Pat Curren (1932-2023)

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The King and Queen of Clubs

Aloha and Welcome to “The King and Queen of Clubs”, the history of the Palos Verdes Surfing Club and the early history of the San Onofre Surfing Club. This chapter in the LEGENDARY SURFERS collection was originally meant for magazine publication in the early 2010s.

Palos Verdes Surfing Club meeting room

Doc Ball image courtesy of

The Surfing Heritage and Culture Center

During the economic Depression and under the shadow of World War II, two surfing groups dominated Southern California in the 1930s: the formal Palos Verdes Surfing Club (PVSC) and the very informal group that gravitated to San Onofre.

A.I. image of the King of Clubs

John Heath “Doc” Ball – surfer, dentist and pioneer surf photographer – was the prime motive force behind the Palos Verdes Surfing Club. Following his graduation from the USC Dental College, Doc rented a second story, five room suite above a movie theatre in Los Angeles, in 1934. One room was dedicated to working on his patients and one room served as his bedroom, office, darkroom, and laboratory. A third room constituted the meeting place for the Palos Verdes Surfing Club, after Doc and Adie Bayer founded it in 1935. Bayer was a champion platform diver, swimmer, tennis player, as well as surfer.

“In those days,” Doc recalled, “I didn’t have enough money to rent another building to sleep in. We made our own boards and swimming trunks, camera tripods, and copy stands. We bought very little. It was good for you. After all that, you really knew how to get there from here. It was a do-it-yourself age… Of course, we had a little trouble getting gasoline, but then it was 7-cents a gallon in those days… It [the Depression] kept us kinda limited in certain ways, but we had surfin’ to take care of everything. Long as there’s waves, why, you didn’t have to pay for those. All we had to do was buy the gas to get there.”

“It made us appreciate money when we were older, cuz we never had any during the Depression,” echoed Leroy “Granny” Grannis, an early PVSC member. “I would go for weeks without a penny in my pocket. I went to high school stone broke most of the time. You’d take a lunch with you, of course, so you could eat. There just wasn’t any money available. Those that had steady jobs were the kings.”

The interior of the club room was elaborately decorated with photographs of all members with their boards, trophies won by club members, surfing paintings, a president’s desk with gavel, and a set of shark’s jaws that housed the club creed.” It read:

“I as a member of the Palos Verdes Surfing Club, Do solemnly swear:

“To be ever steadfast in my allegiance to the club and to its members,

“To respect and adhere to the aims and ideals set forth in its constitution,

“To cheerfully meet and accept my responsibilities hereby incurred,

“And at all times strive to conduct myself as a club member and a gentleman,

“So help me God.”

For non-members, entrance into the PVSC club room was by invitation only. The club had a sergeant-at-arms and no smoking was allowed in the club room. “We forbid any cigarette smoking in the club,” Doc explained. “There were some that did, though. One was [Gene] Hornbeck and another was Jean [Depue]. They never did have any cigarettes when they came to the club, but once in a while, outside, you’d catch‘em. Finally, Jean – he tried to go out Hermosa Beach in the big surf and he couldn’t make it out; couldn’t punch through like the rest of us. He ran out of breath. That slew the cigarettes on his behalf; never touched ‘em again.”

“We met once a week,” Chuck Allen recalled, “normally Wednesday evening, in our club room... One Wednesday night per month, we turned off the lights, burned a candle on a table in front. Each member had to stand in front of the candle, while each member critiqued him about anything, but no kudos. These were somewhat agonizing affairs but we all profited by it.” 

“We were really a friendly group,” Leroy Grannis emphasized. “We had pictures – each one of us – with our boards, hanging on the wall… Every weekend, if there was surf, we were out surfing either Hermosa Pier or Palos Verdes Cove. See, the Cove wasn’t any good in the summertime, cuz it only takes a north swell. Then, of course, in the late ‘30s, we all started going down to San Onofre in the summertime.”

The PVSC went on to organize paddling races, paddleboard water polo matches, and surfing contests between themselves and the other surf clubs in the Los Angeles area. Its influence was also spread by surf safaris. “We’d make these trips out around,” Doc explained, “up the coast and down...”

“We also had, among the clubs,” he added, “the Catalina Island-to-Santa Monica Paddle Race. It was on those 14-foot paddleboards. Whew! That was a long paddle, but [at least] it was a relay.” “All the beach surfing clubs (Venice, Santa Monica, Manhattan, Hermosa, Redondo, PVSC, and Long Beach) had a relay race from Catalina to Santa Monica (42 miles),” echoed Chuck Allen. “Each club made a racing board, long, narrow, rounded bottom. Doc Ball bought our board and he made us practice several weekends. PVSC won every year!” Ocean relay races provided the impetus for surf club contests and these were “very popular” in the later half of the 1930s, LeRoy Grannis recalls. “After the war, that kind of died out.”

Were there differences between the clubs? “Not especially, as far as I know,” Doc said. “They all had their little banquets here and there and times of celebration; same things we did, too, in our Palos Verdes [club].” For music, “If anything,” Doc said, “they had a guitar or ukulele [for get-togethers at the beach]. In our surfing club, whenever we’d have one of our [more formal] get-togethers, we’d hire a band from Hollywood. They’d come over and do the [Big Band] dance music.”

Doc was being typically modest in his comparison of the PVSC to other surf clubs of that era. The fact was that the Palos Verdes Surfing Club was more sophisticated and organized than any of the other clubs. Its organization would be impressive even compared to today’s standards.

Cliff Tucker recalled the 1930’s surfing days as a time, “when a man could still be arrested at Santa Monica Beach for not wearing a top.” That is to say, for wearing trunks, only. As for the contests, they were serious business, too. “If you were in a contest situation and a guy took off in front of you, it was your obligation to show no decency. You either went right through him or otherwise mowed him down.”

“He was a member of our surfin’ club,” Doc laughed at the memory of Tucker. “Yeah, he was a wild one. He’s the one that got the picture in there (Doc’s book) where he got the axe and took about 40 stitches in his leg. He was out of the water for a few days!”

