Aloha and Welcome to this short chapter on 1930s standout surfer Gard Chapin (1918-1957).
In his book California Surfriders, originally published in 1946, Doc Ball featured a half-dozen photos of Gard Chapin. Despite the fact he was not well liked, Chapin was out in the lineup often at places like San Onofre and Palos Verdes Cove, and was acknowledged by his peers as one of the outstanding surfers of the 1930s and ‘40s. “He was kind of a wild guy; lived in Hollywood,” Doc told me. “He had a sister, Martha. He’d bring her down and we got her to surfin’. Oh, God, he’d go down San Onofre [a lot]… He was quite a guy, alright.”[11]
“Innovative but prickly surfer from Hollywood,” is how writer Matt Warshaw characterized him. Chapin was the “stepfather to surfing icon Mickey [sp.] Dora. Little is known about Chapin other than he was one of the most talented and least-liked surfers of the prewar era. He was born in Hollywood… and began surfing in the early ‘30s.”
Thanks to David Rensin’s All For A Few Perfect Waves: The Audacious Life and Legend of Rebel Surfer Miki Dora, we know a lot more about Gard Chapin than we used to. In fact, for further reading about Chapin and especially Miki Dora, Rensin’s work is the go-to source.
“The heavy solid-wood boards in use during the ‘30s and ‘40s allowed for very little maneuvering,” wrote Matt Warshaw, “but Chapin, after developing a drop-knee stance in order to lower his center of gravity, had greater command over his board than virtually anyone on the coast. He preferred to ride ‘deep’ (close to the breaking part of the wave), and when others rode in front of him he shouted or pushed them out of the way or simply ran them over.”[12]
“Gard was a member of the Palos Verdes Surf Club, and the best surfer then,” declared a much younger Joe Quigg. “He ran circles around most guys up and down the California coast because most surfers in his generation were laid-back. To them, surfing was like going fishing. Then there’s this wild, radical guy tearing up the ocean. No wonder some guys didn’t like him that much. I think they were jealous. All those tricks that Miki [Dora, his step son] did later, Gard did first: going over people, under them, around them, behind them, pushing them off waves – and they had the same audacious, wry humor doing it.”[13]
“The rest of us believed nobody had any claim to the wave they were on,” maintained E.J. Oshier. “We’d have five or six guys on one wave and the more we had, the more fun it was. We’d holler back and forth, talk and ride in together. It was pretty square and orchestrated but it worked for us. But guys like Gard would go under you and shove your board out. It’s not that he was trying to perform and needed room; he just wanted to do what he wanted to do, and if you were in the way, he wanted you out of the way.”[14]
“Sometimes Gard would use guys paddling out to get over his wave as a slalom course,” remembered San Diego surfer Woody Ekstrom. “He’d go around one, then around the other, and yell, ‘We’ll all be killed!’”[15]
“I first saw Gard surf at the Palos Verdes Cove,” Jim ‘Burrhead’ Drever remembered. “He would howl while he rode, and his voice would echo off the Cove walls.”[16]
“The yelling was exuberance and wanting to have people watch him,” clarified LeRoy Grannis. “Most of us then felt it wasn’t necessary to draw attention to yourself surfing. If you were good enough, we’d watch anyway.”[17]
“Gard was an unbelievable surfer,” remembers Kit Horn who was a kid at the time. “I remember him at Malibu, coming across a seven- or eight-foot wave. He did this fabulous cutback on a ninety-pound redwood surfboard. He drop-kneed this thing and came back into it so hard, I just thought, ‘Who was that?!’”[18]
“The Chapin place was run-down and didn’t look like anybody lived there,” remembered Bill Van Dorn. “Chunks of cars rusted in the yard, and surfboards leaned up against the eaves. Inside the front door, immediately to the right, was a piano in an alcove, but it had been completely covered over with skis. Books, mostly [Gard’s unattractive sister] Martha’s, were piled everywhere. The kids’ mother, Louise, had pretty advanced cerebral palsy. [Gard’s attractive sister] Nancy and I didn’t socialize much with Gard. He came to visit a few times, once with [his wife] Ramona, twice without. While I was in the service, she left him a couple times. I saw him at the beach when I got back. I remember once he got in a big fight with Martha.
