Florida Begins

Aloha and Welcome to the beginning of surfing in Florida in the mid-to-late 1930s.

Note: Apologies for some redundancies quoting others in the Bill Whitman obituary section, but I wanted to get it all in. Also, this chapter in the LEGENDARY SURFERS collection ends with Tom Blake on Long Island, New York, which might seem off-tangent. But, I wanted to illustrate the linkages between Blake, Bill Mullahey, Jones Beach and the Outrigger Canoe Club with Daytona Beach.

Daytona Beach, 1938

Beyond wooden body boards, the development of United States East Coast surfing was spearheaded by Tom Blake’s invention of the hollow board in the late 1920s. By the mid-1930s, his influence stretched from O’ahu to Southern California and then to Florida – where Blake worked for periods of time and got to know other ocean lovers, only to turn them onto surfing his hollow boards. Before the decade was over, Blake’s water craft designs could be found all along the East Coast, New South Wales, New Zealand, Great Britain, South Africa, Brazil and Peru. Eventually, Blake’s contributions hit every corner of the globe.

Of his influence in Florida, Tom recalled: “Florida was virgin territory as far as I was concerned. Someone had brought a board and left it behind and I got fooling around on it in 1922. Later on I went back, in the early 1930s, trying to spread the idea of surfing and rescue boards. There were no surfers at all then, for years. The surf was pretty good and I enjoyed riding it. Slowly in the mid-1930s it started catching on. But it didn’t catch on for rescue work for a long time.”[2]

Dudley and Bill Whitman, two of Florida’s first known native surfers, began on belly boards at Miami Beach around 1932. Around 1933-34, the Whitmans were exposed to “the famous Tom Blake hollow board,” which was “fairly well accepted at that time,” recalled Dudley Whitman. “Of course, eventually it became the most popular board in Hawaii...”[3] 

While touring in Florida in the early 1930s, Tom “came up to see my brother and me because he understood we were riding Hawaiian surfboards. He became one of our lifelong friends.”[4]

By the 1930s, Mainland USA surfing was no longer confined to California. Following importation of Hawaiian body boards, Duke Kahanamoku’s demonstrations of the sport in New Jersey and New York, and Tom’s presence in the state, surfing got underway in Florida. The first Florida surfers hit the waves around 1932. These were Gauldin Reed, Dudley and Bill Whitman.[5] 

“My brother Bill,” recalled Dudley, “who is five years older than me, and I started surfing in Miami Beach in about 1932 on belly boards. My brother’s quite a craftsman and we made some belly boards that were quite beautiful. John Smith and Babe Braithwaite of Virginia Beach came to Miami Beach with the typical, 10-foot redwood Hawaiian surfboard about that time. My brother and I, being belly boarders, were totally amazed. So, my brother built the first Hawaiian surfboard that was ever built in Florida. It was 10 feet long, and made out of sugar pine. A year later, I followed... I was only about 13 years old at that time.”[6] 

In Tom Blake’s book Hawaiian Surfriders 1935, he named a number of well-known East Coast surfers who, in the beginning of the 1930s, started surfing. Prominent among them were Dudley and Bill Whitman. Later, as members of the Outrigger Canoe Club, the Whitmans went on to patent the underwater camera, make movies, and pioneer the sport of slalom water-skiing.

Dudley vividly remembered meeting Tom Blake for the first time: 

“I was about thirteen years old, something like that. My brother Bill had built an exact copy of a Hawaiian surfboard. A few months later, I went to work to build one for myself. We had a very nice shop that happened to be right on the Atlantic Ocean. I was just finishing up the surfboard… and, well, it was eleven, eleven and a half feet long, and it was laminated out of three or four pieces. It was a solid board, and it was like the traditional Hawaiian-type boards. It was carved, you know, using draw knives and all that kind of stuff; and a plane that was close to 36 inches long; huge wood plane. The shavings are about knee-deep in the shop, and I’ve got it almost shaped, which is a pretty big job out of solid wood; not like shaping foam or balsa or anything like that. I looked out the window, and here goes this chap paddling by on a surfboard like I’d never seen before. It was a Tom Blake-patented surfboard and it was Tom himself. He was coming up to look for us, because he heard that we were surfing and we were the only ones in south Florida surfing. And so, from that time on, we had an acquaintanceship, and we became lifetime friends.”[7]

“We knew Tom from about 1932 or ‘3 for the rest of his life, virtually,” said Dudley. “Last few years I kind of lost track of him, but we used to exchange correspondence occasionally.”[8]

“I always thought of Tom as a person about 35 years old, or something like that,” Dudley Whitman stated, philosophically. “And, of course, he did age as we all do, but he always kept his youthful appearance. The amazing thing was that, finishing this particular board off, it was outmoded just before it was finished! So, very shortly after meeting Tom, my brother Bill built the first hollow board ever in Florida.”[9]

“Well, it’s been documented, I think,” Dudley Whitman said of the first surfers in Florida, “in some of the magazines, Surfer Magazine and so forth. The first people that came down here with Hawaiian surfboards were John Smith and Babe Braithwaite from Virginia Beach. They had an actual Hawaiian redwood board. They looked us up because we were fooling around, riding belly boards and things like that. They allowed my brother and myself to ride their boards, and they, incidentally, became lifetime friends as well.