In his limited-edition photo collection, later to be reprinted, Doc documented “How All This Started.” Below the title, the photo shows Doc Ball, “snapping one in the good old days when the camera was carried out by holding it between his teeth. Towel was there just in case.” The photo below it, entitled “Straight Off,” featured “Paddleboards, hats and paddles, constituted the cove surfing gear back in 1934.”

Fortunately, Doc shot lifestyle photographs of the PVSC crew, too. A night time shot, following a good day of surf, shows surfers around a bonfire. Doc wrote: “Super surf… kept the boys in the water ‘til dark. Tired but surf satiated they are seen warming up here prior to carrying their waterlogged planks up the trail.” Another shot showed a “Pre-war device for warming up in a hurry what gets coldest while shooting these pictures,” showed a surfer – none other than Doc, himself – squatting over a small burning tire on the beach.

“In the winter,” PVSC member Chuck Allen recalled, “we surfed mostly at the Cove. After becoming ‘blue,’ we came in and did vertical BBQ rolls close to a 6 foot stack of burning tires. It didn’t take long to get ‘pink’ and go back to surfing. Those burning tires really put out the heat.” 

How often did the Palos Verdes crew surf?

“Just on weekends,” answered E.J. Oshier. “We all were either working or going to school and we’d just get down there on Saturdays – first thing Saturday morning. Way back then, you could just bring a sleeping bag, if you wanted to, and sleep on the cliff there, just above the Cove, overnight, and bring something to eat. Get up early Sunday morning and surf.”

A.I. image of The Queen of Clubs

Corona del Mar had been the most popular surf break of the 1920s and e en into the early 1930s. Because of the breakwater going in and the jetty coming out during that time, San Diego area surfer Bob Sides (cy-dez) declared in 1933: “They’re wrecking this place.” Sides ended-up being the first surfer to discover San Onofre, which was logical, according to Lorrin “Whitey” Harrison, as “Sides traveled between San Diego and up here frequently… and he said, ‘Hey Whitey, there’s this neat spot down south where the waves break way out.”

“So,” said Whitey of his first trip to San O, “we loaded up a whole bunch of people into touring cars… and we went down there and tried it out… We went clear down to where the atomic plant is now and surfed that spot. Then we came back up the beach and tried it right where the main shack is now. That’s where we found it was always steadiest. The surf was always pretty good… We weren’t the first people to go down there, people had been going fishing down there for years and stayin’ all night. The ranchers [who owned the land] didn’t seem to mind. In fact, the first time we went there, they were making a Hollywood movie. They had built this big palm thatch house right on the beach. We slept in it the first night we stayed there. This was about 1933/34. By 1935, Corona del Mar was over with, and San Onofre was our main spot.”

“It was a much wilder group down there,” E.J. Oshier said of the group that got going at San Onofre. “These guys were wonderful guys. Barney Wilkes, Doakes, Laholio, Nellie Blye, Joe Bush… a whole bunch of guys down there. They would tend to surf all morning and then, in the afternoon, there was a lot of pretty heavy drinking – wine; cheap wine. Party type, you know; hula dancers, singing and all that stuff. A lot of those guys [in the PVSC], like Hoppy [Swarts], didn’t care for that. So, they would come down once in a while – to Onofre – in the Summer…”

“They were ‘straighter,’” E.J. emphasized, of his Palos Verdes comrades, and they were also more serious. “A little of each, I’d say. They just didn’t care for – you know – like Barney Wilkes. Some of those guys would get real falling-down drunk. I wouldn’t go that far, but I’d get pretty loaded, myself, in the course of an evening. And it would get wild and loud. Nobody got hurt or anything. It was just a noisy, friendly, happy party time. Doc Ball and those guys just didn’t care for that. That’s their privilege, you know. They didn’t like it; they didn’t like it.”

E.J. said that some of the early San Onofre regulars included Whitey Harrison, Barney Wilkes, Dexter Woods, Vincent Lindberg (“‘Klotz ‘ we called him”), Charles Butler (Doakes), Laholio (Hawaiian for horse’s balls) Carol Bertolet, Benny Merrill, Frenchy Jahan, Dutchy Lenkeit, Joe Parsons (“We called him ‘Joe Bush’), Davy Tompkins (Keyhole), and Nellie Blye (Nell for Brignell). “George Brignell. He was a guy whose eyes were so bad – like Hoppy’s – when we went surfing, he had to tie glasses with string around his head, so he could see the waves [laughs]. He was something else.”

“Brignell’s eyesight demands that he wear glasses even when surfing,” Doc wrote in his book California Surfriders, 1946. “He fastens them on with a piece of inner tube but on occasions they get lost and he has to come in without them. This accounts no doubt for some of the daredevil rides this guy has gotten away with. He simply could not see the size of the monster he was choosing to ride.”

“The San Onofre group,” E.J. compared, “as I said – they were pretty high livers and party people, but they really made no effort at all to have a club. They liked it just free as a breeze and no commitments. Contrary to the PVSC [which was] very formal and had definite meeting nights and rituals… ‘Nofre guys: all they cared about is you dive for a few abs – abalone and lobster – you get a jug of wine, surf all morning and then play guitars…”

Who were the women around at that time?

“Whoever we could get!” E. J. answered with a laugh. “I had several gals. Their parents were – I guess you could say – liberal; would let their daughters leave with me Saturday and come back Sunday night. It was kind of nice to have around the sleeping bag, you know, Saturday nights…” 

The beach girls would “go with the surfers. They weren’t really ‘groupies’ cuz they were nice girls. Maybe a little hanky panky, [but] not groupies in the sense that the rock and roll people have them. They would go out [and surf], but they were pretty much beach wahines. A couple of them could get out on a board and get little waves. You know, those big boards, heavy boards – it just wasn’t too easy for a gal to get to the water, let alone paddle out.

“Mostly,” Doc Ball recalled, “if they had a boyfriend in it [surfing], they’d come down and eventually they’d say, ‘Hey, let’s get out in the water together.’ So, they’d have a tandem ride and finally started to get in the real deal.”

“There wasn’t a lot of tandem – except Pete Peterson and Lorrin used to do some,” E.J. clarified. “None of us guys did. It took too much strength and it took too much time out of our own surfing, so we didn’t do too much tandem stuff. It just wasn’t worth it. The girls would sit on the beach.” 

