LEGENDARY SURFERS: Dr. Don James (1921-1996)

Saturday, August 29, 2026

Dr. Don James (1921-1996)

Aloha and Welcome to this LEGENDARY SURFERS chapter on Dr. Don James, surfer, photographer and dentist.

Dr. Don James

Photographer unknown

MEDIA

1. Don James’ photo book Surfing San Onofre to Point Dume, 1936-42, with an introduction by Craig Stecyk, was originally published by T. Adler Books in 1996 and reissued by Chronicle Books in 1998; it contains 140 pages and is the principal published collection of his photographs.

2. Surfer's Medical Association put together a lot of Don’s photos at: http://journal.surfersmedicalassociation.org/larger-than-life/

3. “Dr. Don James Presents: Surfing in the 1930s,” 1992.

https://youtu.be/ZnGaTl0S2bg

3. Interview of Don James in the video: “Don James: Inside Surfing’s Forgotten 1930s, episode 1” Part of the Surf Stories series:

https://youtu.be/ds9gOEfa4yQ

4. “Don James: Inside Surfing’s Forgotten 1930s, episode 2” Part of the Surf Stories series:

https://youtu.be/liBkGJGLvJg

CONTENTS

Introduction

1935: Surf Start

1936: Photog Start

1938: Bel-Air Bay Club

1939: Sorrento Beach

Blake, Ball & Wilkes

1941-1944: Dental School & War

Lifeguarding & Pete’s Influence

Dental School to Active Duty

After The War

Significant Publications

Twilight Years

Rememberances

INTRODUCTION

Donald “Don” James was born in 1921 in Santa Monica, California. He began surfing around 1935, and started photographing surfers the following year. He continued photographing surfing for decades, eventually becoming one of the most widely published surf photographers of the 1960s.

James was a surfer and photographer who also became a dentist. He was around early enough to have surfed with some of California’s surfing pioneers and was around long enough to capture surfing in Hawai’i in the 1960s. His real value lies not only with his priceless images of surfing from the late 1930s on into the ‘60’s, but also his recollections of surfers during those times – particularly the pre-World War II years and during the war, in Southern California.

1935: SURF START

James grew up in Santa Monica during the Depression, at a time when the California coast was a very different world from the heavily developed coastline we know today.

When James began his life as a surfer at age 14, he was in high school. There were, in his recollection, very few teenage surfers. “Me, Ed Fearon and Bud Rice were the only three surfers at Santa Monica High at the time – everybody thought we were crazy,” he recalled.

The trio also surfed with neighbors Jack and Joe Quigg. Jack’s younger brother Joe was younger than James and Ed Fearon. Another friend, Jimmy McMahon, later recalled that Joe lived across the street and that Joe, Don and Ed were part of this Santa Monica surfing group that formed.

The younger Joe apparently wasn't immediately accepted into the older boys' circle. They eventually discovered that he could repair and work on surfboards, which got him in.

“In the 1930s, the concept of riding a wave while standing on a plank was completely alien to everyone,” he wrote – excepting surfers.

1936: PHOTOG START

“When I saw Tom Blake’s surfing photos in National Geographic that was it,” Don recalled. “We’d go to the library and pore over Blake’s stuff. My dad had an old Kodak folding camera, and I grabbed it and started taking photos. Our group hung out at the Del Mar Club in Santa Monica, and we worshipped the older guys like Bob Butts, Bob Moore, Pete Peterson, Paul Stater, Chauncy Grandstrom, and Johnny McMahon. We were the only teenagers around. I began shooting pictures to show our parents and teachers what was going on. You know, ‘Hey mom, look, it’s not so bad, it’s actually neat!’”[1]

James used his father's camera to photograph not only his friends and other surfers riding waves, but also tandem surfing, beach parties, camping, girls and girlfriends, musicians, ukulele playing, fishing and diving, beach picnics, the boards themselves, and the general social life surrounding surfing.

Like Doc Ball, James helped create something far more valuable than a collection of surf action photographs. He created an ethnographic record of early California surf culture.

