Whitey Harrison (1913-1993)

Aloha And Welcome to this LEGENDARY SURFERS chapter on Lorrin “Whitey” Harrison.

Whitey surfing Killer Dana, late 1930's

Photographer unknown, but possibly Doc Ball

Contents

WHITEY'S BEGINNINGS 1

LAGUNA BEACH, EARLY 1920S 1

CORONA DEL MAR, 1925-35 2

SAN ONOFRE, 1933-39 3

STOWAWAYS TO WAIKIKI, 1930S 4

NORTH SHORE "RE-DISCOVERED"\L 1 6

DANA POINT, 1930S 7

DANA POINT & SAN JUAN CAPISTRANO, 1940S 7

SHOWING THE WAY, 1950S AND AFTER 8

EULOGY TO A WATERMAN 9

On September 8th 1993, one of the first and best of the early California surfers, Lorrin "Whitey" Harrison, died of a heart attack while driving back from the beach with his wife Cecilia near their second home on the Big Island of Hawai`i.

"Lorrin was the stuff life was made of," long-time friend and fellow surfer Mickey Muñoz offered.  "Lorrin was around here long enough to remember Steelhead salmon spawning up San Juan Creek, and through all of the pollution in general, Lorrin was always true to himself.  He wore his coconut hat and would get up in the morning with a big smile on his face and kind of face all of these issues with that smile.  He was always enthusiastic and positive... hey we lost a great light and energy."

Whitey's Beginnings

Born in Garden Grove, California, in 1913, Whitey became not only a great surfer, but -- like Pete Peterson -- an accomplished waterman in many of the ocean disciplines including sailing, fishing, diving and paddling.  His personal history in surfing reflects much of the development of the sport and lifestyle in both California and Hawai`i from the 1920s on into the 1950s.

"Where we lived, west of town," began Whitey in an interview for The Surfer's Journal just before his death, "there wasn't much in those days.  Everybody lived there because things would grow.  Garden Grove, at the time, was just like a garden.  After that, my family moved to Santa Ana Canyon where my dad built a big house up on a hill which is still there.  Our family had a place in Laguna ever since I was one year old, right at Sleepy Hollow.  My mom and dad would take us down there on a horse and wagon back when you had to go through Aliso Canyon to get to Laguna.  It took days for us to get there.  They'd stop to visit friends along the way.  We had chickens at our home, there at Sleepy Hollow, and we kept a cow in a field across the wagon road from us.  Our house was right where the Vacation Village is now."

Laguna Beach, early 1920s

"We used to body surf the entire stretch of beach from Sleepy Hollow rocks to Main Beach," Whitey continued.  "In the fifth grade, I made a plank, about 4-5' long and 18" wide to ride with.  We were body surfing all the time back then.  I'd never seen anybody ride standing until about 1920 when my dad took us to Redondo Beach in the car.  We parked up on a hill and ate lunch there and I looked down and saw these guys riding surfboards."

Mentioning the influence of the Father of Southern California Surfing George Freeth, Whitey noted of Redondo:  "That was where Freeth had started surfing.  My dad was thinking of buying a lot there, but we had the place in Laguna, and we were happy with it there."

Whitey made the transition from body surfing to stand-up surfing by 1925.  "My brothers Vern and Winfred, and my sister Ethel and I were like a gang at Sleepy Hollow.  Every year we'd build a raft and swim it out to the kelp in front of our house.  We floated an old wood burning stove out there, sunk it, filled it with rocks and anchored the raft to it with cable.  We'd go fishin' out there.  I can remember my mom getting so mad at me for getting my sister to swim out there.  And I said, 'Well, Jesus, if she can swim to her surfboard she can swim out there.'  By then we all had these redwood boards about 4' long that we'd ride.  We all grew up riding shore crashers that would just annihilate us on those boards.  In school I made a hollow one.  It was like a sled with runners curving up in front with 1/4" planks nailed crossways, it was about 18" wide.  I covered it with canvas tacked on with copper tacks and painted it.  We'd ride it till we wore the canvas off, then we'd put new on."

Tom Blake was a few years shy of inventing the wooden hollow board (1928).  

"The typical board of that time," wrote Nat Young in his History of Surfing, "...was still a solid redwood from six to nine feet long, flat-bottomed, with the edges just barely turned up on the bottom side.  Surfers would buy a redwood plank at the local lumber yard, take it home, chop it into rough shape with an axe [adze], and then whittle it down with a plane and knife.  The finished board was invariably flat, heavy, and about 3 1/2 inches thick."

Corona del Mar, 1925-35

"When I was twelve," Whitey recalled, "I started walking to Corona del Mar from Laguna Beach to go surfing.  There was a crew of stand-up surfers who would ride Corona back then.  Carroll Bertolet, Jack Pyle, Wally Burton, Keller Watson, Bud Higgins.  Guys from Huntington Beach and all over would come to Corona del Mar because it could be just a 3-foot surf, but it would pile up real high next to that jetty.  If a guy couldn't catch the wave, we'd throw him a rope and pull him on his redwood while running along the jetty.  We'd pull 'em right into the wave.  We surfed there from 1927 till 1935.  That's when they dredged the channel out to 60' deep.  They had cables going across the break out to the dredge.  We'd be riding and we'd have to jump the cable or lay down on our back to go under it.  We thought it was great fun to go out there with the construction going on, surfing in all that.  We used to walk there from Laguna because there was no way to drive at the time.  I didn't have a board then, but there was a bathhouse at Corona del Mar and Duke [Kahanamoku] had made a board out of white pine and left it there.  There were a lot of redwoods there, too.  Later on, I'd leave boards at one of the Thomas brothers' houses up on the bluff.  And there was the Chinese house at China Cove, I sometimes kept my board there too.  It took us a couple of hours to walk the twelve miles from Laguna Beach to Corona del Mar, but all the way was pretty nice."  It was the era of Prohibition on alcohol.  Whitey noted that "There was nothing from Abalone Hill all that way, except rum runners' leftover crates, boxes and bottles strewn around the beach."

San Onofre, 1933-39

Whitey was part of the early crew at San Onofre, where Southern California surf culture's roots are most firmly embedded.  "I was surfing [at Corona del Mar]... with Willy Grigsby, Bob Sides and Bill Hollingsworth... 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.'"

Sides declared of Corona del Mar, in 1933, that:  "They're wrecking this place."

"So," Whitey said of their 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.  In one day we surfed all the different breaks.  The entrance to the beach was just across from the old San Onofre Train Station.  You'd drive across the tracks and down the dirt road.  At that time Santa Margarita Ranch owned the beach there along with another ranch that owned the land north of the point.  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 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."

By 1939, the San Onofre crew included – along with others less well known –  Tule Clark, Jim Bixier, Don Oakey, Dorian Paskowitz, Lloyd Baker, Guard Chapin, Vincent Lihnberg, E.J. Oshier and, of course, Pete Peterson.

The automobile had helped increase surfers' ability to go on surf safaris.  At places like Long Beach, Palos Verdes as well as San Onofre, surfers established the Southern California surf culture.  Following their trips to the Hawaiian Islands, guys like Whitey and Pete were major influences in helping foster a love of Polynesian culture.  Both men were instrumental in helping transplant elements of Polynesia and Hawai`i onto the beaches of North America's Southern California.

"The Hawaiian beach boys taught us to love their music and instruments as well as their waves," explained Whitey.  In Hawai`i, it had been "so hot during summer nights that we'd sit out in front of the Waikiki Tavern and make music till we fell asleep."

The scene at San Onofre was influenced in this way and colorful in its own right.  As Nat Young put it, "They were an incredibly healthy lot, spending long days down at the beach, engaging in friendly competition, encouraging their girls to surf, and partying long into the night.  They successfully combined normal working-class lives with the excitement of being the first group of [California] surfers."

Beginning around 1935, San Onofre became the major "meeting place for surfers up and down the California coast -- from Tijuana Sloughs [south San Diego] to Steamers Lane in Santa Cruz," wrote Dorian Paskowitz, one who was there.  "Friday and Saturday nights were always 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."

Stowaways to Waikiki, 1930s

Whitey Harrison "was one of the first California surfers to come to Hawaii and join the Hawaiians in the big surf," read a description of Whitey, as one of the world's surfing greats, in 1960.  "Every year from 1932 on I went to Hawaii," Whitey declared.  "In 1932 I was over there for six months.  I'd go in the winter."

"My mother was a school teacher and my brothers and sister were going to school.  I was eighteen so she said I either had to get a job or go to school.  So I went over and signed up for Fullerton Junior College.  But every time I'd show up at the beach, Willy Grigsby would be there just back from Hawaii and he'd tell me, 'God, Whitey, you've gotta go over there, you won't believe it.  The warmest water, you can stay in all day.  It's paradise!'  So I told my folks, 'I'll get a job.'"

"I started hitch hiking every day all the way to San Pedro to catch a ship.  To get there, we'd hop bumpers on the back of cars with the spare tire and big rear bumper.  The cops would be blowin' whistles runnin' after us.  There was a guy that went the first time with me called Doakes.  He was gonna go to Hawaii if I'd go.  He was studying to be a doctor, but he didn't show up again."