By the later 1930s, San Onofre was unquestionably “the meeting place for surfers up and down the California coast – from Tijuana Sloughs to Steamers Lane in Santa Cruz,” wrote Dorian Paskowitz, an early attendee. “Friday and Saturday nights were gay ‘ole times, with Hawaiian guitar, Tahitian dances and no small amount of boozing. But come Sunday morning, it was serious surfing for the true beach rats – like us guys from Mission Beach...”

It was, E.J. Oshier agreed, a “… procession of parties and surfing.”

The effects of this beach partying can be seen in a shot Doc made of the ‘Nofre crew still sleeping one morning. The caption reads: “Six A.M. of a ‘flat’ day and everybody still in the bag. Had the surf been humping they probably would have stayed up all night.” 

“When it was good down there,” Doc told me, “you couldn’t deny. You could go in and stay all night on the beach... If it was good on the weekend, why, that was it!”

The golden years at San Onofre are generally considered by ‘Nofre veterans to have been between 1936 and 1943, when the area was owned by Rancho Santa Margarita and leased as a fishing camp. “Back then it was part of Rancho Santa Margarita,” a later Nofre regular Stan King recalled, “and a guy named Frank at the Texaco station charged us a quarter to get in. We usually snuck in, and he’d swipe our clothes while we were out surfing and hold them until we paid the two bits.”

“Believe me,” emphasized E.J. Oshier, “Back before the war, at the Cove and at San Onofre, the Aloha Spirit was very prevalent. Everybody knew everybody. Your friends were out in the water with ya! There weren’t that many other people. And, so everybody got along, rode their waves and went in and got a jug of wine or a guitar or ukulele and that was a good day.”

“Now, again, the Palos Verdes group was entirely different,” E.J. underscored. “We [in the PVSC] used to have an annual dance, a ‘Hula Luau’ we called it… The San Onofre group would never do anything like that cuz they didn’t want to act as a group. They just wanted – they were all independent spirits and they didn’t want any part of an association type thing. Yet, they got along as well as the more formal PVSC guys. It was just a different approach.”

In 1937, Doc Ball built his first waterproof camera housing, inspired by Tom Blake’s. The watertight “shoots box” housed Doc’s replacement for the Kodak folding Autographic. Not only could he get closer to his wave sliding buddies, but the images were clearer. 

“I got a stripped down Series D Graflex camera – 3 ¼ x 4 ¼ – and put a water box around it. So, that way, you could open it up and make your shot and then shut it up real quick and it didn’t get all wet.” Doc laughed. “That thing really did work. I got some terrific shots with it.” Doc’s water box featured a large brass handle attached so that he could hold onto it when he was caught inside.

Chuck Allen described what happened when bigger sets came along: “he could sit between the waves and shore [on his board]. He would snap a picture, then swing the camera hard so that the lens door would slam shut, whereupon he could toss the camera, lose his board, swim in and retrieve both!” 

“I traded the chief of photography in the Los Angeles fire department arson squad for one of my Graflex cameras,” Doc recalled. “I made him a three-unit gold inlaid bridge.”

In the late 1930s, Doc shot a small amount of 16mm movie film and, later on, some 8mm. “I finally got rigged-up with a Keystone. It was a 16mm. Take that out on the board and I got – man, I just got pack after pack...”

Doc didn’t pursue this aspect of his photography, but what he did shoot documents the heyday of prewar Southern California surfing. One roll of film contains a unique segment shot from a bi-winged airplane. “During the aerial photography shoot,” surfing historian Gary Lynch wrote, “Doc turns the camera on the pilot. With his leather cap slapping in the wind, the pilot’s eyes grow wide from behind his goggles and a large grin appears on his startled face.

“Other notable footage includes Martha Chapin, sister of pioneer surfer Gard Chapin, and step-aunt to Mickey Dora. Martha stands in front of an enlarged map of Los Angeles wearing an eye-catching swim suit. Looking like a Hollywood film actress, she points out the way from Hollywood to Palos Verdes Estates. This was a promotion device for the new Palos Verdes Estates subdivision. It should be mentioned that on this rare footage is recorded an astonishing look at what the surfer sees while sliding a comber… On the deck of the board, the Palos Verdes Surf Club logo is clearly visible along with Oscar the surfing gopher snake. With water splashing off the rails and ocean whizzing by, the club’s pet snake lies on the nose of the board, head and upper third of body erect, apparently enjoying the ride.”

Amused by the interest in his photography, Doc on one occasion handed a group of young Nofre surfers his newest spiral bound photo book titled Beach Stuff and stepped back to record the image with his new Graflex camera. The photograph that resulted can be seen in Doc’s 1946 book. It clearly shows the enthusiasm of the group. “Obviously these boys were interested in surf photography,” Doc summed up.

Doc also created the first surf posters. “The majority of these posters announced that the Palos Verdes Surfing Club was holding a Hula Luau,” wrote Gary Lynch. “Hawaiian music, food and drink, female companionship, and of course, the newest surfing photographic images to leave the darkroom were the rewards if one attended the event…”

Even the Zamboanga club featured a Doc Ball poster. “That was a place where they had one of my pictures in there,” Doc told me. “They got excited about it. I gave them a print and they had it blown up to a 5’ X 6’ or something like that and put it up on their wall.” The picture was of Jim Bailey and his surfing cocker spaniel Rusty. “A real friendly guy,” Doc remembered of Jim Bailey. “He was one of our originals from Hermosa Beach. Movie gal gave him that dog. Then, I got that picture of them out there at Palos Verdes. They published that over in England and France and – son of a gun – the English guys were all over me about torturing that little dog. That dog, [actually, would] about scratch your ears off trying to get on your board to go out and ride!”

Down south, San Onofre continued as “Surfers’ Mecca,” documented in a number of pages in Doc Ball’s book California Surfriders, 1946. He wrote and took pictures of an epic contest day there, in 1940: “The competition was keen, the spills were frequent, and the spectators roasted on the beach. The boys come from within a hundred and fifty mile radius to participate in this activity.”