About his friends and starting to use a camera at the beach, Don explained: “There were little groups of people who surfed, but they didn’t necessarily know of one another. Altogether there were probably less than a couple of hundred guys [surfing] in the entire state. The photos were a way to let people know what we were up to. We were involved in this great activity and totally stoked up. I guess there was also a little ego gratification involved. It was a good deal to display them and impress a pretty girl. At our high school, we were the only kids like us; everyone else played football.”[4]

“We were members of a loose-knit group called the Del Mar Surfing Club that didn’t really have meetings. There was a patch and that was about it. [In contrast] The PVSC [Palos Verdes Surfing Club, the top club of the period] was very organized; guys had color-coordinated sweats with their name on them. The Del Mar people used to think that surfing was definitely not a team sport. Maybe we were just jealous of those plush outfits. There were some very hot riders in the PVSC, like Doc [Ball], Cliff Tucker, Tulie Clark, Leroy Grannis, and Hoppy Swarts. All in all we were friendly toward each other and had some great times together.”[5]

Next to the Del Mar Club was “the old Bay Street lifeguard headquarters, where during the off-season guards would illegally bunk to save money. There wasn’t much available at the beach in terms of steady employment back then. Before the Santa Monica municipal guard service was formed in the thirties, surfers worked sporadically at the beach clubs as guards, but that was about it.”[6]

“Life in the Depression was hard,” Don James admitted, “but it encouraged us to appreciate what we had and to live simple lives. My dad scrambled to keep us afloat. It was never too bad for me because there was always the beach to turn to.”[7]

1937-1941: SAN ONOFRE

San Onofre, located midway between San Diego and Los Angeles, became one of the most important places in Don James's early life and many of his most iconic photographs were taken there.

During the late 1930s, San Onofre was still undeveloped and relatively pristine; a place first for fishermen and then surfers. You could camp there, surf for hours and live sometimes for days almost entirely outside the conventional world. Major food staples included abalone, avocados and oranges, all of which could be procured for free.

Beginning in 1933/1934, San O became the major surf spot to surfari; a place of natural beauty, semi-isolated and a great location for an independent surf culture to flourish. Don James was there to capture some of this attitude in his shots of ‘Nofre that were taken in the water, on sand, aboard boats, around campfires, collecting lobster, playing ukuleles, and just hanging around.

One of Don’s early surfing buddies was Fred Beckner. Don recalled some of their times together with older surfers his parents had entrusted them with, at “the camp” at San Onofre:

“Fred Beckner had immense appetites and no predisposition toward suppressing them,” recalled James of the period circa 1937. “This was brought home to me when Fred would coerce my other ‘guardians’ into leaving me alone in the camp [at San Onofre] and driving off to the Rendezvous Ballroom in Balboa in the hope of meeting girls. Camp life and its isolation were apparently too much for Freddy, and he would bellow his verbose mating howl and demand transport to civilization. Each time they abandoned me in such a manner, I would wonder if they were ever coming back. They always did, with eight hours being the average duration of their absence. I’m not certain that this was what my mother had in mind when she entrusted her son into their care.”[2]

Another friend who used to go with him to San Onofre was Chuck Eddy:

“Chuck Eddy loved to cook but had the frightening habit of making whatever crawled, flew, or burrowed its way into the campsite into an entrée. I was unable to attend school for a week because I had fallen off the bus on which I had hitched a ride and broken my leg. To save the nickel fare I snapped my femur; talk about false economy! We camped for eight days at Onofre and never saw another soul. The closest resident was Senator Cotton, who lived a couple of miles up the coast in a mansion at San Mateo Point.”[3]

Elements of Hawaiian culture found their way into the camps at San Onofre, promoted by the radio show “Hawaii Calls,” the presence of ukuleles, and testimony of surfers who had visited “The Islands.” James well remembered Sam Reid’s return from Hawaii in 1938 and telling stories about: enormous Castle waves, riding backside at Cunha's, and the spray and mist filling Waikiki.

James wrote that these stories “charged” young California surfers like him. Culturally, they and the older surfers were oriented toward Hawai’i and hadn’t yet considered they were creating their own independent surf culture.

1938: BEL AIR BAY CLUB

For a time, circa 1938, Don was employed at the posh Bel Air Bay Club,[8] where his skin was often burnt by the sun.

“We never thought about skin protection from the ravages of ultraviolet radiation,” James wrote. “A severe sunburn was considered a sign of good health.”[9]

Around 1938, “The surf fashion craze of the extremely wide bell bottom pant” came into vogue. “We used to buy them in Santa Monica at Brauns and then have a tailor let them out. They got progressively wider and wider, and eventually they caught on with the pachucos in the barrio. Once that happened, they were out at the beach.”[10]

Jimmy McMahon recalled that Joe Quigg and Ed Fearon also got work at the Bel Air Bay Club, along with Bud Rice, Jack Quigg, Dick Reed, Roger Bohning, Ralph Kiewit and a few others of the Santa Monica/Bel Air Bay Club surfing group.