“So, my brother Bill built his board, and then I told you about myself building my solid board. So, my brother Bill built the first Hawaiian surfboard ever built in Florida, and I built the second one – not that that matters. And then my brother Bill built the first hollow ‘Blake board’ that had ever been built in Florida. I still have that one that I built over sixty-some years ago, and that’s kind of an interesting story, in that it was, of course, mahogany and all of that. It was run over by an automobile up in Daytona. Actually, it was patched so good that when I look at it today I can hardly tell that it was patched. I had to have another board, of course, and so we built numerous Blake boards. I don’t have to tell you that the Blake board dominated the scene in Hawaii from about 1935… all through, until after World War II. There were a few square-tail hollow boards, too, but Tom, of course, is the father of the pointed tail, cigar-shaped one, and hollow boards.”[10]

“Well, of course, Tom was physically fit, a pretty handsome man, and as a person that knew him, he was a little different than a lot of surfers that you know,” Dudley said of Tom Blake and his early impressions of him. “Some people might say, or like to think, that maybe he was a hippie-type or something. No. He was a type of person of his own kind. He was always immaculately dressed with excellent clothes, excellent taste, and never far-out... He always, always presented well; not a rundown-looking, sloppy bum like you and I know some surfers degenerated to.”[11]

“Miami Beach, back in those days, was not developed to much of an extent at all,” Dudley Whitman reminisced. “It was just starting its development. We had a home on the ocean… [on] Collins Avenue… also known as A1A. When I was a kid and born here, there were crocodiles all over the place. Very, very few people know that, but… we have photographs of it... Our home was at Thirty-second Street and Collins Avenue. The closest home to us was about a mile and a half away, and that was the Firestone Estate. Of course, today, there’s a dozen hotels in between where our home was. We could hear them [the Firestones], on a Sunday, start up their Pierce Arrow automobile and come down, pick us up, and take us to Sunday School. Miami Beach was just getting going, and the publicity department was running pictures nationally of bathing beauties in those ‘gorgeous bathing suits’ they had in those days; which are pretty much a big laugh to look at… Of course, during my lifetime I saw Miami Beach slowly build to be the premium resort of the world. Then, in time, [it] had a big slide in the sixties and seventies, and looked like it was going nowhere. But now it’s had a reverse [it’s getting prosperous again]. So, I’ve seen the city built. But, Miami Beach [when I was young, was a place where]… some of the roads were paved; there were few hotels and a sprinkling of homes; and virtually everybody knew each other. Today it’s a huge city, and is redeveloping as a too-popular of a resort – and also, really, a terminal for Central and South America.”[12]

Dudley Whitman said of the surf spots back then: “We probably surfed more up in Daytona than in Miami Beach, especially when Bill and I went to college. We went to the University of Florida, so every weekend – bam! – we were over in Daytona surfing. We introduced the sport there, and I think we started a lot of people surfing. Some of our friends are still surfing there, like Gauldin Reed.”[13]

“I was surfing before the Whitman brothers came up from Miami and joined us in the mid-’30s,” recalled Gauldin Reed, of the earliest days of surfing Daytona Beach. “We had a pretty strong group early on. I have a picture with 25 boards on the beach that we built ourselves. The boards were hollow and weighed about 40 pounds. We built nose and tail blocks and side strip bulkheads every foot and then nailed the plywood down on top of it. Of course, this was providing we could save $3 to buy all the materials.”[14]

“Nobody knew what we were doing,” Dudley admitted. “We carried our boards on the cars, these hollow Tom Blake boards that were 12 feet long, and people just didn’t understand it. Daytona was the focal point in Florida for surfing in 1936. Every time we surfed we had a crowd watch us, but it didn’t really take off until after World War II.”[15]

The hollow boards they built were “rounded… off a little bit more like the modern boards of today. They were put together with wooden pegs instead of screws like everybody else had.”[16] The wooden pegs created quite a stir at Waikiki when they were first seen.

“Well, that’s a pretty good story,” Dudley Whitman declared when asked about his connection with the Outrigger Canoe Club and the story of the wooden pegs. “I don’t know how long we had known Tom; maybe for a year or two. Yes, at least that; maybe more. Definitely more. We were going to Hawaii and he [Tom] wrote a very nice letter to Duke Kahanamoku to introduce us to the Outrigger Canoe Club. And so, when we went to Hawaii, we saw Duke. Of course, he stood about six foot four at least, and he looks down at us haole white boys, and reads the letter and says, ‘Sorry, we don’t have any room at the Outrigger Canoe Club.’ 