Charles Butler was better known amongst surfers as "Doaks."  Later on in the decade, he was photographed at Long Beach's Flood Control and mentioned in Doc Ball's California Surfriders, 1946.  He was studying to become a medical doctor when he enlisted in the Navy, during World War II.  Doaks went down with the Edsal when it was sunk by the Japanese in the early stages of the war in the Pacific.

"Different guys would back out," Whitey went on, "but I kept going up there trying to get a job.  There were lines of able-bodied seamen looking for work, so they weren't going to hire any kid out of high school.  I went up there for two months, hitch-hiking back and forth and never getting out.  I got so tired of it, I finally climbed on the U.S.S. Monterey... Duke was on there, but he didn't know me then.  They had a dance, then the boat took off that evening and I just stayed on.  I went out and slept in a steamer chair.  About three or four in the morning this guy came by and said, 'Hey, where's your room?'  I said, 'I couldn't find it, I made a mistake...'  So he went off looking for my name and I took off and ran into some other officer.  This is late at night the first night out, so they took me to the Captain and logged me in as a stowaway.  They caught three more of us.  Everyone was either riding freights or stowing away, that was the only way to get anywhere [during The Depression].  So they kept us in the brig, but we got to eat the same as the crew.  Then about five miles off Diamond Head, they had us climb down a Jacob's ladder to a tug and we laid out there from 4 a.m. to 6:00 that night.  Four stowaways and none of us knew each other.  I could see the Moana Hotel onshore... it looked like paradise, and I was ready to swim in until we saw some giant sharks.  That night, they put us on a freighter, the Manakai, and we ended up in San Francisco."

"All that time my mom was thinking I must have gotten a job cause I didn't show up.  Anyway, the next morning we had to appear before a judge.  We walked in there chained together and the judge says, 'You guys are from L.A., we don't like your type up here.  I give you twenty-four hours to get out of town or we'll really get you,' and they turned us loose.'"  Lorrin turned right around and did the stowaway thing once more:

"This guy from Belgium... said the lifeboats were the spot.  The lifeboats hung one above the other, out over the side.  So I hid out for two-and-a-half days inside one of them.  It was coal black in there.  I couldn't see anything.  When I finally climbed out I was punchy from no food or water... So they hauled me up and stuck me in the isolation ward.  All they gave you on that ship was bread and water and I was pretty hungry.  They were supposed to have emergency provisions on the lifeboats, but there weren't any there.  The night before we got to Honolulu, they found the Belgian and they threatened to transfer us by bosum chair to a ship headed back to San Francisco, but the sea was too rough.  So we sailed into the dock at the Aloha Tower in Honolulu with the Royal Hawaiian Band playing and streamers flying off the boat.  We were the first people off the boat, in handcuffs, and they turned us over.  But the cops were great.  I ate six breakfasts, ham and eggs, everything!  They made us stay at the station till the boat left.  When I walked out I was able to find a job for four dollars a day pressing clothes.  I ended up with a room next door to Pua Kealoha and John Oliver, the beach boys, for $7.50 a month.  It had one bed and a wash basin.  I had heard about Pete Peterson and seen him at San Onofre.  He and Don DeGrotti came over after I did and were staying right on the beach for $25 a month.  But they were broke and nobody sent them any money, so he and Don moved in with me.  It ended up they got the bed most of the time.  We hitched around the island together and saw Haleiwa when it was just huge.  I stayed for six months, then stowed away home with Pete.  I went over and back every year from then on through 1935, and of course, many times after that."  Nat Young remarked, "Stowing away became a surfing tradition that continued right into the 'sixties."

Waikiki was the heart of surfing at the time Whitey teamed up with Pete Peterson.  They both lived together for a while and became close friends.  They were two of a very small group of early haole  surfers.  "The first hard-core surf guys to hit Waikiki that I knew of consisted of Pete Peterson, Lorrin Harrison and Tom Blake who went there before the war," wrote Walter Hoffman, another early Californian who went to live and surf in Hawai`i, in a second wave of surf invaders in the 1940s.

While in Waikiki, Whitey worked as a beach boy.  In addition to friends like Pete Peterson, Tom Blake, Wally Froiseth and John Kelly, Whitey also hung with the Father of Surfing, Duke Kahanamoku.

Hot Curl surfboards came on the scene in 1937, developed by the likes of John Kelly, Wally Froiseth and Fran Heath.  Wally told me he remembers both Whitey and Pete were interested in the new design:

"A lot of guys -- like Whitey Harrison -- when they came down and saw what our boards could do at Castle -- him and Pete Peterson cut their tails down -- right there on goddamn Waikiki Beach!  They cut their tails down.  Of course, when they went back to the Coast, they took their boards with 'em."

North Shore "Re-discovered"

Even though Whitey only visited the Islands, he still must be considered part of the group of surfers that expanded surfing's Hawaiian boundaries out beyond Waikiki.  The reason lay much deeper than the fact that he joined the Hot Curl surfers in the biggest waves O`ahu's South Shore had to offer.  For, Whitey Harrison and another Mainlander -- Gene "Tarzan" Smith -- were the guys that "rediscovered" the North Shore in 1938, coincidentally on Whitey's first honeymoon.

Paumalu -- now known as Sunset -- is a spot noted for excellent surf even as far back as the ancient Hawaiian legends.  It is likely that the North Shore of O`ahu has always been ridden at one time or another -- at least since the first Polynesian settlers made their home on the Hawaiian Chain.  Unnamed surfers must have been surfing the area, if only on and off, all the way through.  We know that guys like Andrew Anderson were living at Mokule`ia and surfing there in the 1920s and '30s.  But, in relationship to the surfing movement of the Twentieth Century, it wasn't until Whitey and Tarzan made the call that the North Shore was put on the surfing map.

"This is the way it happened with us," Wally told me.  "Whitey Harrison -- he and Gene Smith went out to Haleiwa one day.  This was, like, around '37 or '38, whatever it was.  They went out to Haleiwa.  It was a big day.  And they both almost drowned.

"So, Gene Smith was telling us about this.  'Oh, Christ!  You ought to see these waves!'

"Me and my gang [the Hot Curl riders], we hear that -- 'Hey, let's go!'  So, the next weekend we go out there, you know, but Haleiwa wasn't that good, but Sunset Beach was good, so we just went Sunset.

"At that time, there wasn't a name or anything.  We just saw a good surf and went out.  It was just when we started to have our Hot Curl boards."

"Who started going out to the North Shore?" I prodded.

"Well, like I say, Whitey Harrison, Gene Smith... Whitey came over to the islands two or three times.  He came in the early '30s.  We were surfing Castle -- '31, '32, somethin' around there.  I mean he was...

"My brother and I, Dougie Forbes... Fran, of course, Kelly -- there were really only a couple of guys who went North Shore after Whitey and Gene.  It was just too much for the other guys..."

Dana Point, 1930s

"When I was in Hawaii," retold Whitey, "I was paddling canoes all the time... When I came back from Hawai`i with my first wife, we lived in Dana Point.  I started fishing commercial, and then I got a motorcycle and rode it all the way to Los Angeles to work at Pacific Redi-cut Systems Homes for a summer."  Pacific Redi-cut Homes was the first company to produce commercial surfboards.  

"Tule Clark and Carroll 'Laholio' Bertolet worked there too.  Quite a few surfers worked there, this was about 1931.  We were shipping sixty boards a month to Hawaii... There was this guy there named 'Dutch' that was notching these swastika symbols in some of the boards, and he couldn't speak a word of English.  They called these 'swastika boards.'  He'd mix glue and we'd glue up the blanks.  Then we'd run them through a shaper to get a rough shape then finish them with hard planes and sandpaper.  It drove me crazy, but it was work.  They sold a balsa redwood plank for about $25.

"They also made and sold paddleboards.  They had me racing them against all the other boards up and down the coast.  They would cut all the balsa scrap into blocks, glue them together and cut them into a plan shape.  Then we'd cover the top and bottom with 1/8" mahogany sheets and then laminate redwood strips along the sides which ended with redwood nose and tail blocks.  They worked pretty good, and they were light!"

Whitey began shaping boards at the rate of four boards a day for one hundred dollars a month.  The boards were constructed of laminated redwood and balsa which could be milled and joined with a newly developed waterproof glue.  These boards used the lightness of balsa down the middle and the strength of redwood around the rails.  Varnish protected the outside.  "The rail shape was full with a square upper edge and rounded lower edge.  The typical board was 10' long, 23" wide, and 22" across the tail block, and was known as the Swastika Model because of the distinctive logo the company used."  It was later discovered that Dutch was a Nazi.  After 1939, when war broke out in Europe, the swastika insignia was discontinued on Pacific Redi-cut Systems Homes boards.

Most of Whitey's shaping, however, was done in his own shop.  "... in 1936.  I'd just come back from Hawai`i and I was shaping boards for different guys like Joe Quigg and Matt Kivlin, guys that surfed Malibu and all over.  They'd drag a blank down to Dana Point and have me shape it.  I had a garage with balsa shavings a foot thick all over the floor.  Tom Blake and everybody would come down and sleep there... You know, we had big waves at Dana Point [before the harbor was built].  I even made a storage rack down on the beach and kept all the boards down there.  There was no way anybody was gonna take one of those boards by carrying it outta there!  It might float away before anybody was gonna carry it out.  Peanuts Larson would come by the shop and take the leftover balsa and make model planes."