Also in 1938, Don got his first automobile, a 1925 Hudson that he bought from his uncle for $25. He subsequently nailed 2x4 lumber to the roof to create board racks. No longer was James restricted to riding surf close to home. He and his friends could load the boards and head south.

In 1938, Pete Peterson shaped Don a board and Don took a very famous picture of Pete shaping it. His caption to the picture recalls that he was standing there urging Peterson to hurry because the surf was coming up and he wanted enough time to get some coats of varnish on the board.

James remembered Peterson as stylish: “Pete had this funny, relaxed style, he was Mister Cool on a board.”

He also noted that Peterson had tough feet and didn't use wax. He described Peterson as so agile and secure on his board that he simply didn't think he needed it.

Later commenting on his photo of Pete working on the board with planer, Don wrote: “This is Pete shaping my first Peterson board in his garage on 17th Street. To earn this shape job, I labored for Peterson for a full year as his lawn boy, babysitter, and aide-de-camp.”[11]

1939: SORRENTO BEACH

Around 1939, Don did a fair amount of hanging out at Sorrento Beach. In a caption to a 1939 photo of a bunch of his friends leaning against a wall there, James wrote: “Sorrento was located in Santa Monica at the base of the California Incline road. A couple of decades later I would live just up the beach next door to fellow surfer Peter Lawford. Our idyllic life would be destroyed whenever Peter’s brother-in-law, [U.S. President] John F. Kennedy, would come to visit. JFK delighted in going for a swim in the surf, ditching his secret service guards in the process, and then resting against this very same wall while watching the melee as they frantically searched for him.”[12]

BLAKE, BALL & WILKES

“I got interested in becoming a dentist because of Dr. Barney Wilkes and Dr. John Heath Ball,” Don wrote.

“They were two outstanding men who surfed a lot and did something to help others.”[19]

James was also influenced by Tom Blake, who demonstrated that photography could be used to document surfing from a surfer's perspective. Doc Ball had pushed the idea further, using surf photography to not only capture wave riding, but also the lifestyle that went along with it.

Doc Ball's photographic influence was particularly significant. He had taken Tom Blake’s waterproof camera design, improved it a bit, and pioneered photographing surfing from the water. A National Park Service historical survey of San Onofre notes that Ball's techniques influenced later photographers including Don James and Leroy Grannis.

Like Doc, James learned to make waterproof housings for his cameras to keep them dry. He built his first one in 1938, taking Doc’s design as a starting point. It was built out of mahogany and allowed him to take photographs in the line-up and impact zones.

1941-1944: DENTAL SCHOOL & WAR

On December 7, 1941, at Topanga Point, Don took a shot of Ed Fearon, Jack Quigg and him. “It was a balmy Sunday and the news about the Japanese attack upon Pearl Harbor was coming in over the radio. We were paying sixty dollars a month for rent, which was split three ways, and life was good. Suddenly, everything had changed. We all knew we were going off to war.”[13]

The changes were documented by Doc, James and a couple of others shooting film. An example was a photograph Doc Ball took that “shows a Palos Verdes Surfing Club member in a drunken stupor being helped to his feet and taken to a waiting car. The reason for such overindulgent merriment was that the young healthy surfer, in the prime of life, was to enter the armed forces the next day. With WWII raging, everyone knew that his chances of ever surfing or seeing his friends again were uncertain.”[14]

During the war, Don had a girlfriend at USC. “On our last date we went to Laguna for the day. Unfortunately, my car broke down, and it took until nightfall to get it going. As we started back, she said that her parents would be pretty upset about her coming home later than they expected. I knew I really was in trouble when the car’s headlights suddenly went out. Wartime blackout conditions were in effect, and it was so dark that there was absolutely no way to drive any further. We were stuck out there alone on the Old Coast Road, and there wasn’t a soul or a telephone around. I let her stay in the car, and I slept outside on the ground. When we finally got to her house the next morning, it was very dramatic. Her parents had called the police and demanded that I be arrested. I never saw her again.”[15]

