Aloha and Welcome to this chapter in the LEGENDARY SURFERS collection on surfing in San Diego, California, during the 1930s.
To read about San Diego's earliest surfing history, that lead up to the 1930s, please go to:
https://legendary-surfers.blogspot.com/2018/05/san-diego-surfing-1910s-1960s.html
Early surfers in San Diego were mostly lifeguards for whom wave riding was a pastime, not a dedicated activity. They were lifeguards first, surfing on heavy redwood boards modeled after the Hawaiian alaia, and greatly influenced by Duke Kahanamoku and George Freeth. Notable in the beginning were Ralph Noisat, Charlie Wright and Gilbert “Gil” Duran, riding mostly in Coronado and La Jolla.
Surfing had been a rarity in the 1910s and ‘20s. What boards there were weighed 80-100 pounds and were generally stored in lifeguard stations or boathouses. In comparison, bodysurfing and prone riding on shorter “bellyboards” were far more popular than stand-up surfing.
By the late 1920s, wave riding on solid wooden boards began to grow in the San Diego area, mostly due to contact with both Los Angeles area surfers and Hawaiian surfers – including members of Hui Nalu and the Outrigger Canoe Club – sometimes surfing San Diego for short times while visiting or working.
Also, surfboards improved slightly with the introduction of lighter redwood.
Surf spots like La Jolla Shores, Pacific Beach, and Coronado developed reputations for rideable waves.
In 1928, Emil Sigler (1910-2011) moved to Mission Beach and soon became San Diego’s most influential waterman of the 1930s. Unfortunately, his influence and accomplishments remained little known throughout his life. It was only in his last decade that his key role in San Diego’s growth and development became known to the wider world, thanks to David Aguirre and his book Waterman’s Eye, published in 2008.
After arriving in Mission Beach at age 18, Sigler discovered a surfboard near the Mission Beach lifeguard station. “It was two pieces of thick pine, bolted together. And it had an iron tip,” recalled Sigler in 2006, at age 96. He found out that it belonged to early San Diego surfing pioneer Charlie Wright. When Sigler tracked Wright down and asked if he could use the board, Wright told him he could use it as much as he wanted. “Just put it back where you found it. Lean it against the seawall.”
Born in San Francisco, Sigler had wanted to become a fisherman, and since school didn't interest him, he often ditched classes to hang out at the Fleischacker Pool. Some of the pool's lifeguards were Hawaiian, and Sigler says one day during an outing to the beach they gave him a couple of rides on their boards. That triggered his interest in surfing.
When Sigler’s family moved to Southern California and Queenstown Court, Mission Beach, he discovered that Charlie Wright’s board was similar to the Hawaiians' boards that he had ridden up north, off San Francisco beaches. But, Wright's 125-pound board “was so heavy, it was steady, real steady,” Sigler said. “It was a lot more steady than the other boards later on.” But, because it was so heavy, a rider couldn't turn in the water. Additionally, the varnish was so worn “you had to be careful you didn't get any splinters.”
Charlie Wright warned Sigler away from surfing at Ocean Beach, claiming that the outflow from Mission Bay, which at that time streamed under a bridge rather than through the present channel, could be tricky. “You could get knocked out or something, and the tide'll take you out,” Sigler recalls Wright saying.
One day while jogging on the beach, Sigler noticed a surf spot that looked promising. At the north end of Pacific Beach, just south of Pacific Beach Point, the waves seemed particularly well formed. The board was too heavy for Sigler to carry that distance, so he hauled it aboard a ten-foot wooden dory and rowed north from Mission Beach. He unloaded Wright's board at the beach that's now known as Tourmaline and caught some good waves. He never saw anyone else surf there for years. Sigler is generally considered to be the first to discover Tourmaline as a surf spot.
Emil Sigler became the San Diego area’s first serious local surfer. Some of his younger contemporaries disagreed, though. One local surfer, Lloyd Baker, said Sigler “surfed a little bit, but he was not very agile. Not that he wasn't strong and not that he couldn't have become a better surfer, but he and Don Pritchard and Dempsey Holder (two other early surfers) were never, ever stylists. They went out and tried, but when they got up it was like you never thought they were going to last for more than 20 feet before they fell off or something.”
According to Baker, he and his pal Dorian Paskowitz and a handful of other teenagers from Point Loma and La Jolla were the first true San Diego surfers.
Born in San Diego, Baker and his family moved around California in his early childhood, but in 1934, when Lloyd was 13, they settled into a house at Portsmouth Court in Mission Beach. Dorian Paskowitz lived a couple of blocks away. In the years that followed, “We went to school every day together,” Baker says. “We swam in the morning before school. We ran together. We dated together. We did everything together.”