Dana Point & San Juan Capistrano, 1940s

After World War II, board experimentation shifted from Waikiki to Southern California.  Material-wise, besides the addition of balsa, the innovation of the skeg and the introduction of new materials like fiberglass helped propel development.  As far as shaping was concerned, the scoop nose and use of rocker had long term effects on improving board design.

In 1946, at age 33, Whitey married his second wife, Cecilia Yorba, from one of California's pioneering Spanish families.  They raised their family in a historic 200-year-old adobe in San Juan Capistrano.

"When I met Cecilia, she was walking down the beach at Doheny with her cousin, and I came ridin' in on this board right to where she was standing.  That had to be about 1945.  She said, 'That looks like fun.'  I said, 'Yeah, you've gotta try it.'  So I spent a week talkin' her into going surfing with me.  She said, 'Well, I don't know, they've had such awful drownings in my family, nobody wanted to go near the ocean.'  So I said, 'I've worked lifeguard for five years, I'm not gonna let you drown.'  A fella named Voss Harrington was surfing with me at the time I was going with her.  We were in the abalone business together.  Voss, Fritz and Burrhead worked abalone with me all up and down the coast of California... I talked her into coming over and helping trim abalone at the cove.  Then I got her to go surfin' with me at Doheny.  Voss had this 11' board.  I caught a wave with Cecilia and he was on the shoulder and jumped off when he saw us coming tandem.  I was standing up, and his board flipped right over, hit on top of her head and shoved her teeth through her lower lip.  So that's how we started.  Since then she got so she could ride real good."

As late as 1948, most all surfers still knew or knew of each other and surfboards were still pretty much of the redwood & balsa variety.  "When I first started surfing," 1950s-60s big wave rider Greg Noll said, "Bob Simmons was just beginning to experiment with other materials.  You'd hear a few stories about new, revolutionary Simmons boards, but up to that time there was Matt Kivlin and Joe Quigg riding redwoods at Malibu.  Doc Ball and the guys at the Palos Verdes Surfboard Club.  Velzy, Leroy Grannis, Ted Kerwin, the Edgar brothers at Hermosa and Manhattan.  Lorrin Harrison, Burrhead and the guys at San Onofre.  A few guys down in La Jolla.  The entire surfing population consisted of maybe a couple hundred guys, most of them riding redwood boards, paddleboards and balsa/redwoods."

"It's amazing how long it took to get to the point where you could stand up on those redwood boards and just ride a little soup," testified Dale Velzy who shaped many of them.

Showing The Way, 1950s and After

Lorrin's barn in San Juan Capistrano -- built around 1890 -- became an important Southern California research and development center for experimentation with various water craft.  These included diving gear, paddle boards and outriggers as well as surfboards.

"When I came here [to Capistrano beach] we kept horses in [the barn] for the kids.  Later I converted it into a surfboard shop where Fly and I built two hundred and sixty rental boards for Steamboat over in Waikiki.  I've probably built twenty canoes here altogether.  I built five that were 44'-11'' long, right here in the barn."

Polyurethane foam surfboards had their beginnings here and in the workshop of Dave Sweet and Dave Rochlen.

"The first person to try foam in a surfboard was Bob Simmons in 1950, using polystyrene foam," wrote Greg Noll.  "In 1955, Lorrin Harrison in Capistrano Beach became the first to try polyurethane foam, and in [May] 1956 Dave Sweet in Santa Monica made the first sustained effort to develop polyurethane foam boards."

In June 1958, Hobie Alter came out with the first commercially successful polyurethane foam board design.  Then, in 1961, Gordon "Grubby" Clark formed Clark Foam, which became the largest foam-blank manufacturer in the world.  "Foam didn't change surfboard design all that much," pointed out Greg Noll, "but it did stabilize and streamline the boards.  The same type of board could be made over and over again without worrying about different weights of wood, bad grain, etc."

Grubby Clark said Whitey, as an innovator, inspired many surfers, including himself.  "After all the places he'd been and waves he'd surfed, he could still get pumped about a 2-foot day at Doheny.  That's the most remarkable thing about Whitey -- how he retained his skill and enthusiasm for surfing throughout his long life."

With the exception of orange and avocado ranching, Whitey's work history was almost all related to the ocean.  He was instrumental in introducing outrigger canoe racing to the Mainland; put in time as a lifeguard; surfboard builder and innovator and; lobster and abalone harvester based out of Dana Point Harbor.  "Whitey was one of the best divers on the coast," said noted diver David Tompkins.  "He was all over the place, living up at Cojo for weeks at a time, diving out in the Channel Islands.  He showed us the way."

Eulogy to a Waterman

Mickey Muñoz, from a later generation of surfers, but also fortunate to have known Whitey well, eulogized:

"Lorrin was, in my way of looking at it, one of my guiding lights.  If I was ever feeling down about stuff, just being around him would be uplifting and I'd just go to myself, 'Jesus, if this guy lived in days that I would envy and is still as positive and as happy as he appears to be, then that's the way I wanna be and things can't be all that bad.'"

Muñoz told some stories of events that occurred toward the end of Whitey's life that were typical of Lorrin's attitude:

"By eminent domain they [the state] condemned or took a right of way through their property to put a road in, basically a bridge going over San Juan Creek connecting two main roads in Capo Beach and Dana Point.  When your lifestyle is being split, if you will, by a road or violated by a road, you'd probably be pretty bummed out.  Lorrin, on the other hand, came running over to my house with saliva coming out of his mouth, he was so excited that he could hardly talk and he goes, 'Yeah, part of the deal he says is that we got to cut down that big sycamore tree.'  He had a huge sycamore tree that was hundreds of years old and he says, 'Yeah, that's gotta go, but I'll tell you what,' he says, 'it's part of the deal that you have to cut it, but that will make a perfect canoe.'"  Muñoz laughed at this point.  "I mean this is a man in his '80s so excited he could hardly talk, babbling about this tree that he wanted to make a surfing canoe out of, and so, you know, it sort of tells what kind of man he was, turning what could have been a very negative event into a very positive thing.  I think Lorrin's life has been kind of a series of those kinds of reactions."

"He had a four or five way bypass [surgeries] done five years ago," said Muñoz, in 1993, "and, typical of Lorrin, he goes out surfing too soon and rips some stitches internally, so the doctor scolded him and put him back in the hospital and they had to cut him open again and re-stitch him.  You know a month after the bypass he was out riding in some contest or something.  So, he was just like this invincible guy... I always considered Lorrin as being invincible because he had such a wonderful outlook on life and physically he was lean and mean.  I don't think the man had ever been out of shape in his life... he went in probably a pretty good way.  He had been surfing all morning and his eyes weren't too good so he had stopped driving and Cecilia had been doing most of the driving for the past three or four years, so they were driving home from the beach and Lorrin had a heart attack and went right away, bang, right out and down."

Six or seven years before, Pop Proctor -- a friend of Whitey's -- had died suddenly.  Mickey Muñoz drew a parellel between Pop's kickout and Whitey's:

"I had the privilege of spending some months with Lorrin and Pop Proctor on the Big Island of Hawaii shortly after Lorrin got his property over there and he had put up kind of a kit home on it and he had taken Pop over there for Pop's second trip to Hawaii at 97 years old.  So I got to spend quite a bit of time with both of them.  Pop at that time had just lost his driver's license and having lived in a van or truck for the last 45 or 50 years, you know losing his driver's license was like hey, you might as well cut his head off.  Pop was totally independent, he could take care of himself, he'd have a couple glasses of wine, talk story.  He'd go in the water everyday.  Unfortunately when they came back to here [the mainland], they put Pop in a hotel in San Clemente and Pop kind of looked at his life and went jeez this isn't what I want to do, this isn't how I want to live my life, so he just kind of shut himself off and checked out, and because of Pop's tenacity with life up until that time, at least as long as he had his driver's license and was independent, I think Pop would've lived until God knows what, he could've lived until his hundred and tens, who knows."

When Whitey found out about Pop's departure, his response had been, "Great!  great!  Good way to go, at least they didn't get a chance to put those Goddamn tubes in him."

"That kind of sums up a lot of how I feel about him and how I looked at him as a man," Mickey Muñoz concluded.  "You know, he wasn't a great craftsman, but he was never afraid to try anything, build anything, make anything, do anything, you know the man's babbling out of control over a 30-foot boat he's gonna make in his '80s and you know that sycamore log sits, waiting to be seasoned... the man had so much knowledge of life in general, but especially of the water and what worked and why.  Maybe not even why, he just knew what worked through trial and error through knowledge accumulated over 80-plus years of dedication."  Muñoz ended by saying the sycamore would be seasoned in two or three years and after that, he hoped to be part of a team effort to go ahead with Whitey's plan to build that vision of his "perfect canoe."

On the Saturday after Lorrin "Whitey" Harrison passed away, approximately one hundred friends and family members spread his ashes in the waters off Kawaihae on the Big Island of Hawai`i.  There were also ceremonies held at San Onofre marking the passage of one of surfing's greats; a man whose positive contributions we benefit from each day we hit the surf.