By 1942, Don “was an apprentice seaman in dental school… to impress the girls [we were currently going out with], [my friend Frank] Donahue decided to organize a tour of the submarine he was serving on. At first it didn’t seem like such a great idea, but as I recall by the third pitcher of martinis, it was sheer genius. Frank procured a laundry bag full of uniforms somehow, and we all snuck on the base wearing them. The actual tour of the sub was uneventful, but since Donahue had disguised me in an officer’s uniform, everywhere we went sailors saluted me. When Frank started the engines, all hell broke loose and the sub’s security detachment arrived with their weapons drawn. Somehow they bought my Lieutenant JG-bit and then pretended not to notice that our ordinary seamen weren’t really men at all. Donahue’s bravado was unparalleled. In succeeding years, Frank would roll through one amazing adventure after another. Probably his greatest legitimate escapade was capturing and ‘fresh-water training’ live sharks for Howard Hughes’s RKO movie studio. Donahue would go out and catch the sharks at dawn, come ashore and load them into a trailer, and then haul them up to Hollywood in time for the day’s shoot.”[16]

“Frank Donahue always had something going. During college, Frank realized that the movie studios needed young men to populate the spate of war films they were producing.”[17]

Don joined in, too. His work in Hollywood included: doubling for Cary Grant in Mister Lucky and roles in Back to Bataan [1945] and The Moon is Blue. There were others, but his work in the movie industry was not his focus. “I don’t remember the names of most of those films, they were just a way to earn money. They gave you $35 to start, and with salary adjustments for stunt work, you could pocket a hundred bucks a day.”[18]

LIFEGUARDING & PETE’S INFLUENCE

Thanks to Pete Peterson, “I was exposed to the lifeguards on the Santa Monica force, and the way they conducted themselves always impressed me. They were the first organized professional group of guards around, and they worked hard to establish a respect for surfing.”[19]

“It was Pete who gave me my first job,” emphasized James, “and he later took Cap Watkins aside and said, ‘Look, the kid needs to be a doctor and we’ve got to help him.’ That got me on as a Santa Monica guard. I’d attend school all day and work for the city all night on the pier. I had a scholarship from the Navy, so my grades had to be good. One failure and you were out of the program immediately. Being a lifeguard enabled me to get through dental school, so I owe it all to Peterson and Watkins. If the university or the government had ever found out I was working another job, they would have washed me out straight away.”[20]

Pete helped Don in other ways, too:

“I learned about the Hawaiian concepts of aloha and doing for others first from people like Johnny McMahon, Tony Guerrero, Duke Kahanamoku, Pua Kealoha, Hackshaw Paia, and, of course, Lorrin Harrison and Pete Peterson.”[19]

DENTAL SCHOOL TO ACTIVE DUTY

“The times had a desperate air,” wrote Don about the war, stateside. “Anything went in a nervous laissez-faire sort of way.”[22]

By 1943, he was in dental school, “tooling around in Frank Donahue’s old ‘40 Chevy convertible. Girls were everywhere during the war years, and we all felt a little guilty having so much fun with the fighting going on.”

“During World War II, San Onofre was taken over by the military and declared off-limits to civilians. We began to frequent the Laguna area since the diving was great. I graduated from dental school [in 1944] … and went into the navy.”[23]

“ I remember swimming at Okinawa in an area I thought was secured. I knew that we were still mopping up elsewhere on the island, but the ocean looked so inviting that I just had to jump in. I was offshore diving on a sunken Japanese ship when the water started splashing all around me. The air buzzed and I realized that a sniper was zeroing in on me. I hid behind a rock and waited several hours for nightfall so I could skulk back in. During those long hours I recalled the guilt we all shared that day in Laguna. I would have gladly traded places with that worried aspiring young dentist back at Oak Street. I no longer felt guilty; right then I felt stupid and lucky.”[21]

AFTER THE WAR

After the war, Don James established himself professionally as a dentist and continued surfing and taking pictures; his photography becoming increasingly sophisticated and popular during the 1950s on into the ‘60s.

He photographed both in Southern California and Hawaii. After surfing’s big popularity surge following the Gidget movies, his images began appearing in magazines and commercial advertising, including: magazine covers, posters, advertisements, billboards, books, calendars and other mass-media presentations of surfing.

The New Yorker later described his lush color photographs of Hawaiian waves as having been reproduced on an enormous scale, including in Hamm's beer advertising.

A 1965 publication described James as generally recognized as one of the world's great surf photographers, noting that his long experience as a surfer informed the techniques he used to obtain his photographs.