Their school was Point Loma High, which they reached by riding the streetcar that ran south on Mission Boulevard and over the bridge to Ocean Beach. That bridge was later torn down when the Mission Bay jetty was created. "On the other side of the bridge, we'd get off and take a bus up to school."
And school was where, in their sophomore year, they built their first paddleboards.
Paddleboards had been invented in the late 1920s by Wisconsin native Tom Blake who had found his way to Hawaii and become fascinated by the ancient Hawaiian boards in Honolulu's Bishop Museum. In an attempt to devise something that would work like the old planks but be lighter, he had come up with a design that was essentially a surfboard-shaped hollow box. Dubbed a cigar box or a kook box, paddleboards became popular with lifeguards for rescue work, but they could also be used to ride waves. Baker and Paskowitz copied this design and learned to stand up on the boards in the surf that sometimes formed at the entrance to Mission Bay. “Those boards probably lasted a year, year and a half,” Baker estimated.
Although nearly half as heavy as the boards they had been riding, Blake hollow boards were unwieldy and "were a pain in the ass, because as soon as they got just a little warped or they got in the sunshine or whatever, why, they started leaking," Baker says. When the era's best Californian surfer, Pete Peterson, moved to San Diego and got a job at the Mission Beach Plunge, he brought with him a couple of square-tailed solid-wood Hawaiian boards. These were studied by the locals with interest, as they realized their options on board designs were increasing.
Redwood/Balsas expanded the options even further.
By the mid-1930s, Los Angeles-based manufacturer of prefabricated homes Pacific Systems Homes had diversified and started to build surfboards as a sideline. Although the company used solid redwood at first, it later began importing lightweight balsa from South America for use in both home-building and surfboards.
The balsa "was beautiful stuff!" Baker recalled. "They had it all milled, and it was very pretty." But a surfer couldn't simply order a finished board. He had to request that a block of wood be manufactured to the shape and dimensions he specified. "They'd put it together in any configuration you want," Baker says. "You could actually go through their bins and pick out the pieces you were going to have them glue up." Some pieces were harder, some softer; they also varied in weight.
"You could pick them out so the board balanced. You'd pick out redwood pieces with pretty grains of wood." If you wanted a stringer of redwood glued down the middle of the board to stiffen it or along the sides (the rails) or tip (the nose) to protect the softer wood, you could order that too. You drove up to L.A. to pick up your order, then took it home, where with woodworking tools you shaped the simple geometry into a board that planed over water with power and speed. Or if you had a friend who was good at shaping, you might press him into service.
Baker was one of those who became known for his skill at shaping Pacific Systems Homes boards. For a few years in the late 1930s, he worked on probably 40 or 50 boards; boards for Paskowitz and for the small gang of Ocean Beach and La Jolla boys who had started surfing, as well as others. He did it for free. "We were happy to do the work and pass the board on to somebody that would use it." Because they were lighter, weighing 45 to 65 pounds, the balsa/redwood boards were more responsive in the water, and with the addition of a fin (introduced by Tom Blake in 1935), they became more maneuverable.
Kimball Daun, one of the Ocean Beach boys, doesn't remember when or where he met Lloyd Baker, but he says it didn't take long to realize they were kindred spirits. Born close to the ocean, Daun remembers wandering over to the water, unsupervised, when he was six or seven, and teaching himself to swim. Not long after that, he became friends with another kid named Skeeter Malcolm, who lived a few blocks away and shared his love of the ocean. By the time they were eight or nine, they were bodysurfing on "the big beach." They heard that Duke Kahanamoku had once surfed the Mission Bay channel back in the 1920s, and that piqued their interest in surfing with boards.
Their first attempt at following Duke's example involved a paddleboard owned by an older teenager named Bob Sterling. "He would take it out on the ocean, usually on calm days, and paddle round on it," Daun recalled, adding that Sterling would also lend his board to the younger two. Daun says he and Malcolm took it to an area of Ocean Beach where they didn’t have to worry about swimmers. They took turns pushing each other into the shore break, and while the nose would sometimes take a dive and the board come to an abrupt halt, at other times the board surged forward. Then whoever was on it would pop up into a crouch, balancing for a couple of seconds before tumbling off.
They couldn't steer it at all, but they had fun on Sterling's board, Daun says, until the day one of them caught a good-sized wave and nosed in hard enough to hit the bottom. "All of a sudden, the board was just sunk, which was unusual." When they got it onto the sand, they realized "four feet of the plywood bottom of the board had peeled off and was just hanging under it. We thought, 'Oh my God, this is ruined.'”
Sterling was a big guy and they dreaded the thought of what his reaction might be. So, they loaded the busted board on a wagon and hauled it to Daun's house. "I said, 'Well, we gotta glue it,' but we didn't have any glue. So we went on Green Street, which was the next block over, and dug the tar out of the cracks in the street. We put it in a can, melted it, and poured the seam all the way around. We scraped off the excess and nailed it down with the tar in there. When we got finished, you could see the black here and there." It seemed to hold, though, and Daun and Malcolm never pressed their luck by borrowing the board again.