"I'm glad I've lived during the right time," Lorrin said shortly before his sudden and unexpected death.  "I've enjoyed every minute of my surfing life... Of course I hate all the changes.  You even have to pay to get to the beach now, nothing's free anymore.  But what can you do?  Stop going?"

ENDIT

Doc Ball (1907-2001)

Aloha and Welcome to this chapter on Doc Ball, surfing's first dedicated surf photographer and adaptor of Hawaiian Surf Culture into that of Southern California's.

This biography of Doc is largely drawn from interviews his friend Gary Lynch did with him in the late 1980's and a piece we wrote together about Doc, published in the late 1990's.

In the 2010's, I worked with another friend of Doc's, Carl Ackerman, to produce a one hour documentary on Doc that stands as the definitive treatment of the man. It is available via the Surf Network at: 

https://www.thesurfnetwork.com/detail/9f8f6a356d5f0f4b644dcff0400d5b04/movie?fbclid=IwY2xjawJaAfZleHRuA2FlbQIxMQABHfE8A1ZTUw50Va1JdfGegSjug12dJ14NDs-2J7O3nXF28B7sIzfQP5FDQg_aem_9MR7rTz-tRqdVIqfSrdKuw

Photo of Doc by Tom Blake

One of the most influential surfers of the 1930s was “Doc” Ball. Born John Heath Ball on January 25, 1907, Doc was a key guy in three very important areas: Firstly, he, along with Adie Bayer, organized and lead surfing’s first great surf club, the Palos Verdes Surfing Club (PVSC), a group whose legacy is still felt today. Secondly and as importantly, Doc became surfing’s first truly dedicated surf photographer. Although others had shot surfers and surfing before him – most notably Tom Blake who became one of his closest friends – it was not until Doc Ball that surf photography rightly came into its own. Thirdly, Doc actively incorporated elements of Hawaiian surf culture into his and his club's pursuit of a Southern California surfers’ lifestyle.

Doc grew up in Redlands, California, the son of Genevieve – a natural child psychologist – and Archibald E. Ball, DDS, a graduate of the University Of Michigan School Of Dentistry. Even as a boy, photography was part of John Heath’s life.

“Most of my lifetime, I guess,” he told me, “I’d had a camera for some reason or another… I started with a little thing about four or five inches; maybe less than that; a little tiny camera box that they made. I guess it was for kids or something. It was black and white stuff. Take it on bike hikes and everything. That was when I was about eight years old. I got started ‘photography’ that way.”

Doc’s introduction to the Pacific Ocean also came early in his life. Out at Catalina Island, “at age 4,” Doc wrote, “I was taken along with my parents on a Redlands Elks Club party. On arriving, my mom decides to take a swim in the little bay. She also carried me out there and met another club member, Jake Suess (owner of a grocery in Redlands). He says, ‘Let me take little Jack. I’ll teach him to swim.’ She handed me over to him. He wades out to hip depth and plops me down in that cold H20. I went clear under before he grabbed me up. And I start screaming ‘It’s salty!’ Anyway, that did not blot out my interest in the old salty, as our family vacationed at Hermosa Beach. I learned to bodysurf, here. Also, to make a few dimes catching and selling sand crabs to be bait for fishermen.”

Doc’s water direction was kept alive, back in the Redlands during the school year, when he later became a junior lifeguard at the Redlands Municipal Pool. Duke Kahanamoku visited the pool as a master of ceremonies for an inauguration and made an impression on Doc that was never lost.

By 1924, Doc held the Redlands High School pole vault record of 11-feet 6-inches, using a bamboo pole. He continued playing sports in school when he played left end on the University of Redlands football team (1928). “The next wild experience here,” Doc wrote about the aquatic side of high school sports, “was learning how to do a one-and-a-half flip over from the 20-foot high diving platform. It was a blast!”

Following his father’s profession, Doc enrolled at the University of Southern California Dental School in 1929. “This is where I learned to put my hands in people’s mouths,” Doc recalled, “and not get bit.” It’s also where Doc got his nickname.

“By this time,” Doc added, “I also set another record. A 20-foot exhaust pipe for my strip-down Model T Ford (rode the thing on the gas tank) – was given the thing for cleaning up a friend’s backyard of weed overgrowth. Weeds had almost swallowed the old T. It had no body or fenders or front tires. I drove it home and got it in shape to drive. When they did some repair work on the Kingsbury Grade School roofing was when I got that 20-foot pipe – put the end of it on skate wheels and attached it to my Model T Ford. Got a blast when classmates went to look at the skate wheel towing attachment. I would pop the thing [pop the clutch] with a backfire which caused them to jump sky high.”

Doc recalled that “when I went down to USC Dental College. I had a little canoe I used to ride up in the Redlands area, in the lakes and rivers and whatever – canals [even]. So, I figured, ‘why not?’ [try it in the ocean]. Oh, we had lived in Hermosa Beach, there, in the summertime, way back [beginning in] 1920-21. So, I knew the beach and I was interested in salt water and so –” he laughed, “I took that canoe, went out and paddled around; finally found out I could catch some waves with it!”

When we think of a “canoe“ nowadays, an image of a nicely constructed, mass-produced, well-marketed product comes to mind. But, back then, a canoe could mean something you bought, but most likely meant something you made. Doc’s was a custom job he called “The Bull Squid.”

“I made it with bicycle rims – wooden rims, in those days,” Doc told me. “The canoe was mostly made – what they had were some [train] car strips that they would use for packing oranges; great big orange boxes in the flat cars in the freight trains; just big long strips [of wood]. They just fit together perfect.

“So, I made the sides out of wood and put a little canvas covering over the front and back and that kept the waves from crashing over both the bow and, ah – stern.

“Anyway, it was a pretty good little surfing canoe; 6-foot, 6-inches long.”

With The Bull Squid, Doc not only spent time sliding the surf, but diving for abalone. The rest of the time was spent on classes and studying.

“Remember your first surfboard?” I asked Doc.

“Pretty much. It wasn’t mine, but it was one we could use. There was a guy who came down to the beach, there, to go surfin’. He’d been to Hawai’i and he brought this board back. A big 10-foot redwood. He didn’t know what to with it during the week, cuz he knew he’d only come down on the weekend. So, by that time I had another buddy whose mother and father owned a restaurant right on the beach – right on the cement walk, there, on the ocean front.

“We went in and made a deal with him. If the guy would let Norm [Brown] and I use his board during the week, they’d let him store it in their restaurant (‘Walt & Mize Hamburgers’). It was kind of an attraction! It helped them out and it helped us out. That was the first board.”

Encouraged by Sam Apoliana, a Hawaiian classmate, Doc went on to build a plank-style surfboard. He carved it out of a large slab of redwood, hewn with an adze.

“Then,” Doc told me of this development, “Norm and I decided we better have one of our own, so we went down and got some lumber.” Doc paused and asked me if I knew what an adze is. “You have to stand with your legs spread pretty good,” Doc cautioned about use of the adze. “Some of the guys we’d been told – in the logging industry – they’d pretty near chopped their ankle off.

“It’s a horizontal [blade, as opposed to an axe’s vertical]. Well, we hacked us out a couple of boards with that. That was really the first one [we made ourselves and were our own].”

In the late 1980s, Doc passed this same adze on to big wave legend Greg Noll, appointing him as “keeper of the flame.” As for Doc’s first surfboard when he first hacked it out, he colored it white and decorated it with copper sheeting in the shape form of a shield with the words “Na Alii,” Hawaiian for “The King.” Copper studs kept it solidly pressed to the board’s surface. “In time,” Doc said with some regret, “it was stolen out of our Hermosa Beach house backyard.”

“Then ole Norm,” Doc told me, “he decides he’s gonna make one after Blake’s type [hollow paddleboard]. He started making 14-foot paddleboards. I bought one of those from him and that was my board for a long time.”

“You liked the increased flotation?” I surmised.

“Oh, definitely,” Doc agreed. “Yeah!”

Early Heroes & Influences

Like many surfers of his time, Doc revered Duke Paoa Kahanamoku, the man who was primarily responsible for the rebirth of wave riding in the Twentieth Century. “He was one of our heroes in that time,” Doc told me. “He came here and toured around a little bit, but I didn’t get to see him too much.”

About a year or two after he got started surfing, Doc had an opportunity to surf with Duke down at Corona del Mar. One of Doc’s most vivid memories of Duke was in the early 1930s, at a surf contest at Santa Monica:

“They had a big thing at Santa Monica – a whole gathering of surfers giving out awards from the contest they’d had,” Doc recalled. “Ol’ Duke was in there. And, son-of-a-gun, when I got in there and sat down, here’s Duke. He’s sitting right in front of me.” Doc was laughing about it as he remembered the day. “And I said, ‘Duke… Duke… Duke…’ [trying to engage him in conversation]. Never even turned his head.” To get Duke’s attention, Doc resorted to the little Hawaiian lingo he knew. In Hawaiian, Doc said, loud enough for Duke to hear: ‘To the up righteousness of the State.’ “And, man, he whipped around like a shot!” Doc laughed some more, then told me they got into active conversation. “We had a blast…”

A hero more accessible and even a close friend was Tom Blake, inventor of the hollowboard, the skeg and the precursor to the sailboard. “He was my surfin’ buddy for all those years,” Doc told me of the 1930s &’40s. “We rejoiced together in the picture shootin’ [photography] and everything.”