“Well, my brother Bill is a tremendous craftsman and he’s really great at lofting and stuff of that nature. So, we had built pretty nice-looking boards… and we were right there at Waikiki. So, after Duke had shoosed us, why we immediately started to unpack our boards that were wrapped up in canvas. After they saw our boards, maybe ten or twenty Hawaiian surfers gathered around. By the time we got them unpacked, there must have been at least a hundred or a hundred and fifty standing around. They took us to the Outrigger Canoe Club, gave us the racks of honor! I’ve been a member of the Outrigger Canoe Club ever since.”[17]

“My brother Bill’s probably been to Hawaii almost every summer of his life; at least certainly every other summer, and I’ve not been that fortunate. I’ve been over there about once every six-to-ten years; something like that. But, we had a lot of experiences with Tom. Incidentally, I have a beautiful – had a beautiful – little sailboat I had built, and Tom happened to name my boat. And he sailed with me on it. It’s called the Kahiki… It means, over the horizon, or in the distance.”[18]

“This one that I built, that we have in the museum,” Dudley Whitman recalled of the first surfboard he ever built, “The board that I was telling you about, about 1958 or 1962 I gave it to a doctor friend, or loaned it to him so he could train to go to Hawaii with us. Of course, we were riding modern boards like the type you have today; particularly Hobie boards… [Dudley’s original board that he loaned was] run over with a car, [so] I built another one. I loaned it to this friend of mine, Dr. Bradley, so he could condition himself for a surf safari we had in Hawaii. But he’s a practicing doctor. He didn’t have a chance to become an expert surfer or anything like that – not that I’m insinuating that I am or was. But, he used it to train on, and it got kind of beat up. And so I was throwing it away. I had it strapped on a cart that was over at our yacht club, and was moving it, and a friend of mine said, ‘What are you going to do with that?’

“I said, ‘Well, I’m throwing it away.’

“He said, ‘You can’t; it’s historic.’

“I said, ‘Oh, yes, I can. It’s a piece of junk.’

“So, he took it to Columbia, South Carolina, and stored it in his garage and his attic and his hangar, and he brought it back just a couple of years ago. It’s quite an experience to take a board that you built when you were 13, and you’re well into your seventies when you rejuvenate it.”[19]

Stand-up surfing and body boarding were not the only water sports the early Florida surfers got into. “… kind of an interesting story,” Dudley Whitman recalled. “When water skiing… first got started in this country, they thought it came from the [French] Riviera. I had a friend that had gotten a hold of a pair of water skis from the Riviera. After I tried them on me, I immediately came home and made a water ski... water skiing was brand new [in Florida]. People didn’t even know what you were doing. Within a year or so, I had met Bruce Parker, who was the U. S. National Champion, and very instrumental in introducing water skiing in the United States. He was a professional skier, incidentally. And so one time when we were skiing, he said, ‘Dudley, we’re going to have a water show. We want you to be in it.’ And I said okay. I think I was in college at the time; I’m not sure. Or, I was in high school. And he said, ‘We want you to do the single ski act.’ And I said okay.

“It happens that the ski that I had built from scratch, laminating it and everything else, was pretty much like the ones that were built in Europe, but the only skis that were made in this country actually weren’t stable. So, if a person did any single skiing, they probably went for 500 or 800 feet and invariably they’d fall off… it just wasn’t real satisfactory. Because of that, I practiced up and I never rode two skis again. So, it took about three, four years to get my friends to change over. And [one day] Bruce Parker writes me a letter and calls me on the telephone, both. He says, ‘Dudley, please stop that single skiing. We don’t need any one-legged skiers.’ Well, that’s slalom skiing as it is today. And one of our group – a younger brother of one of my close friends, who’s an expert skier – his brother went up to Cypress Gardens when they were doing their girls on a pyramid and flags. They saw them perform and from that day on they started their own ski company, and [water] skiing, of course, progressed a lot.” [20]

Dudley’s brother Bill passed on at age 92, in 2007. Obituaries marking his passage also reveal how much he, too, was an influence on Floridian water sports.

In “Surfer, horticulturist William Whitman dies,” David Smiley of the Miami Herald wrote: “A pioneering U.S. East Coast surfer (and horticulturist) has left us. Dudley Whitman’s brother Bill has passed on at age 92.

“The surfboard Bill Whitman built in 1932, the first of its kind in Florida, helped earn him a spot in the East Coast Surfing Hall of Fame. The underwater camera he invented and patented in 1951 shot footage that ended up in the Oscar-winning documentary ‘The Sea Around Us.’ And the 600 truckloads of rich, acidic soil he had dumped in his Bal Harbour backyard in the 1950s nurtured a world-famous grove of exotic, tropical fruits. Throughout his 92 years, the horticulturist scoured the world for tropical fruits – breadfruit, Kohala longan and a 40-pound jackfruit. All in all, Whitman is credited with introducing 80 varieties to the United States and donating more than $5 million to Fairchild Tropical Botanic Garden.

“William ‘Bill’ Francis Whitman Jr. died in his home… He was born June 30, 1914 in Chicago, but as a boy the family moved to an oceanfront home in Miami Beach. In 1932, he and his younger brother Dudley Whitman wanted to surf Hawaiian-style. But there weren’t any surf shops selling boards anywhere in Florida, let alone the East Coast. So, the brothers made their own, according to the East Coast Surfing Hall of Fame, of which both are members. The elder Whitman continued to surf well into his 80s.

“‘He was probably one of the greatest underwater men that ever lived,’ said brother Stanley Whitman. Added brother Dudley: ‘He was more fish than man.’ An example of the brothers’ 80-plus pound surfboards can be seen in their private museum at the Whitman-owned Bal Harbour Shops.

“On their trips to the Pacific after World War II, the brothers learned new trades, including spearfishing, which they introduced to the East Coast and Caribbean, Dudley Whitman said. In 1951, Bill Whitman wanted to show friends back in South Florida a glimpse of the South Pacific, so he created the first underwater camera and began shooting film below the surface, Dudley said. Early films earned the brothers nominations for Academy Awards. They sold some of the scenes they shot to filmmakers for use in the 1952 documentary ‘The Sea Around Us.’ The film won an Oscar. “We won the academy award and we weren’t even in the business,” Dudley Whitman said.