A bit of larceny enabled them to get a board of their own. This happened one night when the boys were walking home from high school. "Out around Coronado Avenue, someone was building a new house," Daun recalled. On the building site, they spotted "six magnificent redwood boards that they were using for the window frames. They were about 12 feet long. No one was around, and in those days no one stole anything."
Daun and Malcolm hoisted the boards on their shoulders and headed down the hill for the home of a friend who had a big basement. He refused to harbor their plunder, so they continued on to Sunset Cliffs Boulevard. "The boards would bounce because of the distance between us. We were walking along, and a couple of Ocean Beach cops drove around the corner, and oh my God, I thought we were going to die right there. I said, 'Don't look, don't look, don't look!' " The police slowed down but didn't stop the boys, who reached the safety of the garage adjoining the café and barbershop on Voltaire operated by Malcolm's parents.
Later, "Skeeter told his dad that my father had bought the wood, and I told my dad that his father had bought it," Daun says. The only problem with this was that "when my dad went down to get a haircut, one of us always had to be in the damn barbershop to keep the talk away from the surfboard."
Somehow that worked. Three-quarters of an inch thick, the boards were far too thin to be made into a solid wooden surfboard, so Daun and Malcolm set about building another box with cross-members. For this they needed screws and plywood, which cost little – but more than they had.
"But Skeeter got 20 cents a day for lunch money, which was unheard of for me," Daun says. "I had my mom make three sandwiches for me, and I'd take two and give Skeeter one. That way he could save his lunch money." They earned a bit more from chores. "We finally got the board built, and at 11 feet long, it was slow in turning, just like all big boards. But for a hollow board made at minimal expense, it was easy to catch waves."
Daun says he and Malcolm later graduated to boards fabricated by Pacific Systems Homes; balsa/redwood blanks shaped by Lloyd Baker. So did three other Ocean Beach friends of theirs.
Many of their surf sessions were impromptu. Baker could look out from his music-appreciation class and assess the surf conditions. If the day looked good, he would sweep through the building, poking his head into the other boys' classrooms and catching their attention. They'd get up and leave. Someone always had an old Model A or some other vehicle they could pile into. "The teachers didn't like it," Daun acknowledges. "But that's how much we were into surfing." Every minute of their waking lives, they were either doing it or thinking about doing it.
The weight of the boards limited the choices of where these first hardcore surfers surfed. "See, in those days, those boards were nose-heavy," explains Bill "Hadji" Hein, who by the late 1930s had joined the small band of regulars at Mission Beach. Because of the boards' tendency to "pearl" (or plunge beneath the water), "You had to be selective in where you could go. You had to have a wave at least four to five feet high, and it had to have slope in front of it, not a curl," he said. In San Diego County, the most reliable places to find those conditions were San Onofre, Windansea (in La Jolla), Pacific Beach Point, Sunset Cliffs (south of OB), and Imperial Beach.
Yes, this was the beginning of San Onofre’s golden era. Sometimes compared to Waikiki in Hawaii, San Onofre began luring Southern California surfers as early as 1934, a surfer named Bob Sides “discovered” it.
San Onofre soon became known not only for its waves, but its parties, too. According to Emil Sigler, the location's remoteness encouraged some at the all-male gatherings there, to swim naked. This was at a time when men wore bathing suits that covered them from neck to knee.
Soon, the Pacific Coast Surfriding Championships – the first organized surfing contest in the world, at that point; having begun in 1928 – were being held there. The competitions were not fierce, Jane Schmauss, the director of the California Surf Museum in Oceanside, noted. "Those guys didn't care a feather or a fig about who was the best surfer." But they were curious about each other's boards and techniques, and the San Onofre gatherings – organized or not – provided an opportunity to compare notes. "We had campfires and luaus," Hadji Hein recalls. "It was the Hawaiian Islands spirit."
San Onofre was too far away for most surfers, excepting on the weekends. So, San Diego surfers surfed other breaks more often; like Tijuana Sloughs when it was up, Mission Beach, Sunset Cliffs, Windansea, Pacific Beach Point and Tourmaline.
Imperial Beach – near Tijuana Sloughs – was just an average beach break. But in the winter, in the late 1930s, when the surf came up at Tijuana Sloughs, "Then [Imperial Beach lifeguard] Dempsey [Holder] would call, and we'd go down." It might happen only three times a year, Baker recalled, "usually for three to four days. Then there wouldn't be any other surf for a month or so. And the beach surf [in Imperial Beach] wasn't any different than the beach surf at Mission Beach or anywhere else."