I mentioned to Doc that I’d heard there were only about 30 surfers in Southern California at the end of the 1920s.

“That sounds a little extra, to me,” he responded. “When I started, there were probably 15 or 20 around the whole coast. But, they were mostly all in Southern California where the water was warm.” I asked Doc who the earliest surfers were that he could remember.

“Some of the local guys. Johnny Kerwin and his family, Jim Bailey [and] lifeguards. They had a big pier there [Hermosa], ya know. You go out there and that’s where you run into the lifeguards. Most of the time, some of these other guys were out there; goin’ fishin’ or just checkin’ the situation out.”

Most respected of these lifeguards was Rusty Williams. “Anytime the waves got good, why, he’d be out there. He was the one who was always telling us to watch out for the pilings on the pier.”

About Johnny Kerwin, Doc said, “He was one of the first, there, at Hermosa Beach; the Kerwin family. He had three brothers and a sister… We used to get together to go surfing, abalone diving, lobster diving and, boy, you name it. His folks had a big bakery down there at Hermosa Beach and so that’s where we went to get all our cookies, bread, cakes… it was really an ‘in’ thing.

“He was a real friend...”

First Dedicated Surf Photographer

John “Doc” Ball certainly was not the first person to photograph surfers. One has only to visit any surfing museum to see evidence of predecessors. There are shots taken of surfers going back to the late 1800s. Frenchmen Auguste and Louis Lumiere invented the motion-picture camera in 1895 and by 1898, motion pictures of surfers at Waikiki were taken by Thomas Edison, inventor of the lightbulb.

Notable during the 1910s was Alfred Gurrey, Jr. Sometime shortly after 1903, he opened Gurrey’s Ltd: Fine and Oriental Art in Honolulu, which became a hub of that city’s art scene; “the haunt of artists and patrons,” as a Honolulu Commercial Advertiser later put it.

It was while operating the gallery that Gurrey photographed surfers and had some of his surfing photographs published in magazines like Alexander Hume Ford’s Mid-Pacific Magazine. It was Gurrey’s photographs of Duke, especially, that gained a large audience not only in the Islands, but on the U.S. Mainland and in Australia. His best work can be seen in one of surfing’s most scarce collectibles: The Surf Riders of Hawaii.

Surf Riders of Hawaii was originally self-published by Gurrey as a handmade booklet photo compilation of surfing photographs in 1914. It was later reprinted in St. Nicholas Magazine, Volume XLII, Number 10, August 1915. The booklet combined artistically-rendered prints with romantic poetry from Lord Byron and also prose by Gurrey himself.

Unfortunately, A. R. Gurrey, Jr. apparently ceased photography shortly after publication of Surf Riders of Hawaii. His art gallery struggled financially through the second half of the 1910s and on into the 1920s, finally shutting its doors in 1923. After a year of unemployment, Alfred, Jr. joined his father in the insurance business. He died a few years later at the relatively young age of 53.

Photographs of surfers continued to be taken through the first two decades of the century – the beginning two decades of the rebirth of surfing. Surfer, inventor and philosopher Tom Blake took many photographs, some of which can be seen in his first book Hawaiian Surfboard. And, in a notable milestone, Blake had the first surf layout printed in a 1935 edition of National Geographic. Don James, who also began surf photography in the 1930s – like Doc Ball – shot many a photo between the ‘30s and 1960s.

The significant role Doc Ball plays in surf photography, however, is that he was the first truly dedicated “surf photog.” His surfing experience was framed by the camera’s lens from many angles. Sure, he surfed and spearheaded the Palos Verdes Surfing Club, but more than that, he took photographs of surfers, surfing and surf culture. He was the first to take this approach as his primary focus. It began like this:

In 1926, Doc was given a Kodak Autographic camera by his father’s dental assistant. “My dad was a dentist,” he reminded me, “and his office gal brought in a folding Autographic. She didn’t want it anymore, so she gave it to my dad and he gave it to me. I took that down to the beach, there, and when I went to school.”

“I started [taking pictures of surfers surfing] after we started going down to the beach. I said, ‘Oh, man, I gotta take a picture of some of these guys.’ That’s when I started using that folding Autographic.”

One of Doc’s earliest surf-related photographs was taken the same time he started riding waves with a canoe then a surfboard. Around 1929, Doc took some pictures of his mother on a board at Palos Verdes Cove. “My mother was a beautiful chicken,” is how he put it to Gary Lynch, “you have to admit it, a natural child psychologist. She raised us right,” he added in appreciation.

The year 1931 was when Doc really hit a turning point in his life; a turn that would unite his recreational time with both surfing and photography. At the start of the year, the Los Angeles Times printed a sepia-toned, full spread rotogravure photograph of four surfers at Waikiki. Taken by Tom Blake with his new waterproof camera housing, “Riders of Sunset Seas“ grabbed hold of Doc’s imagination at the same time it provided viewers with a unique perspective of waves and surfers at an angle never seen until then.

From that point on, “Doc became dedicated,” surf historian Gary Lynch wrote, “to the pursuit of artistically recording the California surfing scene.”

About the Kodak folding Autographic, Doc told me: “You could sign the thing and it registered right on the film; had a little place down at the bottom of the camera case. I used to carry that out to the Palos Verdes Cove… I finally got to the point where I carried it in my teeth with a towel around my neck, getting’ drowned an’ everything.”

“Doc started,” Gary wrote, “producing photographs of surfers surfing, their boards, cars, girlfriends, parties, surf board construction, living quarters, club houses and just about all activities related to this new breed of Californian. Comedy often played a part in the composition of Doc’’ photographs.”

Palos Verdes Surfing Club (PVSC)

Doc graduated from the USC Dental College in 1933. Shortly afterward, on Monday, March 19, 1934, he opened an office at 4010 1/2 South Vermont Avenue, in Los Angeles. “He rented a second story, five room suite above a movie theatre that then stood at that address,” wrote Gary Lynch. “On a surviving photograph of the office and theatre beneath, the marquee clearly informs us that the movie ‘Algiers‘ was showing, starring Charles Boyer and Hedy Lamarr. 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 Palos Verdes Surfing Club, after it was formed in 1935. The landlord gave Doc the first two months rent free, due to the Depression, and charged forty dollars a month thereafter.

“In those days,” Doc told Gary, “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.”

I asked him about the depression; how did it effect them as surfers?

“Well, as far as surf was concerned: not really. Of course, we had a little trouble getting’ gasoline, but then it was 7-cents a gallon in those days. Imagine that? … Well, that’s the way it was. 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.”

A year after he got going in his dentist practice, Doc got together with Adie Bayer to found the Palos Verdes Surfing Club. “He was one of the big ones,” Doc told me, referring to Adie Bayer as one of the top surfers of the era. Bayer was a champion platform diver, swimmer, tennis player, as well as surfer.

“He was real energetic and everything,” Doc affirmed. “He helped do organizings, too.”

Because it organized the first annual Pacific Coast Surfing Championship, the Corona del Mar Surf Board Club was probably the first surf club to organize on the Mainland, “the largest club of this kind in America,” according to The Santa Ana Daily Register, July 31, 1928. Chuck A Luck” Ehlers claimed the honor for the Hermosa Beach Surfing Club, saying that it was the first, in 1934, when “the Hermosa Beach Surfing Club was formed. They had about 18 members. The old ones plus Don Grannis, Ted Davies, and others.”

The following year was “A banner year,” Chuck A Luck recalled of 1935, when, to the south, “the Palos Verdes Surfing Club was formed – a with Tulie Clark, ‘Doc’ Ball, Hoppy Swarts, LeRoy Grannis, along with transferred surfers Matt Davies, Jim Bailey, Johnny Gates, Tom Blake, Gard Chapin and others.”

I tried to pin Doc down on this one. How he remembered it was that Johnny Kerwin got the Hermosa Beach Surfing Club going “a little after we formed. Palos Verdes was one of the first ones that organized. After that was Hermosa and then Manhattan and then Santa Monica. From there on it went up the coast and kept going after that.”

I asked Doc if there were any significant differences between the surf clubs that sprang up in this period. “Not especially, as far as I know,” he responded. “They all had their little banquets here and there and times of celebration; same things we did, too, in our Palos Verdes [club].”

Doc was being typically modest in his comparison of the PVSC to other surf clubs. The fact was that the Palos Verdes Surfing Club was more sophisticated and organized than any of the other clubs early on. It’s organization would be impressive even compared to today’s standards. Importantly, Doc’s photography played a large part in establishing the PVSC as the dominant surf club of the 1930s.

“We also had, among the clubs,” Doc added, “the Catalina Island-to-Santa Monica Paddle Race. It was on those [hollow Blake-style] 14-foot paddleboards. Whew! That was a long paddle, but [at least] it was a relay.”

Soon after forming, the Palos Verdes Surfing Club moved its headquarters into one of the rooms Doc rented. A small room that separated the clubhouse from the dental office was Doc’s storeroom, bedroom and darkroom.