“Despite the accolades, Whitman was possibly best known for his expertise and accomplishments in horticulture. He devoted himself to bringing back to South Florida many of the exotic fruit species he found in the South Pacific. He found the sand and marl in his own backyard unfit to nurture the fragile plant life, so he had 600 truckloads of rich acidic soil taken from Greynolds Park area and dumped in his Bal Harbour backyard. He continued to scour the world – from the Amazon to Borneo to the Australian rain forests – for species he could bring back to the United States. His traveling partner on many of the trips Whitman made late in his life was Steve Brady. By that time, Brady said, Whitman could hardly walk and used a wheelchair. But that was no deterrent. “If it involved his passions he would go to the ends of the earth,” Brady said.

“In 1999, Whitman donated $1 million to Fairchild Tropical Botanic Garden, where the Whitman Pavilion was erected in his honor. In 2003, he added $4 million to endow the tropical fruit program. He also helped found the Rare Fruit Council in 1955, and served as president until 1960. In 2001, Whitman authored the book, ‘Five Decades with Tropical Fruits: A Personal Journey.’ Whitman’s accomplishments earned him an honorary doctorate from the University of Florida’s College of Agriculture and Life Sciences in 2004. He earned his bachelor’s in administration from the school in 1939...”[21]

David Karp, of the New York Times wrote in “Bill Whitman, 92, Is Dead; Scoured the Earth for Rare Fruit,” that “William F. Whitman Jr., a self-taught horticulturist who became renowned for collecting rare tropical fruits from around the world and popularizing them in the United States, died… at his home in Bal Harbour, Fla. He was 92.

“Mr. Whitman, who had suffered strokes and a heart attack, died in his sleep, his wife, Angela, said. Among rare-fruit devotees, Bill Whitman, as he was known, was hailed as the only person to have coaxed a mangosteen tree into bearing fruit outdoors in the continental United States. Native to Southeast Asia, mangosteen is notoriously finicky and cold-sensitive. That did not deter Mr. Whitman, whose garden is propitiously situated between Biscayne Bay and the Atlantic Ocean, minimizing the danger of catastrophic freezes. (Mangosteen is the most prominent of the exotic ‘superfruits’ like goji and noni, which are made into high-priced beverages from imported purées.)

“Mr. Whitman managed to cultivate other fastidiously tropical species like rambutan and langsat, and he was recognized as the first in the United States to popularize miracle fruit, a berry that tricks the palate into perceiving sour tastes as sweet. In pursuit of rare fruit, ‘Bill was a monomaniac,’ said Stephen S. Brady, his doctor and friend, who traveled with him. ‘He’d hear about a fruit tree, and pursue it like a pit bull to the ends of the earth.’ Richard J. Campbell, senior curator of tropical fruit at Fairchild Tropical Botanic Garden in Coral Gables, Fla., went on many of these expeditions. ‘When people said, “You can’t grow that in Florida,” he took that as a challenge,’ Mr. Campbell said.

“William Francis Whitman Jr. was born in 1914 in Chicago, a son of William Sr. and Leona Whitman. His father owned a printing company in Chicago and added to his fortune by developing real estate in Miami. Bill and his brothers helped pioneer surfing in Florida, and he was inducted into the East Coast Surfing Hall of Fame in 1998. After serving in the Coast Guard during World War II, Mr. Whitman, along with his brother Dudley, built and patented an underwater camera that provided film for several movies, including ‘The Sea Around Us,’ which won an Academy Award for best documentary in 1952. Mr. Whitman’s devotion to collecting and propagating rare species and varieties stemmed from a sailing trip to Tahiti, where he became enchanted by the fruit. Mr. Whitman was a founder of the Rare Fruit Council International, based in Miami, and was its first president, from 1955 to 1960. Foremost among the fruit he introduced to Florida was Kohala longan...”[22]

Jordan Kahn of the Daytona Beach News-Journal wrote a fine history of the early days of surfing at Daytona and Miami Beaches. The following is taken from his “Surfing’s Lost Chapter - How did Daytona Beach become Florida’s 1st surf city,” DAYTONA BEACH NEWS-JOURNAL, 27 July 2008:

“There is a grainy photograph of surfers posing near the Main Street Pier [in Daytona Beach, circa 1938] that holds clues to a lost chapter of local history... [In the 1930s] Few people in the world had ever seen such a thing as surfing then... Yet there they are, sepia-toned Florida surfers wearing wool swimsuits and riding 16-foot wood boards at a time when Studebakers and Model A Fords rolled down the beach...