In covering the San O event Doc has a classic overhead shot of Gard Chapin blastin’ into the beach in his roadster. “Gard Chapin arrives late. Down the dirt road at 60 per, spots parking space, cramps wheels and slides in.” 

E.J. told of one prank they played on Gard: “One time, Gard Chapin left the beach for some reason and went off to do something. He had his usual 12-foot solid board. We got shovels and dug about a 10-foot hole, deep in the sand, and put his board in it with just the nose sticking out, and filled it back up again. He didn’t like that, when he got back! But, none of us knew who did it…”

Just before the war, it was not uncommon to be buzzed by a fellow surfer while on the beach or out in the water. “I was stationed as an instructor pilot at Mather Field, CA and Stockton, CA.,” recalled Chuck Allen. “Many weekends, I would jump into an AT-6A, go to LA and surf. When I departed, I would always ‘buzz’ my surfing buddies at the Cove, but never got a reprimand as [Johnny] Gates apparently did.”

Following the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor and the United States declaration of war in December 1941, the California surf clubs disbanded and almost every able bodied man enlisted in the armed services. Many a surfer would never ride again.

World War II certainly “Shut it out for a while,” Doc said sadly. After the war, “It just kinda exploded, again. Guys’d get back and they’d been hungry for surf. It’d come natural that you’d want to get back… The ones who survived – we had an outlet and surf was it.”

“Immediately,” after the war was won, Doc continued, “my first week back [September 1945], I went to Malibu. We were walking along the beach and looked out and saw probably around 12 guys out. I turned to the guy [I was with and said], ‘Jeez, the place is ruined.’ Before the war, you’d call somebody before you went to Malibu because you didn’t want to surf alone… What we considered to be a crowd, back then, would be a beautiful day, today.”

“Our old club members got together,” after the war, Granny said. “We all got together again. We all got married and we all had to have jobs. About once a month, we’d get together and have a poker party or something like that. A lot of the guys joined the San Onofre Surf Club [in the 1950s] and that became our common meeting point after that, for most of us – in the summertime, anyway.”

“A couple of guys didn’t come back from the war,” E. J. understated. “I never went back to Palos Verdes… The same guys were never there, anymore. The enticement of the camaraderie was gone, there. But, San Onofre was booming like crazy…”

Later on, by 1951, the Marines became concerned over the number of people using San Onofre within their jurisdiction. This lead to the formalization of the San Onofre Surfing Club. Nofre veterans like Dr. Barney Wilkes, Al Dowden, and Andre “Frenchy” Jahan lead the way.

“Little Frenchy Jahan – Andre Jahan – he was a guy that went into the Marine Corps and wrote up the original papers to get the San Onofre Surfing Club accepted to where we could run the San Onofre beach,” E.J. Oshier remembered. “When the war ended and we all started going back to ‘Nofre, the Marine Corps had that all and owned it. They gave us a real bad time about surfing there, especially Trestle. They’d come down with jeeps and guns and arrest people and take them into the base and confiscate their boards. It was an unhappy situation!”

“So, Barney Wilkes and Andre had a couple of meetings with a general and he saw it our way,” E.J. continued. “And so they set up a procedure whereby we would, you know, be responsible for keeping the beach clean… We couldn’t spend the nights, anymore. That was too bad. The Marines wouldn’t go for that. So, we had to be out by ten o’clock at night…”

After decades of being an ad hoc, rag tag group, the San Onofre Surfing Club held its first formal meeting at Old Man’s on April 24, 1952.

ENDIT

Bud Morrissey: Flat Bottoms & Parallel Sides

Aloha and Welcome to this LEGENDARY SURFERS chapter on 1930s and ‘40s surfer and shaper Bud Morrissey. It is largely drawn from an article I wrote for The Surfer's Journal in the late 2010’s, entitled “Flat Bottoms and Parallel Sides: The Design Contributions of Buddy Morrissey”.

Between the pine/redwood planks of surfing’s resurgence at the beginning of the 1900s, and the emergence of the Malibu Board in the late 1940s, surfboards developed from simple slabs to hydro dynamically designed “surfing machines.” It was nearly a half-century-long process and stuck in the middle of it was the 1930s surfboard shaper of choice: Bud Morrissey. More than any other shaper of his time, Morrissey contributed design elements “The Father of the Modern Surfboard” Bob Simmons would use to create his advanced designs; one of which – with further refinements by Joe Quigg – became The Malibu Board. Both Simmons and Quigg were influenced by Morrissey's flat bottoms and parallel sides.

“As a kid, I got to go down with my family to Balboa Island and the Corona del Mar area,” Bud told surfing historian Gary Lynch in an interview in 1988, a number of years before Bud’s passing. 

“Going out the bay, I saw guys surfing at old Corona del Mar… that looked like a great deal.” Of course, like many Southern California kids of his time, he also saw pictures and newsreels of people surfing. His first hands-on experience riding waves, though, was riding rented kayaks and getting “all screwed up.”

“First board I got was a paddleboard that my cousin and I made. I’m trying to think of a guy’s name – he just had some blueprints – Bob French.”

These were Tom Blake paddleboard diagrams. Although Bud at one point referred to French as “a bit of a screw-up,” he was a naval architect at one time and became an innovator of internal ribbing for paddleboards. His late 1930s paddleboards were some of the finest designed during that period, as testified by the fact that one of his original boards even won a paddleboard race in the 1980s.

“My cousin and I just got the plans from him,” Bud said of French. “Very detailed blueprints. That was the first board. 1934. We went down State Beach, first day, and I got bashed in the head. I guess it wasn’t long after that that I saw the regular type of surfboards. I went to all the different surfing places. Palos Verdes was predominantly paddleboards. I was probably one of the first ones there to use a square-tail – or whatever you want to call it [a solid wood board].

“Also, one of my school buddies – this is going back to junior high school – was a brother of Meyers Butte [pronounced “buddy”]. We were interested in hot rod cars… Meyers Butte was Pacific System Homes. They built prefab houses. Meyers Butte never became much of a surfer, but he was very interested in it [surfing]… Pacific System Homes is the place where they made most of the [solid wood] blanks. Lorrin [Harrison] got his blanks from there and shaped ‘em. That was a natural tie-in for me.

