
1960’s to the End
Many of the early California surfers tandem surfed at one time or another. After all, it was a great way to meet and get to know girls, and it was also included as an event at most surf contests. Pete grew to be a master of tandem surfing – so much so that he and his various partners over the years won tandem contests even into the mid 1960’s.
“Peterson didn’t surf competitively in the ‘50s,” documented Matt Warshaw in the Encyclopedia of Surfing, “then returned with spectacular results in the early and mid-‘60s as a tandem rider. With various partners (including Patti Carey, Sharon Barker, and Barrie Algaw), he won the 1960 and 1962 West Coast Championships, the 1964 and 1966 United States Surfing Championships, the 1966 Makaha International, and the 1966 World Championships.”
As anyone who’s done it can attest, tandem surfing is no easy thing. “Trick tandem riding,” explained Otto Patterson in Surf-Riding, Its Thrills and Techniques, “requires the surfer to ride a wave with a wahine either on his shoulders or in any of a great number of acrobatic poses, all performed while his board slices across a steep wave.”
“The act requires a particular combination of partners in order to be successful,” wrote Jason Borte in 2001. “… the man clearly is the captain of the tandem ship, plotting and navigating the course while hoisting his trophy mate skyward. He must be a competent surfer of considerable strength, while his dainty companion generally tips the scales in double digits. In most cases, a competitive duo includes a girl with either a dancing or an acrobatic background familiar with flaunting her body.”
Pete also showed other surfers how to tandem, including Walter Hoffman. Hoffman and his brother Flippy would lead a second wave of California surfers over on to O‘ahu in the late 1940s – a decade and more after Pete and Whitey first started coming over.
“He had Popeye forearms,” Les Williams recalled of Pete, after first meeting him in 1946 when Les was still a teenager. “They were bigger than most men’s biceps. That’s how he could lift those girls at that age. He was winning tandem events in his late fifties, at Makaha. In ten-foot surf!”
Life magazine ran two photos of Pete and Barrie Algaw winning the 1966 World’s tandem event, with the added text: “Every gremmie on the beach knows that surfing is a sport mainly for teenagers, but this in no way inhibited Peterson, the nearly bald 53-year-old businessman from Santa Monica who specialized in tandem surfing.” Life went on to note that Pete, at 6’2” and 200 pounds was “bigger than most competitors” and that over the past few years he had outlasted “more partners than [dancing legend] Fred Astaire.”
By the time Pete finished competing, he had racked up a stunning record of wins, most notably in paddling. “Paddleboard racing was then closely allied to both lifeguarding and surfing,” noted surf writer Matt Warshaw. “… the waterman ethic was, and largely remains, a combination of the three – and Peterson was a masterful paddler. He was described in Los Angeles-area newspaper articles as a ‘paddleboard and aquatic star,’ and ‘the bronzed paddle star of Santa Monica,’ and from the early ‘30s until the late ‘40s he consistently set and reset paddling marks in all categories, from 100-yard sprints to 26-mile open-ocean marathons. In a 1939 meet he was victorious in the 100 (his 30.7-second time beat a nine-year mark set by Sam Kahanamoku, Duke’s brother), the 880, the one-mile, and the relay. Arlene [his first wife] won the women’s 100- and 440-yard sprints.”
California’s best surfers competed in the Pacific Coast Surfing Championships eight times between 1928 and 1941, until World War II. The annual event was dominated for 4-out-of-9 years by Pete. He reigned as California’s officially recognized top surfer during 1932, 1936, 1938 and 1941., but throughout the entire decade most everyone considered him the best surfer, contest winner or not.
A likely not-complete listing of Pete’s competitive wins looks like this:
1932 – Pacific Coast Surfing Championship
1933 – 100 yard sprint paddleboard record at 28.8 seconds; held for years.
1933 – Coast Dory Championship.
1934 – Hermosa Beach One Mile Paddleboard Championship.
1934 – Coast Dory Championship.
1935 – Santa Monica Lifeguard Swim.
1936 – Pacific Coast Surfing Championship
1936 – Santa Monica Lifeguard Swim.
1938 – Pacific Coast Surfing Championship
1939 – Hermosa Beach One-Mile Paddleboard Championship.
1941 – Pacific Coast Surfing Championship
1960 – West Coast Championships (tandem with Patti Carey)
1962 – West Coast Championships (tandem with Patti Carey)
1964 – United States Surfing Championships (tandem with Sharon Barker)
1966 – United States Surfing Championships (tandem with Barrie Algaw)
1966 – Makaha International (tandem with Barrie Algaw)
1966 – World Championships (tandem with Barrie Algaw)
One of Pete’s most respected records was one that was informal and not part of any organized program. He beat both Johnny Weissmuller and Buster Crabb during in and out buoy swims in front of the Santa Monica Lifeguard Headquarters. Johnny Weissmuller was an Olympic gold medal swimmer and was known to millions as Tarzan in the films of Edgar Rice Burroughs fictional character. Buster Crabb was also an Olympic gold medal swimmer and played both the cinematic characters of Flash Gordon and Buck Rogers.
Pete was inducted into the International Surfing magazine Hall of Fame in 1966.
Once, Surfer’s Journal founder Steve Pezman asked LeRoy Grannis about a rumor that Tulie Clark may have beaten Pete in a race at one time, back in the 1930’s. “I don’t remember anyone ever beating Pete,” LeRoy replied with not so much accuracy as an attitude that most all 1930’s era surfers felt about Pete.
Pete was on O‘ahu when the big storm of 1983 hit The Islands in March. Whether because he had a premonition or a feeling the storm could do as much damage or more once it hit the West Coast – we’ll never know. We do know that he left Hawai‘i after only a few days. Soon after arriving in Los Angeles, “just hours later the storm meets him,” his son John recalled, “and devastates the pier, and his shop.” Four hundred feet of the pier was torn out by the storm.
Pete’s shop on the Santa Monica Pier had been there in one form or another for over a half a century, with priceless photographs, records, documents, specialized tools and a career’s worth of other material goods. Several of Pete’s famous tandem, surf and racing paddleboards had been there on the pier, too, stored in the lifeguard station at pier’s end. Most all were lost.
Tommy Zahn was there to help Pete assess the damage.
One of the few survivors was “Big Red,” a red racing paddleboard that Peterson built for and with Dave Rochlen in 1947. Rochlen had gone on to win the Diamond Head paddleboard race in 1951 with Big Red. “Decades later,” wrote Craig Stecyk, “David’s son Pua used the same board in another victorious effort in the Outrigger Canoe Club sponsored event.”
The loss of his shop must have been devastating to Pete, but by all accounts from friends and family, he chose to just carry on. “Let things slip,” Craig Lockwood remembered Pete once saying, “and sometimes they’ll take you along with them.”
After a busy Sunday two months after the storm, Pete docked the Nordica in its berth at Marina del Rey. After a shower, while wrapped in his towel, he laid down on a berth in the ship’s cabin. It was there that he passed on, May 4, 1983.
Notes:
This chapter is part of LEGENDARY SURFERS Volume 3: The 1930s, published in 2012, and still available in print form.
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