“From a campsite on the beach a few blocks south of the pier, three brothers waded through the sea foam, and surfing in this city began. “People didn’t know what a surfboard was, and for years they didn’t know what we were doing,” said Dudley Whitman, one of those brothers. The puzzling sight of these three brothers from Miami Beach standing above the waves didn’t go unnoticed long so near the Boardwalk. In the 1930s, this was the hub of beach activity. Pep’s Pool and Pat Sheedy’s Handball Courts were there. The ‘Flying Mile’ race was held on the sand, and boxing rings were erected on the beach. Within a few years, a chain reaction of surfing discoveries was spreading. James Nelson of Daytona Beach Shores remembers the day some 70 years ago when he was at the handball courts and saw something in the ocean. “Some of the lifeguards were out there fooling around on these boards.”  Nelson, now 91, was fascinated. He went to talk to them and found out one of the lifeguards made and sold surfboards. Soon afterward, the young Stetson University law student bought an 18-foot red board for $25... [23]

“None of the men in that 1938 photo was the first person known to surf Florida, but the details of their boards contain the fingerprints of the man who was. A fin is visible on one board. And a few bear the telltale dots of nails securing plywood to a hollow frame. These are the inventions of Tom Blake, the seminal trailblazer of surfing as not just sport, but lifestyle and craft. While living in Hawaii, Blake put the first fin on a surfboard only [four] years before that photo was taken...

[Hawaiian] “Duke Kahanamoku... was famed as much as a surfer as for being an Olympics sensation, setting world records and winning three gold medals in the 1912 and 1920 games. It was Kahanamoku who inspired Blake to take up surfing. When Kahanamoku traveled to swim meets, he saved surfing from disappearing by giving the surf exhibitions for which he is now renowned as the ‘Johnny Appleseed’ of modern surfing. Kahanamoku told his biographer that by 1900, western colonization had so completely stamped out native Hawaiian culture that ‘surfing had totally disappeared throughout the islands except for a few isolated spots… and even there only a handful of men took boards into the sea.’ It is surfing’s narrow escape through this historic bottleneck that gives it a lineage like a family tree. Ancient Hawaiians are surfing’s roots. Kahanamoku is the trunk. And surfing’s genesis in Daytona Beach is only one branch removed.[24]

“Whitman said lifeguards visiting Miami from Virginia Beach, where Kahanamoku had held a surf demo, first showed him and his brothers how to surf in 1930. Two years after that, the Whitman brothers were at their oceanfront workshop in Miami Beach when they saw someone paddling a surfboard. It was Blake, who in his biography, ‘Tom Blake: The Uncommon Journey of a Pioneer Waterman,’ said he was looking for these Florida surfers he’d heard about. Blake taught the Whitmans to build his boards that transformed the sport’s 180-pound planks into 80-pound hulls.

“These brothers’ surfing experiments may have begun in Miami, but they did most of their actual wave riding in Daytona Beach as students at the University of Florida in Gainesville. “We worked every minute so we could leave on the weekend and go to Daytona and surf,’ Whitman said. ‘We actually surfed at Daytona; probably one of the first times was after the 1934 hurricane… We carried our surfboards on a trailer and camped on the beach.’ Blake could have directly influenced other locals, too. He was a lifeguard in Florida during the early 1930s and toured with the Red Cross promoting the use of surfboards to save people from drowning.

“And among the surfers in that 1938 photo are Paul Hart, a lifeguard examiner for the Red Cross, and Donald Gunn and Dick Every, who are both wearing the wool tank-top uniforms of the day for Daytona Beach lifeguards. Every even remembers a picture of Blake surfing in Daytona Beach at Harvey Street... [25]

“I remember seeing Dudley driving into town in a fancy convertible with surfboards towed behind it,” said Every, now 85. “My brother and I decided to build boards like them.” Gaulden Reed said in an interview before his death in November [2007] at 89 that people started making Blake-style boards in Seabreeze and Mainland high school shop classes. Bill Wohlhuter, the owner of Port Orange Seafood today, said he built his board from plans he got from Every’s brother, Don. ‘I once mounted a 1 1/2-horsepower Water Witch outboard on that board,” Wohlhuter said. ‘I steered the tiller with my foot!’ Many of these men – including the three Whitmans – are in the photo, preserved by the surfing hall of fame in Cocoa Beach, the Halifax Historical Museum in Daytona Beach and the Whitman family museum in Miami. The occasion is said to be the East Coast or Florida surfing championships.

“By today’s standards though, those boards are closer to boats. ‘They were kind of like a freight train,’ Whitman said. ‘They were very much faster for paddling, slow to get started of course, but probably faster than you could paddle a canoe once you got going. And you could catch big waves much farther out.’ After hurricanes, to make it past the onrush of whitewater, Reed said he used to throw his board off the pier and dive in. ‘During the hurricane season, you could catch some pretty good-sized ones, maybe 7- , 8- , 9-foot waves that were breaking out there beyond the pier,’ Nelson said. ‘You’d have to really walk the board. You’d catch the wave and you’d have to walk about four or five feet to keep the nose down and then walk it back and forth to keep it going.’

“They stuck their hands in the water like oars to prod those big boards into turns. ‘To be a cool cat and get the girls,’ Nelson said, ‘you had to lean over with your hand to steer it.’ The real hot dog move was shooting the pier, surfing through the pilings from one side to the other. ‘I almost lost a kneecap trying to do it,’ Nelson said. [26]

“When some of Daytona Beach’s surfers made their first pilgrimage to the sport’s birthplace, these Florida upstarts would achieve a degree of stature with the world’s most hallowed surfing club. The relatively advanced boards the Whitmans are holding in that 1938 photo defied odds in arriving in Waikiki... They were beautifully crafted; one made with mahogany and brass screws. Blake had given the Whitmans a letter of introduction to the Outrigger Canoe Club, the first surfing club.