“Also, going over to Catalina, we did a lot of aquaplaning – the old fashioned aquaplane. Just a flat board.

“My first plank was a Christmas present. I don’t know who shaped it; possibly Lorrin. There was an old guy named ‘Dutch’ somebody who was not a surfer but shaped boards at Pacific Systems. That was Meyers’ hobby, too.

“The balsa wood came from General Veneer. They imported the balsa wood, then Meyers got it. Then we went to the balsa wood boards. Then – I imagine Meyers was the one who came up with the balsa board with redwood rails. You know, redwood nose and redwood tail piece and some stringers. Then we went to pure balsa. Oh, they were so light compared to what we’d been using! That was way before glassing [fiberglass]. But, the damn balsa boards would just get chewed apart, you know, in the rocks, in rocky areas – Palos Verdes, for one.

“I went to Hawai’i first time in 1936. They were still riding without a fin – Hawaiian-style redwoods. I made one of those. They did very badly in cold water. Then, Meyers built a lot of redwoods like that [possibly pointing to a balsa/redwood combination], probably before the balsa really came in. I went back to redwoods, then; like that [pointing to another board], chambered. They were doweled.”

Back in the 1930s, most guys made their own boards, but it was generally considered that if you wanted a better board, you needed to get one made by someone with a proven track record of successful boards. Recalling the main shapers of his day, Bud noted Johnny Stinton of Santa Monica, Lorrin “Whitey” Harrison of Laguna Beach and himself.

“I shaped boards for different guys… dozens.

“What I went to was a flat bottom and parallel sides. I’m pretty sure I introduced that. Absolutely flat bottoms. Lots of them [at that time] were rounded bottoms. My idea was – with no engineering [background] or anything – they [the boards at the time] were just kinda pushing sideways all the time. Parallel sides would keep ‘em straight and flat bottoms were like boat bottoms.”

The best example of a Morrissey-shaped chambered redwood – possibly the only surviving Morrissey chambered – is the board held in the Surfing Heritage and Culture Center (SHAAC) collection, a gift from William C. Janss, who later in his life owned the Sun Valley Ski Resort. The board is 11’4” x 21.5” x 3.75” and weighs in at 78 pounds.

“Bill took this board on the… Lurline to Hawaii in 1939,” Barry Haun of SHACC told me, “surfed it there, then brought it back to the Mainland and later had it in his home in Sun Valley, Idaho. It is one of the first boards to have a fin made of aluminum (only 1”deep).”

Bill Janss recalled the board being built sometime around 1934. However, it was most likely shaped sometime afterwards; probably between 1936-1939, after Morrissey was fully exposed to Tom Blake’s hollow board designs with transverse ribbing. Janss wrote that the board was built to surf Malibu, Palos Verdes and San Onofre. It was ridden at Malibu, Palos Verdes, San Onofre and at Waikiki – Queens, First Break, Public Baths and Castle (Steamer Lane). “Size of waves approximately 20-25 feet. At the time I thought 30-35 feet or more.”

The board is a hollowed redwood laminate with later modifications like a two inch reduction in length (original was 11’6”) and a metal skeg extrusion on the bottom toward the tail. Like other boards of that era, it was typically carried on the shoulder somewhat perpendicular to the ground. Janss remembers carrying the board sometimes a fair distance, like from the cliff road to the beach at Palos Verdes.

The Janss/Morrissey board consists of five air cells, three ¼” horizontal wooden struts for support during construction and strength during hard use. After the board was originally shaped, it was broken apart so that the air pockets could be created and the struts added, then it was reassembled. The board was sealed with 3-to-4 coats of Val spar varnish. The “price from my companion designer/builder,” wrote Janss, “was $30 FOB.”

The board was well cared for and even “wrapped in beach towels from the Royal Hawaiian in Waikiki. It was varnished and sanded every two years and shipped in a wooden crate yearly to Waikiki. It was a charmed board, as it went over a few coral reefs and finally just arrived from Hawaii [one time] with no wrapping.”

“Main accident to board was in late 30’s when Dick Ince (father was producer Tom Ince who died under mysterious conditions in Catalina Harbor near William Randolph Hearst’s yacht) pearled into Public Bath Reef. Nose reworked locally by a Japanese cabinet maker who copied triangular design... Other damage occurred from storage and bad handling at Duke’s restaurant.

“DAY OF FAME: Was surfing with Duke and Morrissey at Public Baths and got caught in 10’ wave. Board washed over coral reef. It was a long swim to reach a narrow channel through reef. Duke paddled up on his Blake-built koa paddle board (160 pounds, 16 feet long and hollow). Duke took me on tandem and we caught smaller wave that deposited us on reef. I said, ‘I’m out a here,’ and Duke said to stay put and we would catch next wave in across the reef. We did that and I recovered board – no damage – and returned to Public Baths Surf.”

Bill Janss, himself, had begun surfing in the “Santa Monica area, until 1933 when I teamed up with Buddy daily after school. Each weekend we would be at Malibu, Palos Verdes, Long Beach, Storm Channel and San Onofre.” He remembered notable surf sessions with Tommy Holmes and Bob Sides “on reef off Santa Monica Canyon in the early days. Spent a day with Tony Guererro (Santa Monica Beach Club life guard), Duke Kahanamoku and my brother Ed (he owned the car)… surfed at Balboa Storm Channel (Corona del Mar)…”

When he went to Hawai’i sometime after 1936, Janss “started surfing Waikiki... After a year we ventured out past Public Baths and worked Castle Surf which came up two to three times during the summer. Only companions out there were Duke K., Tom Blake, Tarzan Smith and Buddy Morrissey. Sometimes it was quite lonely for the two of us. Our surfing spot could be set by triangulation with objects on shore.”

“We had a one bedroom apartment (could sleep 3) opposite Queens in back of Piggly Wiggly Market, with monthly rental of $35… Our attire was: a pair of shorts with one pocket (for paraffin wax) plus jockey shorts.”