“Nancy supported the whole family working for an advertising agency in Hollywood. Martha did bit parts, wrote scripts, and contributed to a few books now and then. Gard did nothing much.”[19]
“Gard went to Douglas Aircraft right out of high school and worked in a tool crib making twenty dollars a week,” Burrhead Drever recalled. “He wasn’t an engineer, but in the late ‘30s that was still a lot of money.”[20]
“He just couldn’t go into the service,” Woody Ekstrom explained. “Because of his ulcers he was 4-F and had to rest a lot. But as soon as he’d get them healed up, he’d go on a drunk binge and be right back to crackers and milk again.”[21]
“Gard and Ramona [Miki Dora’s mother] were a god and goddess,” recalled Douglas Stancliff, “stunning to look at. Gard was 6’1” or so. Extremely muscular. Kind of an Aryan blond. He was also a chauvinist, intolerant, maybe racist, and loud. He drank too much. Ramona did, too.”[22]
“Gard also used to pick on a Jewish family of surfers down at the Flood Control in Long Beach,” remembered Jim “Burrhead” Drever. “He called them kikes all the time. I don’t know why he did that, because any one of those guys could have beat him up.”[23]
“On the other hand,” Gardner Chapin, Jr. pointed out, “my father had a good friend who was Jewish, a guy named Perry, who used to come over and drink with Gard on the weekends. Gard said that if anything happened to my mother and him, Perry and his wife, Alice, were going to adopt me. So, was Gard anti-Semitic? Hard to say.”[24]
“Chapin married Mickey [sp.] Dora’s mother [Ramona] in the early ‘40s,” wrote Matt Warshaw, “he brought his stepson to the beach fairly regularly when the boy was in his preteens, introduced him to surfing, and had a great influence on Dora’s personality.”[25]
“Gard Chapin influenced Miki a great deal in petty ways,” Miki Dora’s father observed. “Gard felt that the laws were made for his protection but that he didn’t have to respect them himself. One day I saw him at the beach stealing ice cream from a Good Humor man. One guy did something in front to create a distraction while Gard went in from behind.”[26]
“Miki once told me,” recalled Mike McNeill, “that when he was a kid, he and Gard would come back from San Onofre and pull up in front of Miklos’ restaurant in shorts and T-shirts. They’d walk through the door and into the kitchen, grab whatever food they wanted to eat, then walk out, get into the car, and drive away.”[27]
“Many times Gard got out of hand at the restaurant because he was drinking,” remembered Miklos Dora, Sr., “and the more he drank, the meaner he got. One night I left the restaurant early and went to a movie. When I came back, my manager said, ‘Gard came. He walked in and said, “This place is owned by my wife!” He went into the kitchen. I had some roast ducks left over from dinner, and he picked up a whole roast duck. He said, “I’m taking it. It belongs to me!”‘
“I called Ramona and said, ‘You tell Gardner that if he comes in again and behaves like he did last night, the police will be here and he will be put in jail.’ He never came again.”[28]
“Miki admired Gard – in a way,” attested Gardner Chapin, Jr. “Gard took him surfing. Gard was one of the guys. Gard spent a fuck of a lot more time with Miki than Mr. Dora ever did. Lots of Miki’s personality came from Gard because he was probably the only consistent role model…
“But I’m also sure Miki thought my father was a complete madman, and he’d have been correct. There are lots of examples. My father liked to shoot buckshot down on the neighbors below us on July Fourth, then wait until the police came. Then he’d show them a shotgun that hadn’t been fired. Of course, the trick was that he had two identical guns.