“‘We were just kids and we showed it to Duke,’ Whitman said. ‘But he didn’t really have time for a couple of haole (Hawaiian slang for mainland outsiders) boys. So we went ahead and unwrapped our surfboards. People gathered around to watch us unpack and when the Hawaiians saw our surfboards, they gave us surf racks of honor.” The Whitmans were made club members and they surfed next to Kahanamoku. Reed also flew [probably travelled by steamship, as commercial aviation was still in its infancy] to Hawaii and met Kahanamoku and Blake. And Every met and surfed alongside Kahanamoku at Makaha. Sadly, the life these men gave to an embryonic Daytona Beach surf culture nearly vanished.[27]

“A nucleus of roughly 45 Daytona Beach surfers had developed. As quickly as surfing was becoming part of life in Daytona Beach, World War II and its exodus of young men would all but end it. In the days leading up to the war, Nelson sold Mainland High School grad George Doerr ‘a half interest’ in his $25 red wooden surfboard. ‘When World War II came along,’ Nelson said, ‘(Doerr) went into the Air Force and he was a fighter pilot and got shot down and was in a German prison camp for a couple of years.’ Reed said the only person he remembers surfing with during the war was Brewster Shaw, a famous local beach race driver. And on a coast suddenly on high alert for German submarines and spies, surfing went from a bizarre to a suspicious sight. ‘Brewster and I were in front of the Boardwalk and we came in after dark because the waves were so good, and we were reported to the police that two men had come in on torpedoes,’ Reed said. They were surrounded at gunpoint by military police. Reed said another time he was out past the end of the pier and a patrol boat approached him, machine guns drawn. ‘I’m saying, “No! No! No! Surfboard! Surfboard! Don’t Fire!” Reed said. “Scared my mule!”’

“When Every returned home from the war in ‘45, he said, ‘there was no surfing at all.’ Tony Sasso, a longtime director of the East Coast Surfing Hall of Fame Museum in Cocoa Beach, said it’s been very hard to come by stories about surfing at that time. ‘Right around 1940 the trail goes dead. It doesn’t start back up again until the 1950s,’ Sasso said. ‘Everything started from scratch again.’ It is as if the war erased the heritage of Daytona Beach’s surfing pioneers as cleanly as footprints washed by waves from the sand. Only a few photos and people survive to stake Daytona Beach’s claim as Florida’s first surf city. ‘I kind of hate to admit it, being from Cocoa Beach where we call ourselves the East Coast surfing capitol,’ said Sasso, ‘but the first seeds were planted in the Daytona Beach area.’[28]

“By 1958, foam and fiberglass surfboards had transformed the sport. Richard Brown of Daytona Beach turned 14 and bought his first surfboard that year. He remembers being one of the very first people at Seabreeze High School to have one. ‘There were some guys at Mainland,’ he said. ‘But by ‘69, everybody at Seabreeze had a surfboard, or damn near.’ To those who were catching this new wave, it felt as if surfing had just been born. But Richard and his brother Dana, who today own the insurance company Hayward Brown Inc., grew up around surfing. And it was some of these early surfing pioneers who almost literally handed down the sport. Dick Every, who had the first foam surfboard in town, used to lend it to Richard and Dana. And Oscar Clairholme made a hollow board they used to play on as kids. ‘In fact, we had it out in the ocean one day and it sank. We lost it,’ Richard said.

“What has generally been remembered as Florida’s first generation of surfers was, in fact, the second. And these Floridians lived the kinds of experiences romanticized by Hollywood’s beach-blanket movies. As a lifeguard, Dana Brown often hung out on the beach in a palm frond and wood shack in front of the Daytona Plaza Hotel and rented surfboards. ‘In the summertime,’ Richard said, ‘my brother Dana used to anchor a sailboat out off of Daytona Plaza. We had pretty big boards back then, too, and my brother and his friends would each put a case of beer and a beach bunny on their board and paddle out to the sailboat for an evening of revelry.’

“... Richard remembers one of the best days of surfing he ever had was after a hurricane in 1964. ‘I came home from Gainesville because I knew it was going to be good and I surfed in front of the old Voyager Hotel,” he said. “You couldn’t lose your board because it would smack into the sea wall. There was no beach... We’d never seen waves like that; it was so big, 10- or 12-foot waves.’ 

“Richard even saw what he called ‘the day the style of surfing changed.’ He was in high school when two road-tripping surfers from California paddled out. They were all shooting the pier, riding gently rolling outside waves they called ‘humpers.’ Suddenly the Californians headed in. ‘We figured, “Well hell, they don’t like it. They’re leaving,”‘ Richard said. And the next thing we see is their heads from the back of the waves screaming right and left and then they would do a kick out and the board would come flying back out of the wave. ‘We were just sitting there dumbfounded. We thought you’d be killed if you tried to surf in the shallow water in big wave shore pound,’ he said. ‘Then we started doing it.’[29]

“Is it possible that boogie boarders were the first wave riders in Florida? There are numerous accounts of belly boarding, as it was called generations ago, predating surfing in the state. Dudley Whitman said in 1930 when the group of lifeguards visiting Miami taught him to surf, he and his brothers had already been riding belly boards.