Janss described the way in which they turned a surfboard back then: “Turning – combination of leaning board and dragging foot. Foot was lodged against board, board was rocked back to help board change direction. Body position moved forward on wave to increase speed. Board leaned into wave to increase speed. Hip action helped in turning. Moved back on board when turning.”

The problem with turning a surfboard is what led Tom Blake, in 1934, to invent the surfboard skeg – or, what we now commonly call the “fin.” In commenting about the first fin on a surfboard, Bud Morrissey commented that “Like any invention, several people come upon the idea [more or less] at the same time.”

About his own first application of a skeg to a surfboard, Bud said: “You’ve heard lots about [Miki Dora’s step father] Gard Chapin and you’ve heard the term huli. That’s what we used to call a board without a fin and a very steep wave that tails pretty good. That’s a huli.

“Gard and I were out one day. We had talked about, ‘God, what we gonna do about this huli shit?’ And I said, ‘Gard, I got an idea. Let’s go on the beach.’ We found an old – oh, like an orange crate – that had some pieces of wood [I thought I could use]. We knocked off a piece with a rock and then hammered it into the boards… That did the trick, yeah.

“Then, I made a very similar design, but deeper, probably only an inch and a half long. There were a couple of reasons for that. Stickin’ it in, in those days – there were convertibles, cars with rumble seats. You’d put the boards in the rumble seat. The fin of today would have been in the way horribly… That was a part of the evolution of it.”

“I made some,” Bud said kind of chuckling about fins, “out of aluminum – T-sections of aluminum. It came in a T-shape. I used that for a while until I just caught holy hell at Waikiki because they were dangerous. Guys would say, ‘Hey, you’re gonna kill somebody with that.’ So, I went back to wood. Actually, the aluminum did have very sharp edges and could have hurt somebody. But, that’s the only other material. They weren’t dynamically shaped.”

As for materials and weight, “I had some solid redwoods [weighing] as much as 120 pounds… I think I got the idea of cedar; a lighter wood; got Meyers to [glue me up some]. Solid cedars came in at 80-85 pounds, depending on the size of the board you used. Eleven feet, six inches was pretty standard [for length]… Then went back to chambering… [redwood boards] made out of 1 x 4’s, glued together. They’d come out 80-85 pounds… Balsas were real floaters. They’d come out at 50 [pounds] or less.”

“I shaped most of ‘em right here,” he said chuckling in his home on Olympic Boulevard in Los Angeles. “I just shaped, is what I did. Meyers Butte would, you know, band-saw ‘em out for me. I used to get hell as a kid – balsa shavings blowing down the street,” he said laughing. “I used a hatchet, a draw shave, a plane – then, just sand it.”

In addition to Bill Janss, Bud’s friends included Gardner Lippincott, Bob Sides (pronounced “cy-dez”), Brian Janda – “a haoli from the coast, but also member of the Hawaiian Beach Patrol” – Tommy Holmes, Bob Butts, Danny Alexander, Woody Brown – “Something else!” – Dale Velzy – “Dale’s a real character… The Hawk!” – and Tom Blake. “Tom Blake really coached me, really helped me… very positive input.”

According to E.J. Oshier, a regular at both the Palos Verdes Cove and San Onofre, Bud Morrissey was among San O’s top surfers in the 1940s. They were: “Lorrin Harrison, Barney Wilkes [doing dentistry in San Clemente so he could be near ‘Nofre], Benny Merrill [San Clemente Van & Storage, pre-war], Opai [Tom Wert], Bud Morrissey.”

Morrissey “was quite a guy, recalled E.J. “We were friends, but not close friends. He was a little different. He could have been in the Palos Verdes Surfing Club, but he just didn’t care to join. He was just a different type of person, but a nice guy!

“He developed – right after the war – that parallel sides solid board that enabled him to slide at an angle across soup, which none of the rest of us guys could do on the big old boards. We just kind of marveled. A lot of guys didn’t like Buddy. I liked him, but a lot of ‘em didn’t because he was a little different – you might say ‘snooty’ in some respects [high brow, better than thou]. His father had been a Hollywood producer/director and had a lot of money and this kind of thing.

“Anyway, Buddy Morrisey and Opai were very close chums and they’d be together at ‘Nofre a lot. And we’d all be out surfing together.” 

When one looks at photographs of the 1930s and notes the changes in shape that solid and hollow surfboards took over the course of the decade, Bud’s parallel sides and flat bottom influences can be seen as a transformative plan shape by decade’s end. The period just before World War II was when Bud considered he was at the height of his art. 

Coincidentally, this was the time when he married the top woman surfer of the decade, Mary Ann Hawkins. By the mid-1940s, Bud’s influence as a shaper would be felt in the surfboard’s next progression at the hands of Bob Simmons.

“I think we exchanged ideas,” Bud told Gary Lynch about his interaction with Simmons. “We both contributed to each other’s ideas. His boards, I feel, were sort of a take off on mine, only he did the spoon nose which sounded like a hell of a good idea and it turned out to be that way. The top of boards started to be shaped at that point.”

ENDIT

Credits

Photo credits: ©2004 Guy Motil.

Misc: Surfing Heritage and Culture Center (SHAAC), Spencer Croul, Gary Lynch, Barry Haun and The Surfer's Journal.

Bob McTavish (1944-present)

 A placeholder for all things McTavish.

From our Facebook group, July 2025:

Words by Brent Flaaten

Adapted from the interview with Jaime Brisick and Bob McTavish on Soundings

Photos: Bob McTavish Collection:

https://www.facebook.com/share/p/1FobyFB8x5/

“When you cast your fate to the wind, you’ve got to learn how to sail” -Bob Mctavish (and others)

   Here’s a tale as old as time and one that has been repeated throughout history by surfers worldwide. Bob McTavish was a 19 year old shaper/surfer working in Sydney, Australia in 1963 and he had surf on the brain. Walking the streets, every two-story building was pictured as a giant Hawaiian style wave. Each telephone pole, with the wires reaching to the other pole, he would picture the wires as a wave face cresting over. 