“The interior of the club room,” reconstructed Gary from Doc’s personal photographs, “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.”

Image courtesy of the Surfing Heritage and Culture Center

Doc Ball photo

The Palos Verdes Surfing Club creed went like this:

“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 for me. “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.”

The PVSC went on to organize paddling races, paddleboard water polo matches, and surfing contests. The club’s influence went far beyond Palos Verdes. “When the surf was flat there in Southern Cal,” Doc said of the surf safaris club members would take and the PVSC influence on the rebirth of surfing in Santa Cruz, “we’d make these trips out around, up the coast and down. One of them went up to Santa Cruz. They’d not seen that activity (surfing) up there [before]! Our guys were the ones who initiated it in Santa Cruz.”

E.J. Oshier was the main PVSC guy to help get surfing going again in Santa Cruz.

“The sport quickly took hold at Long Beach, Corona del Mar, San Onofre, Dana Point, and many Santa Monica Bay areas,” confirmed Duke Kahanamoku, “like Redondo, Hermosa, Manhattan and Palos Verdes Cove. To thousands and thousands it has become a way of life.”

Mid-1930s

In his limited-edition photo collection – later to be reprinted without consulting Doc or arrangement for residual royalties to its original author – Doc documented “How All This Started.” Below the title, the photo shows Doc “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.”

“Life was grand around the California beaches even though the Great Depression had drained the savings and expectations of many,” Gary Lynch wrote. “for as little as $15-$25 one could build a hollow board or plank style surf board, sew a pair of swim trunks out of canvas and feel like a king at the beach. When the swell was small, Palos Verdes Cove provided food as well as recreation for the surfers. A number of interesting photographs taken by Doc demonstrate that a paddle board could be used as an abalone diving platform. Green abalones were abundant and the limit was twenty a day. Diving for abalone in combination with fishing made for a pleasant existence. Driftwood still existed on the Southern California beaches and a warm fire often was the centerpiece for the daily gatherings.”

One particular time stands out in Doc’s memory and it was less than pleasant. “I was diving for abalones and every time I get down there – oh, about 8-feet of water – I had an abalone beneath a rock. The thing was anchored there pretty solid. Each time I’d get my iron in there to loosen him up, he’d get re-anchored. I stayed down and stayed down – I plumb ran out of air! Man, I began to black out and so I just dropped everything and came up and started to inhale a little water before I hit to where my surfboard was anchored up there. I kinda flopped over onto the board and here comes this guy around the corner, at the Palos Verdes Cove.

“‘Hey, Doc – What’re you tryin’ ta do? Drown yourself?!’

“Holy mackeral! Then it hit me; what was happening. That was a wild experience.

“I had another one, too, down diving like that when a big shadow come over the top. I look up and there’s this great big – 6-7-foot, white belly – leopard shark came swimming across. Holy cow! I got outta there!”

Up until Tom Blake began drilling holes in redwood boards in 1926, surfboard size and  weight had remained the same since early on in the 1800s. Further innovations in surfboard design and components continued during Doc’s time. By the time the PVSC was underway, Blake had already gone to chambered hollow boards which reduced the weight even further.

Blake’s “Hawaiian Hollow Board“ – the board that had begun this period of innovation –  became known more commonly as “Blake’s Cigar.” Even though it was nearly laughed off the beach, at first, almost every surfer in California and the budding East Coast began turning in their old spruce pine and redwood planks for the lighter, “Blake-style” boards once he went to a chambered hollow design. “The trend [in surfing] soon changed,” noted a surfside analyst of the late 1930s, “due to its [the hollow board’s] extreme lightness, strength, durability and the greater ease in gaining speed, with much less effort.” Older kids and women could now surf much easier, too.

Delbert “Bud” Higgins, a Huntington Beach lifeguard of those times, described the solid boards during this period. “The “redwoods were really too heavy, about 125 pounds, plus another 10 pounds or so when they got wet.” Yet, Higgins, who was the first man to ride through the pilings of the Huntington Beach Pier while standing on his head, swore by the old boards, saying they were, “so big and stable [that] you could do almost anything.”

By 1932, Blake’s hollowed chambered production boards helped reduce the average weight of a board from between 100 to 125 pounds to a lighter 40 to 70 pounds. Steering and stability were a problem, though, as the boards tended to “slide tail“ or “slide ass,” in large part because the rails were not rounded and caught water rather than released. Except for simple angle turns – accomplished either by dragging one’s foot “Hawaiian style” off a board’s inside rail, or by stepping back and tilt-dancing the board around and out of its old course and into a new one – the hollowboards were still awkward and cumbersome.

Tom Blake was the one who came up with solutions to this problem, too. By the end of the decade, rails incorporated a rounded edge. Even more importantly and although they would take a decade to be completely embraced, keels (skegs, bottom fins) on surfboards eventually were universally accepted. The first surfboard fin appeared in an edition of the Honolulu Advertiser circa 1935-36. The famous photograph of Duke Kahanamoku and Tom Blake shows the first fin on a board.

The fixed fin  was invented by Blake in 1935 in an effort to solve the problem of the hollow board’s tendency to “slide ass.” The skeg allowed surfers to track and pivot more freely and gave the board more lateral stability. As a result, terms like “dead ahead,” “slide ass,” “all together now, turn,” and “straight off, Adolph,” gradually began to be heard less and less.

By 1937, Doc’s reputation as a surf photographer was well established. That year, he built his first waterproof camera housing. The watertight “shoots box” housed Doc’s replacement for the Kodak folding Autographic – a stripped down Series D Graflex. Not only could he get closer to his wave sliding buddies, but the images were clearer.

“By that time,” Doc told me, “I made a water box. I got a stripped down Graflex 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 had a large brass handle attached so that when he was caught inside, large sets would not wrest it from his grasp. Although the Graflex was big and bulky compared to today’s camera bodies used for surf photography, it used large format cut sheet film – 3 ¼ X 4 ¼ – which made for sharp enlargements. “I traded the chief of photography in the Los Angeles fire department arson squad for one of my Graflex cameras,” Doc told Gary. “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. I’ve got it here in the house, all stored up… it’s got some wild stuff in there.”

Doc didn’t pursue this aspect of his photography, but what he did shoot documents the heyday of prewar Southern California surfing. The films, themselves, contain one very unique segment shot from a bi-winged airplane. “During the aerial photography shoot,” Gary wrote, having seen the footage, himself, “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 Miki 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. While surfing on a wave with his hollow board, named ‘The Wonder Board‘ because of its paddling and surfing qualities, Doc hand-holds his 16mm camera while filming. 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 pet snake lies on the nose of the board, head and upper third of body erect, apparently enjoying the ride.”

As for surf riding vehicles, Doc had “The Wonder Board” during the 1930s and 1940s. Then, he had a Blake paddleboard that he would later regret trading for a skateboard. Doc called his paddleboard the “X-1.” It was a chopped-down foam paddleboard originally shaped by Tom and Doc. “Dog-gone-it, I did the worst thing I’ve ever done when I traded my paddleboard [the X-1] – he [Blake] gave it to me after he left the country [for Hawai’i]. I traded it to a Keith Newcomer, up here [in Northern California] for a skateboard. It was really a good skateboard!”

As for the original Wonder Board, it’s now in the hands of Doc’s old Palos Verdes Surfing Club member Tulie Clark.

Demand for Doc’s photographs by fellow surfers, surfboard manufacturers, newspapers and magazines continued to grow. “When arriving at distant surf breaks such as San Onofre,” Gary Lynch wrote, “Doc was besieged by the crowds, demanding a look at the most recent prints that he had produced in his small darkroom. Amused by the interest (which at times became a burden), 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 still survives and clearly shows the enthusiasm of the group. Piled head over head, shoulder to shoulder, everyone eagerly scanned the pages looking for that special image that would portray them as masters of the rolling comber. ‘Obviously these boys were interested in surf photography,’ smiles Doc. A surfing book with photographic illustrations was inevitable. There was no way to satisfy demand without one.”

The Los Angeles Times published many Doc Ball photographs. “Doc became friends with many of the Times photographers and the newspaper often relied on Doc’s images when huge storm surf or surfing contests made news at the beaches. His creative eye caught the imagination of many. Eventually Doc’s photographs would find their way into Life magazine, Look magazine, Encyclopedia Britannica, news magazines and papers, art galleries, national and international photography competitions, surf board brochures, advertisements, documentaries, foreign publications, and National Geographic magazine.”

Late 1930s

Surfing continued to gain in popularity, as demonstrated by not only surfing photographs making it into newspapers, but articles about surfing, as well. One such recognition of the interest in wave sliding was a September 1936 newspaper article by Andy Hamilton entitled “Surfboards, Ahoy!”

The following year, Doc documented notable big swell conditions:

“This is Big Surf,” wrote and photographically documented Doc of March 13, 1937. Pete Peterson “of Santa Monica“ is identified riding the “wave of the day.” Also featured: LeRoy Grannis and Jean Depue.