“The St. Augustine Record archives contain an article about a man named Guy Wolfe riding the waves in 1914. The article says Wolfe rode on his belly on wood planks covered in painted canvas that had ‘barrel stays’ for a sled-like nose. And one of Daytona Beach’s first surfers, native Gaulden Reed, who was born in 1919, said in his life both body surfing and belly boarding had always been among the sights at the beach. ‘Prior to (surfing), we were really expert body surfers,’ Reed said before his death [in 2007]. ‘We also built belly boards that were about 4 feet long and 2 feet wide by putting thin boards together and crossing them with two small boards and rounding the nose. They were only good for catching a breaking wave and riding the foam in.’

“How this more basic wave sport made it to Florida before surfing is unknown... The idea could have been imported by people who had either visited Hawaii or cities in California and the eastern seaboard that had been exposed to canoe surfing, traditional surfing and body surfing as demonstrated by Duke Kahanamoku in his travels.[30]

“... [At] the East Coast Surfing Hall of Fame Museum in Cocoa Beach and the Halifax Historical Museum in Daytona Beach... Only two of the 16 people are named... Dudley Whitman and Floyd Graves, but the names are written in a way that indicates who is who. A total of 28 names of people surfing in Daytona Beach during that time were given during interviews for this story. These are the 16 surfers in the 1938 photo. Fourteen of them are now identified; Wilbur Flowers, Barney Barnhart Jr., Bill Whitman, Stanley Whitman, Dudley Whitman, Don Every, Earl Blank, Bill Wohlhuter, Paul Hart, Donald Gunn, Floyd Graves, Al Bushman, James Nelson and Dick Every. An additional 13 surfers of that era were named in interviews: Gaulden Reed, Welling Brewster Shaw, Oscar Clairholme, George Doerr, Tom Porter, Buster MacFarland, Nelson Rippey, ‘Nudder’ Wilcox, Charles Spano, Carlisle ‘Boop’ Odum, Earnest Johnson, George Boone and George Jeffcoat.

“Plus there are two surfers from the 1938 photos that remain unidentified. That’s a total of 29 surfers. James Nelson remembers the photo as taking place after the event and after some of the competitors had already left. And in the photo, only 16 surfers are shown, but Dudley Whitman is wearing a No. 24. Dick Every said there were probably about 10 or 15 more surfers in the area who didn’t come to the event, giving 1938 Daytona Beach a rough estimate of 40 to 45 surfers. ‘There was nobody from New Smyrna surfing and I don’t recall anybody from Cocoa either,’ Every said. Paul ‘Bitsy’ Hart won the contest that day, which in interviews was sometimes called the Florida Surfing Championships and sometimes the East Coast Surfing Championships.

“‘(Hart) was in the same fraternity we were in, in Gainesville,’ Dudley Whitman said. ‘We used to stay with him. His mother had the drug store on Main Street. He built his own surfboard.’ Earl Blank, who died in 1993, was, among other things, a lifeguard and a hobby beekeeper. Bushman and Nelson were law students at Stetson University in DeLand when the photo was taken. Barnhardt remembers Boone and Jeffcoat were lifeguards in the 1930s. Johnson’s family owned bait-and-tackle stores in the Daytona Beach area. Wilcox was a boxer and a lifeguard. Spano was a city champ handball player and a head lifeguard. Clairholme was a builder in the area. Shaw was the father of William ‘Flea’ Shaw, who coached and married the four-time world champion surfer from Flagler Beach, Frieda Zamba Shaw. 

“It’s noteworthy that Pep’s Pool was a public swimming pool at the Boardwalk near the foot of the Main Street Pier at the time because the son of the pool’s owners is in the photo, Barney Barnhardt Jr. ‘The kid on the far left is a boy named Wilbur Flowers,’ Barnhardt said. ‘We were both 12 years old then. ‘We weren’t in the contest, but the photographer said, “Hey you’ve got a board. Get in the picture.” Let me tell you an interesting thing about that picture. My grandfather lived in Akron, Ohio, and he saw that picture in the Akron Beacon Journal because it went out on The Associated Press wire.”[31]

Back in the beginning years of Floridian surfing, just after it got underway, Tom Blake returned to lifeguard at the Roman Pools, located on 23rd Street and the Atlantic Ocean, in Miami.[32] Over the years spanning the 1920s to the 1950s, he went back and forth between California and Florida “several times,” Blake recalled.[33]

In Hawaiian Surfboard, Tom Blake mentioned briefly a trip to the Bahamas with his surfboard along; quite probably the first surf safari to the Bahamas: “In a seaplane, (Pan American) trip from Nassau, the English possession, I carried a full-sized hollow surfboard as baggage without trouble or inconvenience. Had we been forced down and the ship sunk in the Gulf Stream, I could have maintained the two pilots, steward, three passengers and myself from sinking for many hours, or until help came.”[34] Dudley Whitman said they also “surfed the island of Eleuthera,” at some point; probably much later.”[35]

Reviews of Tom’s book, published in 1935, reference his previously working in New York. This was, following a stint in Florida. Perhaps Tom’s first time working in New York, since the time he worked in the carnival at Jones Beach in 1921, was the summer of 1934. Tom tells it like this: 

