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.
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.
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.”
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
No comments:
Post a Comment