Waves off Sunset Cliffs were excellent year-round, although access to them wasn't easy. A fellow could make the long paddle south from Ocean Beach or approach from the cliff top or the Theosophical Society. "We used to take our surfboards and just leave 'em in the brush and carry them down the little trail and surf there day in, day out," Baker says.
At Windansea, the reef causes the swell to break abruptly, creating powerful waves that often have a tubular shape. But no one rode Windansea until 1937. That year, a young glider pilot named Woody Brown, riding a homemade hollow board, and a handful of other young men from La Jolla "found great surf at Bird Rock and Pacific Beach Point, where we rode 20-foot waves, taking off right on the edge of the kelp," Brown recalled in a 2000 Surfer's Journal article. He and his buddies then ventured out at Windansea. After that, Ocean and Mission Beach surfers began joining them, at least on occasion.
Most, however, considered Pacific Beach Point "the absolute best for us," according to Kimball Daun. "You always had a long right slide. When the surf was really big, you could actually ride all the way over to Tourmaline." As at Sunset Cliffs, access to the water off the headland wasn't easy. "You had to drive up La Jolla Boulevard and jump the curb," Hadji Hein recalls. Japanese-American farmers were growing fruits and vegetables on the bluff, and the surfers would drive through an opening in their fence and down a mud road leading south to a canyon. They'd park their jalopies there and walk the rest of the way to the beach. "There were beautiful oleander trees all along there," Hein recalled. The surfers would pick the blossoms, bring them home to their girlfriends, and they would make leis. "That was the spirit we had in those days. We'd play Hawaiian music and all that sort of thing."
One way at least a few kids reached Tourmaline Beach was via a City of San Diego lifeguard truck. By 1935, Emil Sigler had overcome the handicap of being blind in his right eye (the result of an early childhood accident) to come in second on the city's lifeguard-screening exam. He wound up working at the Mission Beach lifeguard station, which had an old Ford Model A. Sigler says he would often rise early and load up a couple of the local kids like Baker and Paskowitz with their boards. He would drive north along the sand, going under Crystal Pier, to Tourmaline Beach. The group would surf, then return in time for Sigler to start his work shift by 9:30 a.m.
An incident with that truck resulted in the Ocean Beach boys getting their group nickname. As Kimball Daun recalled it, Sigler had driven up to Crystal Pier and stopped to chat with Daun, Malcolm, and a couple of their Ocean Beach friends. When Sigler started the engine to drive back to the lifeguard station, "Well, Skeeter and I were going to have to walk down to Old Mission Beach," about a mile south of the pier. "So we jumped on the back of the truck. It had handles to hold on to. When we did that, the truck bottomed out." Sigler yelled at them. "So we jumped off and Emil worked the thing out of the sand, then we'd jump on again. Pretty soon it was 'You goddamned vandals!' He picked up big rocks and started flinging them at us! That was the first time we were called the Vandals."
The friends now calling themselves The Vandals were not a surf club, just guys who surfed together. But, these Mission Beach surfers formed the first formal association of local wave riders around 1938, with the support of a city councilman named Fred Simpson. Lloyd Baker was the first president, and the group held meetings in a little room on the north end of the bathhouse that was located at the Mission Beach seawall, near Queenstown Court. But the club "dropped into oblivion when the war came along," says Hadji Hein, who was one of the first members. "Everybody had to go into the service, and it just went kaput."
As for Emil Sigler, he remained stateside probably due to his eye injury. At some point in the 1930s, he and Bill Rumsey rowed to and from Catalina Island, becoming the first two to do so. There are other Sigler stories, too, but they’re lost in the deaths of those who knew him who could recall.
What we do know is that in addition to lifeguarding, Sigler became recognized as a professional diver in search and rescue. After his lifeguarding years, he supported his family as a commercial fisherman, eventually owning and operating his own fishing vessel and plying the West Coastal waters between Baja and Alaska.
Towards the end of his long life (101 years), he finally got the recognition that he deserved when he was featured in Waterman’s Eye, his biography by David Aguirre (2008). Unfortunately, it is long out-of-print.
Emil Sigler’s honors include: 2004: Pioneer Waterman Award from the Surfrider Foundation; 2006: Honoree at the California Surf Museum; 2008: Subject of the biography Waterman’s Eye; and 2011: Finalist for "Best Biography Award."
Obituary reflections remembered Emil as a humble, strong, and inspirational figure who helped shape the surf culture and water safety identity of San Diego beaches.
Links
Emil Sigler Obituary: https://www.sandiegouniontribune.com/2011/10/23/emil-sigler-pure-waterman-dies-at-101/
Notes
Unless otherwise indicated, most all quotes are from “90 Years of Curl” by Jeannette De Wyze for the San Diego Reader, December 14, 2006.
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