“Another time, I guess it was around 1950, as both Miki and my mother told it to me, Gard got the newspaper, read about new parking meters in the city, and completely blew his top. He said, ‘This is it. Communism is taking over.’ That would have been it with anyone else, but not with him. He started drinking and he kept ranting and raving. As the day wore on, he got madder and madder, and madder and madder. He finally cracked around midnight. He said, ‘Miki, let’s go.’
“‘Where?’
“‘To take out the parking meters.’
“Gard grabbed a baseball bat and they got into the car.
“When my dad got to the parking meters, he looked around. There was a little traffic but no cops. He started swinging the bat, and in about two minutes had smashed every meter. He threw the bat on the ground; it was shattered anyway. Then he jumped in the car and took off. Miki said he’d never seen anything like it, that Dad was like a man possessed.”[29]
Miki added: “When we were finished, Gard suddenly became very calm, and he climbed up the sign pole on the corner. ‘Here’s a souvenir.’ He handed me the street sign from Hollywood and Vine. I kept it for years.”[30]
Gard’s temper was not just “reserved for parking meters, surfers in his way, and bothersome neighbors.”[31]
“We had a peach tree in the backyard,” remembers Gard’s son Gardner, “and when I deserved it my dad used to make me pick my switch from the tree. Then he’d get out his pocket knife and cut the little branch, pull down my pants, and whip the hell out of me.”[32]
“Miki told my wife and me than Gard used to come home drunk,” Leroy Grannis said, “and drag him out of bed and beat the hell out of him.”[33]
In the later 1940s, Gard Chapin started a cabinet and overhead door building business, “when he and Ramona lived at Elwood Stancliff’s Studio City home, in the garage apartment.”
Chapin started building surfboards at this time, also, and when he got his own shop, he hired a helper named Bob Simmons. He had met Simmons when they were both recovering from accidents in a hospital.[34]
Supposedly, it was Chapin who turned Simmons on to surfing as a way to exercise and strengthen Simmons’ shattered elbow and arm that he had sustained in a bicycle accident. He was probably the guy who also told Simmons about “the green room.”
Simmons went on to become the recognized “Father of the Modern Surfboard.” Surfing historian Matt Warshaw noted that “Surfboard design genius Bob Simmons is said to have bought his first board from Chapin; the two surfers later built boards together.”[35]
Around 1955-1956, “Gard was in a car accident,” related his son Gardner. “Someone rear-ended him while he waited at a stop sign. It broke his neck. He wore a huge cast for a year. He started in on painkillers and drank more. After the cast came off, he was still in a lot of pain, so he drank even more. His real downfall was the absinthe he smuggled in from Mexico. The stuff made him insane. Everything came unglued. He lost the cabinet shop, he and Ramona split. I was sent to live with my relatives… My mother became a secretary someplace near downtown L.A. She took the streetcar to work but said a lot of times she walked so she could save the fifteen cents. She’d come [out near San Bernardino]… about every two weeks and take me back to L.A. to spend the weekend. She lived in hotels. It was different in those days: everybody seemed to know everybody in the hotel and they’d all play cards, plus they had a swimming pool. She had different boyfriends in these places… Miki always thought they took advantage of her, and that after Miklos Sr., it had all gone downhill.”
“My dad had come to see me only twice when I lived [with relatives near San Bernardino]… The first time was really great. We went out to eat, then to see Rad’s orange grove. Rad gave him a bunch of oranges. He said he’d be back in two weeks to see me again. I didn’t see him for two months. When he came, the oranges were still in the backseat of his car, rotting, and he was drunk as hell, so Frances – Uncle Rad’s wife – had him arrested. He’d brought a bunch of Christmas presents for me, so Frances let him give me the presents before she called the cops. That was the last I saw him.