Along with his photography, James continued surfing throughout his successful dental career. His patients included some extraordinarily famous people like Errol Flynn, Clark Gable, Christopher Isherwood and Aldous Huxley.

James recalled receiving telephone reports from Hawaii about conditions at places such as Waimea. When the surf became exceptional, he would rearrange noncritical appointments and get on an airplane. By dawn of the next day, the dentist could be in the lineup or, at very least, shooting film.

His Hawaii photographs featured big surf and famous surfers, and helped introduce Mainland audiences to the scale and power of Hawaiian surfing.

When surf magazines began to make the scene in the beginning 1960s, James found perhaps his photography’s greatest exposure to surfers specifically. In the process, he took shots of surfing greats like Fred Hemmings, Jose Angel, Buzzy Trent, Eddie Aikau, Miki Dora, Rusty Miller, Chip Post and many others.

SIGNIFICANT PUBLICATIONS

Hawaiian Surfriding

Don James worked with Tom Blake on Blake’s last book: Hawaiian Surfriding: The Ancient and Royal Pastime, published in 1961.

This was an important collaboration between two generations of surf photography. Blake represented the pioneering generation of the 1920s and 1930s. James represented the generation that had inherited Blake's photographic ideas and developed them into the modern era.

Surfing San Onofre to Point Dume, 1936–1942

This collection of photographs, matched with captions and his own recollections, form the body of Don’s most culturally insightful and significant photography.

The book was originally published by Tom Adler Books in 1996, following the preparation of the material during James's final years. The work was subsequently issued by Chronicle Books in 1998. It contains approximately 140 pages of photographs, captions, and recollections.

Prewar Surfing Photographs

This second major collection of James's work preserves more of his early material. It was published after James had passed on, by Tom Adler Books in 2004, with an Introduction by Matt Warshaw.

TWILIGHT YEARS

During his later years, James lived in the Santa Barbara/Montecito area with his wife, Laura Rowan Peake James. He still surfed, paddling a vintage 9-foot-6-inch Del Cannon longboard, and also bodyboarded. He continued to travel and shooting photographs.

James's work acquired a new importance during the longboard revival of the early 1990s, which also coincided with increased interest in surfing history. Consequently, Don James was rediscovered by a generation that hadn't been alive when many of his most historical photographs were taken.

A 1992 video project, Dr. Don James Presents: Surfing in the 1930s, brought previously little-seen prewar color footage and James's oral history to a new surfing audience.

Looking back on his life, Don acknowledged that there had been a period when he wanted desperately to prove himself with his photography.

“There was a time when I had a violent need to prove something, and to be the best in the world at it.”

With age, that changed. He came to appreciate surfing simply for the pleasure of being in the ocean.

He continued:

“I know I can keep it up in some form or another as long as I can walk or crawl down to the water.”

Dr. Don James passed on, on December 24, 1996.

REMEMBERANCES

One of the most revealing memories of Don came from David Ohman, who knew James as his dentist. Ohman remembered seeing Don's surfing photographs decorating the dental office and Don telling stories about the old days, eventually encouraging him to take up surfing himself.

Ohman described him as:

“one of the kindest gentlemen on the planet”

and

“a true diplomat for the sport of surfing.”

“I’ve never really done anything extraordinary,” Don once modestly wrote, “maybe I happened to be where things occurred a few times, maybe I happened to do a couple of things first.”[24]

“Don had little desire to make claims of preeminence in the photographic field,” artist, writer and surf historian Craig R. Stecyk emphasized, “but for the record, among the photographic innovations that he either pioneered or greatly expanded the use of, for documenting the sport of surfing, are these: extreme telephoto lenses, large and micro-mini formats, camera boards, extreme wide angles, water housings, tubal perspectives, gyroscopic mounts, single-lens reflex systems, motor-drive sequences, helicopter perspectives, boat perspectives, and telephoto water shots.”[25]

“For many of his younger patients,” continued Stecyk, “and for two generations of surfing magazine readers, Don James was an example that terminal adolescence wasn’t a requirement for being a true, hardcore surfer. Perhaps that was his most significant achievement.”[26]

ENDIT

FOOTNOTES

[14] Lynch, Gary, “Doc Ball, Legendary Lensman,” April 10, 1990.

Additional Resources

Archive-e https://archiv-e.com/collections/don-james

https://www.surfresearch.com.au/index.html

LEGENDARY SURFERS

Saturday, August 29, 2026

Dr. Don James (1921-1996)

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