“One time in Florida, I had a job at the surf club. That was the most exclusive beach club at Miami. The rich come down there from all over the country. I worked for Richard Ricardi… This rich man named Feldman was at the club one day and he had a big estate up in New York; Long Island… He had some kids. He used to have someone take care of the kids; teach them in the summer, you know. Steve recommended me. I heard him discussing it with his friend once. He said, ‘That’s the guy who beat the Hawaiians at their own game.’ Well, I didn’t say anything. That wasn’t what the Hawaiian’s game was, you know. Their game was winning! [laugh] Anyway, Feldman said, ‘Come work for me this summer.’”[36]

Tom travelled to Long Island, New York and instructed the Feldman children. It is likely that he also did some lifeguarding in the area. He certainly was in touch with the guards at Jones Beach and credits “Mullahey of Honolulu and Valley Stream, N.Y.” with making lifeguards at Jones Beach, on the South Shore of Long Island, N.Y., “surfboard minded.” Mullahey “battled for several years, as a lieutenant in the famous Jones Beach Lifeguard Patrol, to show them the value of the surfboard in rescue work. So when I came along with the improved hollow boards they were ready and eager to accept them.”[37]

“I went up there,” Tom continued of his New York summer. “That summer was fantastic for me… [My costs] were very little and they paid me $500 dollars a month. It was fantastic. I took care of these kids, taught them to swim, had good luck with them. Good luck for their parents, too, because they were all individuals and they were hard to get along with. We did get along… I came out of it with about $1500 bucks, well fed and everything, and heading for the Islands, again, for some surfing.”[38]

Footnotes

[2] Lynch, Gault-Williams, et. al. TOM BLAKE: Journey of a Pioneer Waterman, ©2001.

[3] Vansant, Amy. “Dudley Whitman: A Visit with Florida’s First Surfer,” Surfer magazine, Vol. 35, No. 4, 1994, p. 84.

[4] Vansant, 1994, p. 84.

[5] Vansant, Amy, 1994, p. 84.

[6] Vansant, 1994, p. 84. Dudley Whitman quoted. Dudley was born March 20, 1920.

[7] Lynch, Gary. Interview with Dudley Whitman, May 10, 2000.

[8] Lynch, Gary. Interview with Dudley Whitman, May 10, 2000; most likely 1933 or ‘34.

[9] Lynch, Gary. Interview with Dudley Whitman, May 10, 2000.

[10] Lynch, Gary. Interview with Dudley Whitman, May 10, 2000.

[11] Lynch, Gary. Interview with Dudley Whitman, May 10, 2000.

[12] Lynch, Gary. Interview with Dudley Whitman, May 10, 2000.

[13] Vansant, 1994, p. 85. Dudley Whitman quoted.

[14] Vansant, Amy. “Goofing Off In God’s Waiting Room,” or “Gauldin Reed: A Link to Florida’s Surfing Past,” Surfer, Volume 36, No. 6, June 1995, p. 96. Gauldin Reed quoted.

[15] Vansant, 1994, p. 85. Dudley Whitman quoted.

[16] Vansant, 1994, p. 85. Dudley Whitman quoted.

[17] Lynch, Gary. Interview with Dudley Whitman, May 10, 2000.

[18] Lynch, Gary. Interview with Dudley Whitman, May 10, 2000.

[19] Lynch, Gary. Interview with Dudley Whitman, May 10, 2000.

[20] Lynch, Gary. Interview with Dudley Whitman, May 10, 2000.

[21] Smiley, David. “Surfer, horticulturist William Whitman dies,” Miami Herald , June 1, 2007. See also The Whitmans at the First East Coast Surfing Championships, Daytona, Florida, 1938, at: http://legendarysurfers.com/blog/uploaded_images/1938-Daytona-782502.jpg

[22] Karp, David. “Bill Whitman, 92, Is Dead; Scoured the Earth for Rare Fruit,” New York Times, June 4, 2007 with Correction Appended.

[23] Kahn, Jordan. “Surfing’s Lost Chapter - How did Daytona Beach become Florida’s 1st surf city,” Daytona Beach News-Journal, 27 July 2008.

[24] Kahn, Jordan. “Surfing’s Lost Chapter - How did Daytona Beach become Florida’s 1st surf city,” Daytona Beach News-Journal, 27 July 2008.

[25] Kahn, Jordan. “Surfing’s Lost Chapter - How did Daytona Beach become Florida’s 1st surf city,” Daytona Beach News-Journal, 27 July 2008.

[26] Kahn, Daytona Beach News-Journal, 27 July 2008.

[27] Kahn, Daytona Beach News-Journal, 27 July 2008.

[28] Kahn, Daytona Beach News-Journal, 27 July 2008.

[29] Kahn, Daytona Beach News-Journal, 27 July 2008.

[30] Kahn, Daytona Beach News-Journal, 27 July 2008.

[31] Kahn, Jordan. “Surfing’s Lost Chapter - How did Daytona Beach become Florida’s 1st surf city,” Daytona Beach News-Journal, 27 July 2008.

[32] “Roman Pools Are the Only Pools in This Area Devoted Exclusively to Water Sports.” See handbill, February 18, 1934. Tom had worked here before.

[33] Lynch, Gary. Interview with Thomas Edward Blake, July 25, 1988, Washburn, Wisconsin.