Surfing Years 1950-51

Aloha and welcome to the LEGENDARY SURFERS chapter on the years 1950 and 1951.

This chapter highlights some of the developments and goings-on of some of modern surfing’s most famous surfers during the period 1950-51. Not everything is included, obviously. The chapter was intended originally to give a kind of “sampling” of the space in time, while simultaneously hitting the most important historical points as I saw them at the time of writing (late 1990s).

A disclaimer I have is that the dates of things -- within this time period -- are approximate. I did my best guess of the time frame and what to include in it, but assuredly, it requires more date checking for complete accuracy.

In spite of its warts and all, I hope you enjoy this look at a special time in surfing’s history.

-- Malcolm Gault-Williams

San Onofre, Summer 1950

Photo by Loomis Dean

Contents

Preface

Contents

Introduction

Simmons Plan Shapes

Malibu and Chips

Buzzy Trent, part 1

Greg Noll’s Beginnings

The Manhattan Beach Surf Club

Dale “The Hawk” Velzy

The Bait Boy’s 1st Shape

John Severson at San Clemente

John Severson’s Cinematic Beginnings

Surf, Cars, Parties & Girls

O`ahu -- Town & Country, 1950

O`ahu, 1951

Buzzy Trent, part  2

Mainland, 1951

Malibu, 1950-51

Malibu Perpetual Surfboard

Velzy Invents the Hang Ten

Greg Noll & the Redwood to Balsa Transition

LIFE Magazine photo gallery of the scene at San Onofre in the Summer of 1950, published August 1950:

https://www.life.com/lifestyle/the-few-the-proud-the-totally-chill-life-with-old-school-beach-bums/

Introduction

The Cold War rivalry between the United States of America (USA) and the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR) was well underway as the decade of the 1950’s opened with the beginning of the Korean War. Popular songs of the time included “Bali Ha`i,” “Some Enchanted Evening,” “So in Love,” and “Riders in the Sky.” The Japanese samurai classic “Rashomon“ was released in Japan. Significantly for lovers of the ocean was Thor Heyerdahl’s voyage of the ocean-going raft “Kon-Tiki,” from South America to Polynesia. In the United States, 1.5 million TV sets were already in place in homes across the nation. That number would jump to 15 million in 1951.¹

The world of surfing was still limited, for the most part, to Oʼahu, Hawaii, North America and Australia. The two movements shaping the period were the big wave riding assaults on Makaha and the North Shore of Oʼahu, and the transition to all-balsa boards covered with fiberglass on U.S. Mainland.

Simmons Plan Shapes

Sometimes referred to as “The Father of the Modern Surfboard,” Bob Simmons came up with the plan shape of the post-World War II surfboard, based on scientific principles and tested primarily at Malibu. His board shapes were later modified by others to become what were later called “Malibu Boards,” “Potato Chips,” “Malibu Chips” or just plain “Chips.”

The board’s story started somewhat ignominiously:

Toward the end of 1949, in the midst of all his exciting surfboard experimentation and innovation, Simmons abruptly terminated his business relationship with his workers Joe Quigg and Matt Kivlin, closed his shop and left the Santa Monica/Malibu area.

“Quigg and Kivlin were Simmons’ glassers,” recalled Simmons’ friend and biographer John Elwell, “and he kicked them out of the shop when they started to copy the technology,”² meaning copying his plan shapes. An example of this was the “Darrylin Board,” made after the summer of ‘49,³ the board many consider to be the first “Malibu Board.”