   He had seen the photos of Sunset Beach, Haleiwa and Waimea and read the terms used to describe them. “Waves the size of two-story buildings” or "swells telephone pole high”. Once he laid eyes on waves of this size, he became an obsessed young man. He had to get to Hawaii and ride these huge waves. The obsession became a reality when he learned of a group of friends who were boarding a ship next week in Sydney Harbor. Bob’s close friend, 17 year old Dave Chidgey had recently been let go from his job as a landscaper, and this made him ripe for the picking. Bob posed the question and Dave was in, they would leave in the morning aboard the SS Orsova from Sydney Harbor.

  The next day seeing the other group up on the rails waving, he devised a plan. Simple enough, he asked the ship’s officer on the gang plank if he could say a quick good-bye to his mates up top. The ship’s officer gave him 15 minutes, with that, Dave and Bob were onboard. Once onboard they were blending in as best as they could when the ship’s horn blew. The group of boys said to Dave and Bob,”You boys can sleep in our room, under our bunks”. That’s exactly what they did for the 10 day trip to Hawaii.

   The ship stopped in Tahiti and Fiji, finally arriving in Hawaii and now Bob and Dave could realize their dreams. A bartender named Patsi helped the boys obtain a fake “Exit Pass”, which they could use to disembark once all of the passengers had left. Once off the ship they hitched a ride with a Pineapple truck and found the group of Aussies they accompanied. Bob borrowed a board and caught his first wave in Hawaii at Haleiwa that afternoon. 

    Bob and Dave would sleep on pieces of cardboard on the beach at Sunset Beach, surfing all day long and really tuning into the North Shore surfer lifestyle. There was a surfer article that appeared regularly in the Sydney Sunday Herald and each week the newspaper was sent to Hawaii for distribution. About five weeks into their trip, the American Consulate's son, who was a surfer, read the article about, “two missing surfers from Australia last seen waving to their friends, aboard the SS Orsova, headed for Hawaii”. The article even mentioned the two surfers' names, “Bob McTavish and Dave Chidgey”. The surfer told his father at the US Consulate about the article and the very next morning when Bob and Dave were at Sunset Beach, the FBI showed up. The “Gray Suits” rounded the boys up and hustled them over to the local jailhouse for questioning.  Two days later at their court appearance on Christmas Eve, the judge asked,”Why do you come here to our Island?” Bob, matter of factly answered, “Well your honor, it’s your waves of course.  Why, they are the best waves in the world.”  

The judge replied, “I Understand. You know boys, I know the Duke Kahanamoku personally, and as a Christmas gift, I’m sending you boys back to Australia. If you boys come back here again legally to surf, I’ll introduce you to the Duke.”

     Bob and Dave were given two one-way tickets to Australia for their first ever flight on a Pan American airplane, accompanied by an FBI agent of course. Once in Australia Bob would face the music and be fined for the stowaway trip, by having to pay for the plane flight, which was 600 pounds. Bob borrowed the money from his friends, Ma and Pa Bendel, older surfers he knew.

   Once he paid them back he was invited back to Hawaii in 1967 to surf the Duke Invitational contest. This trip was paid for by sponsors and he actually did meet the Duke. There was a dinner at the Royal Hawaiian Hotel for the competitors and Bob was there. He was approached by Jeff Hakman and Jock Sutherland, who were both underage for drinking. Jeff asked if Bob would get them both beers, as he did this, he looked over in the corner to see the Duke. He was sitting all alone quietly, once Bob got the boys their beers, he sat down with the Duke and had a chat. They spoke all night, Duke talking about the first time he traveled to Australia and introduced the solid wood surfboards back in 1915. The Duke radiated the same stoke about surfing that he did when he first started surfing and Bob had come full circle. He  realized his dream of surfing in Hawaii and now of getting to share a special moment with the Duke.

Jock Sutherland (1948-present)

 A placeholder for Jock stuff.

Jock Sutherland,

2024

Photographer: Katy Grannan for The New York Times

🥥 William Finnegan, "A Surf Legend's Long Ride," The New Yorker, June 4, 2024 (paywall):

https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2024/06/10/jock-sutherland-profile-surfing

🥥 Dan Malloy interviews Jock Sutherland, 21 July 2025:

https://youtu.be/Ux7GQmHNSSg

Pacific System Homes

Aloha and Welcome to a brief look at Southern California’s and The World's very first surfboard manufacturer: Pacific System Homes, originally named Pacific Ready-Cut Homes. It was not only the first company to produce commercial surfboards, but also the 1930’s most notable in terms of volume and designs.

Image courtedy of Peter T. Young

I am indebted to Peter T. Young, of our Facebook group and an historian in his own right, for initial help with references and inspiration to expand and consolidate what I had previously written years ago. Please check out some of the photos he’s posted:

https://www.facebook.com/share/p/1DEkDQZ9ad/

© 2025 Hoʻokuleana LLC

Contents

Pacific Ready-Cut Homes

Pacific System Homes

Meyers Butte & Surfboard Manufacturing

The Swastika Model

The Waikiki Surf-Boards Model

Pacific Ready-Cut Homes

Pacific Ready-Cut Homes (later Pacific System Homes) was a prominent Los Angeles-based manufacturer of prefabricated kit homes. The company was a major player in the early Twentieth Century kit home industry, especially in the Western United States, alongside companies like Sears, Aladdin, and Gordon-Van Tine.

Kit houses – also known as mill-cut houses, pre-cut houses, ready-cut houses, mail order homes, or catalog homes – were a type of housing that was popular in the United States, Canada, and elsewhere in the first half of the Twentieth Century.  Kit house manufacturers sold houses in many different plans and styles and supplied, at a fixed price, all materials needed for construction of a particular house above the foundation level. The customer arranged their own brick, concrete, and masonry and had that part of the job done locally. (Wikipedia)

Pacific Ready-Cut Homes produced homes from 1908 until around 1940, transitioning in the late 1930s and early 1940s to a new name, Pacific System Homes, Inc.. By 1939, it claimed to be the largest builder of homes in the world. The company sold around 37,000 ready-to-assemble homes based on over 1,800 plans.