“Pete Peterson – he was one of the big ones who could really paddle,” fondly recalled Doc. “He was expert at taking gals up on his shoulders and everything and riding. He was one of the big surfers in those days… He was a big wave rider. He used to be able to cut across a wave almost like they do, now; get in the tunnel and get out; just an extraordinary surf hound. That’s what we thought.”

As for LeRoy “Granny” Grannis, aka “Scrobble Noggin,” he continued to be a close friend of Doc’s to the day he kicked out. Most notably, Granny took up the photographic banner that Doc started and became one of surfing’s great photographers after Doc gave it up. “He’d get shook up every once in a while,” explained Doc about LeRoy’s nickname of Scrobble Noggin, “and he’d get an ornery look on his face [at those times].”

Later on in 1937, Doc documented more big surf, this time at Hermosa: “Twenty Footers Roll In” shows Doc, himself (“having deserted his Graflex”), on a big, sloping overheader on Turkey Day, 1937. Another of Doc’s bro’s, Kay Murray was also out that day. “He was a big guy; an athletic instructor; taught classes on body building and exercising.” 

The following month, there was more big surf. In “Storm Surf of December 12th, 1937,“ Doc’s photo, “Taken during a drizzling mist... shows the cove in the throes of a zero break. Johnny Gates vowed ‘he’d get a ride on one of those or else.’ Credit is hereby extended him that he did reach the half way point, only to be wiped out by a monstrous cleanup and forced to swim in through devastating currents, rocks, etc., to retrieve his battered redwood plank. Purple hardly described his color when he finally got out of that freezing blast.”

“Zero Break at Hermosa,” wrote Doc of the term used for maximum surf. “Perhaps twice a year this remarkable surf will hump up a good half mile offshore and keep all ‘malihinis‘ on the beach. Strictly for the ‘kamaaina,’ this stuff comes upon one out there with a long steamy hiss, and fills him at first with the apprehensive thought of, ‘Mebe I better wait for the second one.’”

That winter swell continued to crank out good sized surf. January 7, 1938 was “The day when the newsreel boys came down to shoot the damage done by the big seas – packed up and left when we came out with our surfboards.” Surfers identified: “Tulie” Clark, Hal Pearson, Al Holland, Adie Bayer and LeRoy Grannis.

Tulie “was one of our big guys in the surfin’ club,” Doc said, laughing at the thought of his old friend Tulie Clark. “We got together a lot of times at Hermosa Beach… we’d always stack our boards all together in the back of my car or back ‘a his, or whatever, and take off for where we thought the surf was up!

“He was one of the guys… not poverty-stricken, but very down, financially, in his early days. Everybody used to get after me about him: ‘What are you doing – a doctor! – messing around with those bums; those surf bums?!’ Holy cow; about flipped my lid!

“The guy winds up being a millionaire – got a big house down at Palos Verdes Estates; lives in Palm Springs. He went from a ‘surf bum’ to a millionaire.”

Multiple Formats and Culture

“Through the years,” Gary Lynch wrote, “Doc tried many methods of surf photography. Holding the camera by hand, by teeth, strapped to body parts and surfboard, and shooting off piers and rocks, from airplanes and towers, automobiles and trees, from boats and rubber rafts and cliffs and caves, Doc tried to expand both perspective and perception in the minds of his viewers. The main objective was to keep the camera dry while making exposures close enough to provide a large clear image on the negative. Salt water, dust, sand, and bright sun light became intruders, always lurking close by and waiting for a chance to foul the shot.”

“Doc also created surf posters using his photographs,” Gary wrote. “These quality posters used the images of surfers and waves to beckon all who viewed them. The majority of these posters announced that the Palos Verdes Surfing Club was holding a Hula Luau. 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. These posters, photographically printed, one by one, by Doc, and ranging in size from wallet size (used to gain entrance to the event) to 8” X 10” posters, have become the rarest California surf posters for collectors to obtain.”

A real rarity was a Doc Ball surf poster displayed in a place of business. Such was the case with a Los Angeles night club called the Zamboanga. “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 cockerspaniel 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,” Doc continued. “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!”

Gary Lynch continued his writing about Doc’s surf posters and even post cards: 

“Fine glosssy photograhically printed post cards that the Palos Verdes Drug Store published also boasted Doc Ball surfing images. These post cards were sold inside the drug store to help promote the new subdivision being built in the area. Action shots of surfers such as Hoppy Swarts or Tom Blake caught the eye of the customers as they passed by the post card rack, demonstrating the pleasures of beach life.”

Doc had high praise for Hoppy Swarts. “He was one of our big guys in the place [PVSC]. He’s the one who had that characteristic finger tips thing riding a board. He’d have ‘em all stretched out. You could tell who it was just by lookin’ at his hands while he was ridin’.” Doc laughed. “Yeah, he helped us organize the club… also judging on contests and all that kind of thing. He was a graduate from Occidental College.  That’s where he was going when he got stuck on surfin’.”

I asked Doc what was the most memorable moment he recalled of Hoppy. “When I got [shot] him comin’ right, next to the pier, there.” Doc laughed. “Oh, he was real active… I always used to try and get him to grab one of those big waves out there cuz he could handle it pretty good.

“Those days, we had to steer with our feet; stick your foot in the water, either right or left, whichever way you wanted to turn. He was an expert at that.”

Doc Ball set himself apart from many surf photographers by shooting images of surf culture, along with actual wave riding. A perfect example is a shot Doc made of the ‘Nofre crew still sleeping. The caption read:  “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. Now, you gotta pay a fee and can’t [even] sleep on the beach. If it was good on the weekend, why, that was it!”

He shot night time photos, too, like the night of April 9, 1939, around a bonfire: “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.

I asked Doc about music. “What were you guys into?”

“If anything,” he replied, “they had a guitar or ukelele [for surfaris 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 dance music.”

“What kind of roles did women have in surfing, in those days?”

“Mostly, 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.” Tandem riding was a common sight, particularly at San O. In “Tandem Rides Are Popular With the Boys,” Doc Ball showed a picture of “Benny Merrill and wahini slicing along neat as anything. Most of the female sex, however,” Doc noted in 1946, “prefer to sit on the beach.”

Some of the notable exceptions to the “sit on the beach” mode for women were Mary Ann Hawkins and Ethal Harrison, at Corona del Mar. Mary Ann Hawkins was an outstanding woman surfer of the 1930s. Ethal Harrison later won the Makaha Championship in 1955. Of Mary Ann Hawkins, Doc attested: “She was one of the first surfers down there at Palos Verdes Cove. She was a friend of E.J. Oshier, at the time, and he got her into the water there. She got excited. Then she was about to get a job with the movies, but she needed a portrait or photograph, so I took a picture of her down on the rocks, there, in her bathing suit at Palos Verdes and she got the job.”

Patty Godsave and Marion Cook were two other early California woman surfers. Patty Godsave, Doc recalled: “She used to ride tandem with one of the guys, either Pete Peterson or E.J. Oshier.” Marion Cook: “I don’t remember too much about her. We called her Cookie.”

WW II and After

On April 19, 1941, less than a year before the United States entered the war, Doc married Evelyn Young, an attractive registered nurse. Their first child Norman was born in 1942 and their second child John Jr. followed in 1943.

“When the United States declared war in December 1941,” wrote Gary Lynch, “it broke the back of the California surfers’ life-style. The California surf clubs disbanded and almost every able bodied man enlisted in the armed services. Many of the fascinating personalities of the 1930s would never be seen again. The war took some of the best men surfing had to offer, leaving a trail of waste and broken dreams. If not for the persistent efforts of Doc with his camera we may never have known what the life and times of the first wave of California surfers was like.”

World War II certainly “Shut it out for a while,” Doc emphasized of the effects of war on wave riding. Doc, himself, joined the Coast Guard and became ship’s dentist on the U.S.S. General Hugh Scott, AP136. “His photographic skills soon became known,” Gary wrote, “and he was given a new Speed Graphic camera. As the official ship’s photographer he photographed much of the South Pacific.”

“During September 1944,” Doc recalled a memorable moment during the war, “I got a big surprise. While I was out on the South Pacific someone said the new issue of National Geographic had my surfing photographs in it. Sure enough, there they were.”

Doc credit’s Owen Churchill for helping provide some enjoyment during those war years, through his invention of the Churchill swim fins. “He was the one that did it,” Doc told me when I asked him if it was Frank Roedecker or Churchill who invented the swim fin. “He [Churchill] came over here during World War II and I got acquainted with the guy. I got a couple of original fins from him.” He invented the swim fin “just before World War II,” Doc added, saying, “I think he was more of a diver than an surfer. He was of French origin, I believe… We’d take ‘em [swim fins] aboard ship. When I’d get out into that hot water of the South Pacific, why, I’d go diving and swimming and riding a wave or two; body surfin’. They were somethin’ else!”

After the war, “It just kinda exploded, again,” Doc said about Southern California surfing. “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.”

“Thank goodness for that,” I said.

“You better believe it,” Doc concluded.

Surfer servicemen “started coming back in late ‘45 and early ‘46,” also recalled Duke Kahanamoku. With their return, “surfing once again took an upturn,” not just in Southern California. “But it was slow, for the military returnees were occupied with finding jobs or returning to their interrupted education chores.”