“According to Kivlin in his interview with McMasters,” Elwell wrote, “when they went over to see Simmons they saw the receipts for the glass and and resin. It was at the end of the summer of ‘49 when Joe made a copy of a Simmons which was 45 pounds and 10 feet long for Darrylin Zanuck that others rode and liked.”⁴

Joe Quigg, Matt Kivlin and Leslie Williams later brought their new boards with them when they “showed up at Windansea in December of ‘49 and at the Windansea Luau in August of 1950... These boards were duplicates of a Simmons except for the nose.”⁵

Elwell continued: “shapers copy things they think works. The Malibu Board was an exact copy of a Simmons board but with a pointed nose. Why? [Dale] Velzy came up with the best answer: ‘The spoon nose wedge was too hard to make!’ [Bev] Morgan said they changed it to make it look like it was not copied.”⁶

In addition to the board copying, there were personality differences between Simmons and Quigg. They had gotten into it just the year before. “Simmons was a point rider and had the board to take off sooner with more speed,” Elwell explained. “As the story goes, Simmons asked for the right of way and Joe scoffed at him. Next time Simmons ran him over with his fiber glass board and a fight ensued in the water, with Quigg dunking Simmons... [the fight] continued on the beach. Quigg threatened Simmons that if he did it again he would beat the shit of him. Simmons spit in his face.”⁷ According to Elwell, both [Bev] Morgan and Peter Cole agreed that Quigg and Simmons hated each other.⁸

“The Simmons-Quigg surf war is the longest I have known,” John Elwell wrote. “From my view point... It all started from not giving another surfer the right of way. Those were the rules that [Gard] Chapin taught Simmons and Miki [Dora]. If they don’t get out of the way, ram ‘em, run over them.⁹

To this day, the subject of the Simmons-Quigg rift is a touchy subject for some. To some degree, this aspect of the Simmons story and that of The Malibu Board has been buried over time. “The reason,” John Elwell believes, “is that surfers back then liked both Bob and Joe. They had some peculiar differences but many surfers do. The attitude was that they didn’t like each other. So what?”¹⁰

Calling it quits in Santa Monica, Simmons moved his surfboard operation out to the family’s Norwalk ranch for privacy, seclusion, research and development. He now surfed mostly in the San Diego area -- the Tijuana Sloughs and Windansea -- and it was during this time that he made the best and last of a series of boards.¹¹

Malibu and Chips

First shaped by Joe Quigg, in 1950¹² and then by Matt Kivlin, the “Malibu chip“ or “potato chip“ -- also sometimes called the “Simmons Chip” -- would later be called “Malibu’s” in Australia. They were first popularized by Leslie Williams, Tom Zahn and Dave Rochlen and referred to as “chips” because their thinness combined with rocker reminded some of potato chips.

The main testing ground for the Malibu’s, of course, was Malibu.

Malibu had been ridden steadily since Tom Blake and Sam Reid first rode it in 1926. Like other surf spots, it developed its own surf culture and own local heroes. In the mid-to-late 1950s, Malibu became the center of surf culture. Prior to the 1950s, the bipolar axis of American surf culture had rotated between surfing’s capitol of Waikiki and Southern California’s San Onofre -- which had superceded Palos Verdes Cove and Corona del Mar. As good as the waves were and are there, Malibu was not the focus of California surf culture prior to 1950.

Fifty years after surfing’s revival by the likes of Duke Kahanamoku, George Freeth, Alexander Hume Ford and local Hawaiians of the beginning years of the 20th Century, the sport had progressed and evolved. By the late 1940s, there was enough interest in big wave surfing that Makaha, on the west side of Oʻahu, even usurped Waikiki as surfing’s international focal point. Across the Eastern Pacific Ocean, in California, the surf culture that had dominated at San Onofre before World War II gave way to Malibu after the war. In part due to the lingering military occupation of the area, San O’s descent and Malibu’s rise was primarily because of the quality of the waves and the experimentation in surfboard design and materials that was going on in the Los Angeles area. Malibu became the testing ground for the new technology.

Buzzy Trent, part 1

At the beginning of the 1950s, Buzzy Trent began his legendary career as a big wave rider. On the same yacht that had brought Wally Froiseth, George Downing and Russ Takaki over to the Mainland in 1949,¹³ Buzzy made his way to the Islands for the first time. He was stoked on the tales that had been told by Walter Hoffman (1948) and Burrhead Drever (1949). Buzzy eventually ended up making Hawaii his home.¹⁴

In tracing back his earliest memory of Buzzy before Buzzy moved to Hawaii, big wave rider and oceanographer Ricky Grigg recalled that he himself “got into surfing” at the beginning of the 1950s, “because I was there and it was happening around me. My sister liked Tommy Zahn. He lifeguarded at Malibu and got her interested in surfing. She became the hottest gal on the whole coast.