“Not long after… I got the news that Gard had died.”[36]
“Gard was thirty-nine,” by 1957, explained Bill Van Dorn. “He was in the dumps over Ramona. He drank. He’d get dried out in the Bay of La Paz with a fisherman who had befriended him, a guy who tried not to let him drink. This time he’d been gone for a month, just before Christmas. One day the guy who owned the boat called me and said he had some bad news. They’d had dinner in La Paz. They’d been drinking a bit; Gard said he had a headache and would take the dinghy back to the boat and go to sleep. When the captain got out to the boat, he found no dinghy, no Gard, no nothing. He thought Gard had gone somewhere else, so he went to bed. In the morning, still no Gard, so they started looking. They found the dinghy way down in the bay, beached. Then they found Gard’s body five days later, floating. There was no evidence of injury or foul play. Nothing missing from the boat. We figured he could have just slipped getting out of the dinghy, or getting in. The dinghy was upside down when they found it… They buried him in La Paz.”[37]
“Chapin died under mysterious circumstances in Baja, Mexico,” Warshaw put it. “… Dora later told Surfer magazine that his stepfather had been murdered.”[38]
“My mother and Gard’s sister Martha finally talked to the fishing boat captain,” Gardner Chapin Jr. related. “He said that one of the two Mexicans in the dinghy hit Gard in the head with an oar and took his money. He didn’t say why, or if there had been an argument, but they found his body and his wallet was empty. I don’t think the fish took the cash. The captain also told my mother – and of course my mother and Martha knew this very well – that my father was in excellent shape, a great swimmer, and there was no turbulence. The weather had been fine, the harbor very calm. He didn’t simply drown.”[39]
ENDIT
___________________________
Footnotes
[11] Gault-Williams, Malcolm. Interview with John “Doc” Ball, January 10, 1998.
[12] Warshaw, Matt. The Encyclopedia of Surfing, ©2003, p. 118.
[13] Rensin, David. All For A Few Perfect Waves: The Audacious Life and Legend of Rebel Surfer Miki Dora, ©2008, p. 38. Joe Quigg quoted.
[14] Rensin, ©2008, p. 38. E.J. Oshier quoted.
[15] Rensin, ©2008, p. 38. Woody Ekstrom quoted.
[16] Rensin, ©2008, p. 38. Jim “Burrhead” Drever quoted.
[17] Rensin, ©2008, p. 38. LeRoy Grannis quoted.
[18] Rensin, ©2008, p. 38. Kit Horn quoted.
[19] Rensin, ©2008, p. 39. Bill Van Dorn quoted.
[20] Rensin, ©2008, p. 39. Burrhead Drever quoted.
[21] Rensin, ©2008, p. 39. Woody Ekstrom quoted.
[22] Rensin, ©2008, p. 38. Douglas Stancliff quoted.
[23] Rensin, ©2008, p. 38. Jim “Burrhead” Drever quoted.
[24] Rensin, ©2008, p. 39. Gard Chapin, Jr. quoted.
[25] Warshaw, Matt. The Encyclopedia of Surfing, ©2003, p. 118.
[26] Rensin, ©2008, pp. 50-51. Miklos Dora, Sr. quoted.
[27] Rensin, ©2008, p. 51. Mike McNeill quoted.
[28] Rensin, ©2008, p. 51. Miklos Dora, Sr. quoted.
[29] Rensin, ©2008, pp. 51-52. Gardner Chapin, Jr. quoted.
[30] Rensin, ©2008, p. 52. Quoting from Dora Lives.
[31] Rensin, ©2008, p. 52.
[32] Rensin, ©2008, p. p. 52. Gardner Chapin, Jr. quoted.
[33] Rensin, ©2008, p. p. 52. LeRoy Grannis quoted.
[34] Rensin, ©2008, p. 39.
[35] Warshaw, Matt. The Encyclopedia of Surfing, ©2003, p. 118.
[36] Rensin, ©2008, p. 103. Gardner Chapin, Jr. quoted.
[37] Rensin, ©2008, p. 104. Bill Van Dorn quoted. Burial date May 23, 1957.
[38] Warshaw, Matt. The Encyclopedia of Surfing, ©2003, p. 118.
[39] Rensin, ©2008, p. 104. Gardner Chapin, Jr. quoted.