“… when the war ended – Boom – we were back in the environment,” confirmed 1940s surfer Dave Rochlen. “It was devotion, like seeing a girl again… like, ‘I’m never gonna leave!’ We gave ourselves over to it entirely. I think it was because we spent four or five years in the war and we had survived. And it had all been bad. Now there was no question about what had us by the throat. It was the ocean. Everything else was secondary.”

Doc and his brood was just one of many families to regroup and attempt to restart life where it had ended in 1941. Doc opened a dental office in Hermosa Beach and, rejoining his wife Evelyn, concentrated on raising their two sons, “Norman (man of the sea) and John (God has been gracious).”

It didn’t take Doc long to get back to his surf photography, either. “Demand was still so great for Doc’s surfing photographs,” Gary Lynch wrote, “that he published the book, California Surfriders 1946. The idea behind this was to satisfy the California surfers, giving many a portrait in the book as well as showing the major surfing locations.” California Surfriders 1946 was first published in a limited edition of 510. “Original cost for the first edition,” Gary noted, “was $7.25 a book. Doc kept a complete and detailed list of who bought his book. This list still survives and provides an astonishing array of Who’s Who in the world of California surfing. Names only hard core surf historians would recognize such as Bob French and Jamison Handy to other more familiar names like Preston Peterson and Peanuts Larsen fill the pages.”

“Oh, Peanuts!” Doc livened up even more than he normally did at the mention of Peanuts Larsen. “He was one of the main ones down at San Onofre [before the war]. He lived in Laguna Beach, at that time, so he went to surf down at San Onofre and any time it looked good at Laguna. That son-of-a-gun – I loaned him some stuff to publish and he never gave it back! Well, I forgave him for that. Old Peanuts – he was quite a guy.”

Eventually, the fifth and final edition of California Surfriders 1946 published by Doc went out of circulation. Ventura’s Jim Feuling copied the original and has published Early California Surfriders in 1995. The images used for this latest edition were shot from the pages of Doc’s first edition and then enhanced by computer.

“He did that without my permission,” Doc admitted to me with a laugh. “That’s a classic. It’s patented. So, I told him as much as he’d printed it, we needed to get the message out for surfers, anyway, and keep it going [knowledge of the California surf heritage]. And, so I said, ‘I won’t sue ya or anything.’ So, he sends me a royalty, now.” That kind of reaction, on Doc’s part, was typical of the man. As surf historian Gary Lynch put it, Doc was the quintessential “troubadour of good will.”

“By the mid 1940s,” Gary wrote, “Doc Ball’s photographs had been published world wide. National Geographic (September 1944), Encyclopedia Britannica (1952), photography magazines, news magazines, art galleries, and newspapers were among the places a Doc Ball photograph could be found.”

An image Doc labeled as “The Mighty Ski Jump Roars in – December 22, 1940“ shows “Al Holland, Oshier, Grannis and Bayer riding the 30-foot grinders that arrive here on an average of twice a year and rattle windows over a mile inland with their heavy concussion.” Doc, writing in 1946 in the third person, added, “This picture published in an Australian magazine, made its appearance in far away Noumea, New Caledonia. Was discovered there by a very surprised Doc Ball,” during a WWII trip to Noumea.

Northern California

“In 1950,” Gary Lynch wrote, “Doc was almost killed when he drove his new Ford Woody into a eucalyptus tree. It was during this period that Doc first received and followed Christ.” “Which caused me to start bible reading, cover to cover – my first time ever – because I had a vision, you might say, of me standing before the Judgement Seat of our Maker and He asking me, ‘Doc, did you read my book while you were down there?’ Having no sort of excuse, I just flipped and reading cover to cover began. Took one full year to midnight the last day, but I finished the job.”

“In 1953, the pressure from the Southern California population explosion resulted in the Ball family’s exodus to Garberville, Northern California, where he opened up a new dental office.” “Plus, the words of the Book [Bible], Genesis 12:1. Also, the surfing at Shelter Cove [close by] attracted me.” Although he was now in Northern California and inland, “This move,” Gary wrote, “provided him with a more peaceful environment in which to live and work.”

When he made the move, Doc had a chance to surf with his long-time surfing pal Johnny Kerwin at Shelter Cove, 35 miles south of San Francisco and 18 miles from Garberville, a spot they had first surfed during the war. “We were spoken of as being the very first ever seen doing that in the Cove,” Doc said. “They had a Shelter Cove Surf Club, there,” Doc recalled. “They had a room – a kind of shack – right on the beach where you could go in and get your clothes changed; get your swimsuit on and get out in the water.” The 1953 surf session with Johnny Kerwin remains a special memory to Doc. When asked about his surfing life, Doc always mentioned it. “Kerwin came to visit us in our new location,” Doc explained to me, “and he brought two boards along with him.”

Photographic tragedy struck in 1964 when Doc Ball’s photo collection, film archives, and historical material – most of the film stuffs belonging to the Father of Surf Photography – was swept away in the devastating flood of that year. Yet, because Doc gave copies of most of his images away – approximately 900 of them – it would be entirely possible to, with the cooperation of the Ball Family, reconstruct Doc’s archives by copying Doc Ball photos from the collections of others.

Doc’s friendships through these changes never altered. Doc and his friends would still make time to hang together. After “we moved north – Tom Blake lived on the East Coast, up there in Minnesota I think it was – he used to come out West,” Doc told me, “and just come out and have some fun with the surfers and get re-acquainted again. Every time he’d come up, why, he’d stop here at our place. We’d keep him overnight a couple of days or so.”

After Blake wrote Hawaiian Surfriders 1935 (aka Hawaiian Surfboard), “he gave me the last copy he had on that and then every time he’d come by, he’d sign it, again, with the date he’d visited with us; kind of a treasure, there.”

I asked him when Blake, who died in 1993, visited him for the last time.

“That’s a hard one,” he admitted. “It was after 1971, anyway. We moved to Eureka, here in ‘71 and we kept him over in the place here.”

I asked if Blake surfed at that time.

“I don’t think so. He might have gone in a little down at Shelter Cove. The water’s warmer down there, but he was getting pretty up in the age, then. Wow, what a guy!”

In 1971, Doc retired from dentistry and moved his family back closer to the beach, to Eureka, remaining in Northern California. “With more time to spend on hobbies,” Gary wrote, “Doc soon became infatuated with bird carving. A combination of skillful maneuvering of his hands and fingers in the dental trade, and a life long love of birds, has produced one of the West Coast’s finest bird carvers.”

I asked Doc when it was that he stopped photographing.

“I guess when I lost my camera,” Doc replied. “I went out, one day, up here, at Eureka. I was going to the North Jetty cuz the surf was huge out there that day. I took my camera – Grannis gave me a Nikon camera with a – it had a great big telephoto lens. I rushed out to my truck, there, set the thing down on my rear bumper and rushed back to the house – I’d forgotten something – went and got that, got back in the truck and took off. I got to the North Jetty and reached for the camera box and nothing was there. That thing just spilled off somewhere. I’ve never heard anything about it…”

“I got one here; one of the last ones I ever got with that telephoto. Patrick Edgar out at the North Jetty. There was this great big – must’ve been a 22 or 23-foot big ole overhang comin’ down; soup on both sides. It was obvious he was gonna get the axe. I call it ‘Neptune’s Breakfast‘.”

Doc was still surfing shortly up to the time of his passing. His real exercise in his last years was skateboarding, however. “That’s how I stay in shape,” Doc declared, proudly. “You gotta keep your reflexes sharpened up. That’s one of the best ways to find out how old you’re getting.”

For 18 years, Doc did the local surf report. More importantly, he wanted to share the Christian experience with others, serving with Gideons International. Because of that, Doc regularly visited “churches, community organizations, care homes and schools, helping to provide both young and old with a positive direction and a meaningful future.”

Doc Ball remained a dedicated beachcomber. Every morning at daybreak he could be found at water’s edge, checking the tides and swells. Beachcombing also provided him with a supply of driftwood perches and body parts for his hobby of bird carving. “Latest rage,” Doc wrote me in reviewing the draft of an article Gary Lynch and I wrote about his life, “is knife cleaning up of common driftwood. It’s amazing what images will appear when it’s cleaned and developed – knifed down to the original stuff. It is full of very fascinating images. It also makes the clock go like lightening.”

There was always an exciting ending with each visit to the Ball residence,” Gary Lynch recalled. “As you depart, you get into your car and start to pull away from his home. A glance back at the front porch reveals a smiling Doc giving you the ‘thumbs up’ and yelling, ‘Hang in there!’ Returning the gesture, you feel privileged he has given you his blessing to enjoy surfing, and most of all, to keep the tradition alive.”

On December 5th, 2001 at 1:02 am, at age 94, Doc “caught and rode his last wave into the waiting arms of his beloved Savior, Jesus Christ,” read his obituary in the Eureka Times Standard, “thus ending a legendary and inspirational life here among us and beginning a new, wonderful one in Heaven.”

Doc Ball gave his own kind of obituary when he quoted in ending his classic California Surfriders 1946 – aka Early California Surfriders:

“When Old King Neptune’s raising Hell

And the breakers roll sky high,

Let’s drink to those who can ride that stuff

And to the rest who are willing to try.”