Pacific System Homes offered a wide variety of designs through catalogs, including Craftsman-style bungalows, Colonial and English-style cottages, Spanish Eclectic homes, duplexes, hotels, and offices. The "ready-cut" system involved precision-cut lumber pieces, which were numbered and shipped by railcar to the building site with corresponding blueprints and instructions, promising to reduce construction time significantly. The kits included everything from framing lumber to hardware, doors, windows, and paint.

Meyers Butte & Surfboard Manufacturing

The demand for kit homes waned with the onset of the Great Depression, beginning in 1929 and continuing up until the entry of the USA into World War II, in 1941. Also in the ‘30s, the renamed Pacific System Homes struggled to get Federal Housing Authority approval for its plans, limiting its market access.

When the Stock Market crashed in October of 1929, company founder William Butte’s son Meyers was at Stanford and training for the Olympics in wrestling. The economic crash forced the elder Butte (pronounced "buddy") to bring his son back home and help with the family business. (Peter T. Young)

When Meyers came on board, he convinced his father that manufacturing surfboards would be a good way to diversify the business. Getting the green light, Meyers began to change a small part of the production of Pacific Ready-Cut Homes to surfboards.

“Little is known about the first Pacific System Homes boards, produced either in late 1929 or early 1930,” wrote Matt Warshaw in his Encyclopedia of Surfing, “except that they were made from redwood strips held together with lag bolts, and were probably [around] 10 feet long and weighed about 70 pounds. Pine/redwood boards replaced the all-redwood boards in 1932; full-length redwood-edged balsa boards, weighing as little as 45 pounds and costing less than $40, were introduced in the mid-’30s.” (EOS, 2003, pp. 440-441)

To lighten the load, Pacific System started making laminated surfboards after their initial release of solid wood. The big break came when they found a water-proof glue that would hold the slabs of wood together. This helped them combine strong but heavy wood with softer, lighter wood.

The new, lighter boards were constructed from glued and doweled balsa and redwood strips. They were 10 to 12-feet in length, 20-inches wide and a few inches thick, weighing closer to 50 pounds.

During the course of its years manufacturing boards, Pacific System employed a number of well-known surfers, including Pete Peterson and Lorrin “Whitey” Harrison. Production pay for a shaper was $100/month for 4 boards/day. By the mid-1930s, these boards were made of laminated redwood and balsa which could be milled and joined with waterproof glue. The wood was combined so that the lightness of the balsa ran down the middle and the strength of the redwood went to the stringer and rails. Varnish protected the outside.

The Swastika Model

We don't know how the company came up with the idea of naming their first laminated model Swastikas. In the early '30s, the swastika symbol still retained “connotations of health and good fortune” and it was probably chosen in this context.

Earliest archaeological evidence of the swastika symbol dates back to the Indus Valley Civilization of ancient India as well as Classical Antiquity. To this day, the symbol remains widely used in Eastern religions, specifically in Hinduism and Buddhism, and was also used by various Native American tribes. (SHACC)

“The Swastika boards were droolers,” shaper Dale Velzy is quoted as saying. “Everybody had homemades or hand-me-downs, so people really wanted a Pacific System.”

Although most boards continued to be custom made by surfers themselves, for the period leading into World War II, Swastikas became the most widely-used production board.

The rail shape was full with a square upper edge and rounded lower edge. A typical board was 10’ long, 23” wide, and 22” across the tail block. An example of a Pacific Systems Homes Swastika model surfboard is in the Surfer magazine collection, in San Juan Capistrano. It’s solid balsa with redwood stringers and rails. It features a nose piece and tail block for strength and protection. The 10’1” X 22” board is doweled for rigidity and durability and weighs 45 pounds.

As for the swastika design itself, it “was wood-burned or print-marked onto the back of all Pacific System Homes’s Swastika model boards up until 1937. The following year, after the swastika-decorated German military invaded Austria, Pacific System changed the line name to ‘Waikiki Surf-Boards’” (EOS, 2003, p. 441)

The Waikiki Surf-Board Model

“The 1939 Waikiki board came in 10-, 11-, and 12-foot models, as well as a 14-foot paddleboard model, and five- or six-foot ‘kiddie boards’. All were typical of the plank period: blunt-nosed, squared-off at the tail, with near-parallel sides. Pacific System Homes boards were made in production runs of 15 on saw-horses in a designated dust-free area of the company’s 25 acre site.” (EOS, 2003, p. 441)

The Waikiki model was “sold in beach clubs, sporting goods stores, and high-end department stores like Robinson’s and Broadway. Custom-made” boards were also available, shaped by some of the era’s best shapers (EOS, p. 441)

“Dale Velzy… remembers that the Pacific System boards were among the finest on the coast. ‘Most of us had homemade jobs or hand-me-downs, while the rich guys down there at the Bel Air Bay Club, or the Balboa Bay Club, had the Waikiki models. So we’d sneak down to Balboa and steal ‘em.’” (EOS, p. 441)

Pacific System Homes surfboards were promoted with illustrated brochures and magazine advertisements extolling the quality of the craftsmanship:

“All ‘Waikiki’ boards are precision built with modern up-to-date machinery for a life-time of service in the world’s largest home-building plant… The woods are specially selected. The Balsa wood is hand-sorted from finest imported stocks, scientifically kilned, laminated and cabinet finished by expert craftsmen under the personal direction of a professional surf-board aqualist.” (Pacific System Ad)

By the late 1930s,  Pacific Systems surfboards were so popular, they were shipping 60-boards a month to Hawaiʻi. (Ben Marcus)

“The boards had a one-year guarantee on workmanship and materials. In 1938, the Waikiki model became the official board of Honolulu’s renowned Outrigger Canoe Club. Pacific System Homes stopped producing surfboards not long after America’s entry into World War II.” (EOS, p 441)

Company founder/father William Butte had died in 1936, and his sons Meyers and Robert ran the business up until the war, then sold it in 1942 and enlisted in the military. According to Meyers Butte, his father had taken “great pride in the fact that he [Meyers] had pioneered the making of light surfboards.” 

ENDIT

Preston "Pete" Peterson at Pacific System

(Note four boards stacked)

Photo by Dr. Don James

Image courtesy of Peter T. Young