“Buzzy Trent was my hero. I used to sit at his lifeguard station and listen to him tell stories. He took me surfing when I was nine years old. My sister was out there with us. It was like the beginning of a whole subculture. Hearing about the other surfers in these little pockets up and down the coast, we almost became mythological to each other. Then we started traveling and meeting at different spots and it was great. We built on each other’s experience.

“When I was eleven I got hurt pretty badly while surfing at State Beach. On a wipeout, my board whipped up under my ribs real hard and busted my spleen in half. Buzzy Trent was ten or fifteen yards ahead of me in a sand-buster and he got me to the beach. For three or four minutes, I couldn’t get any air. Buzzy was doing what he could and, finally, I started breathing again. Then Buzzy took me to the hospital in his ‘39 Packard.”¹⁵

When Buzzy was in possession of an old Chevy business coupe with handmade wooden surfboard rack screwed into its dented and rusting roof, Peter Dixon observed him one summer’s Malibu day in 1952. “It’s crowded. Seven guys out at first point. The surf is five to six and peeling to the pier.” In the water were, “Dave Rochlen, Matt Kivlin, Buzzy Trent, Peter Cole, and Chuck King. They’re all in the lineup and waiting their turn. Back then no one took off in front of someone else.

“Trent, Cole, and Rochlen were my heroes. Buzzy because he was a great football player/surfer who overcame polio to surf again. Cole, one of the fastest swimmers on the West Coast, was a fellow beach lifeguard. Rochlen’s mystique was hard to fathom. He had that gleam in his eye that wouldn’t tolerate bullshit.... Chuck King, another beach guard, was a bit older than the others. That summer Chuck introduced me to my future wife...

“The surf was ‘bitchin’ and I watched Buzzy ride a fast Malibu wave right into the rusted wire fence that separated the Adamson Estate from the public beach. Buzzy walked up the dirt path... He spotted my new board, showed interest. I asked Buzzy if he’d like to surf the balsa. He nodded in the affirmative, yanked the balsa from the back of the Zephyr and ran for the water. Buzzy didn’t waste words.

“Buzzy was fantastic. The board that I had lovingly shaped seemed to come alive under his agile maneuvering. After a twenty minute display of his muscular, wave riding talent, Buzzy paddled in and returned the board. This time he spoke. ‘Worst board I ever surfed. Thanks, kid.’

“A week later my draft notice arrived... I was off for the Korean War. Good-bye Malibu, college, beach lifeguarding...”¹⁶

The Korean War began June 25^th, 1950 and lasted to July 27^th, 1953. It was a war between North Korea, with the support of China and the Soviet Union, and South Korea, supported by the United States and the United Nations. Even though surfers were drafted into the military and some fought in Korea, surfing was not effected by this war to the degree it had been by World War II. Even so, this three year war came dangerously close to causing another world war.

Sonny Vardeman, who started surfing in 1948, recalled how he and his friends looked at the more established surfers in the early fifties: “Buzzy Trent, Joe Quigg, Dale Velzy, Bob Simmons and George Downing were all six or seven years older than we were. They’re the guys we watched. George lived in Hawaii, but came to the Mainland for paddleboard races. Buzzy was a lifeguard around Santa Monica and Malibu. He went over to the Islands in the early fifties and became one of the pioneers of modern surfing at Makaha and of big-wave surfing.”¹⁷

Greg Noll’s Beginnings

In his autobiography, Greg Noll wrote, “If I’ve learned anything in the past decade or two, it’s that you never have friends like the ones you make when you’re young...” He proceeded to tell the story of his beginnings at Manhattan Beach and the Manhattan Beach Surf Club. “I’ve been stoked on the ocean since I was a kid. I got hooked on fishing when I was six, and learned to surf a few years after that at Manhattan Beach Pier.

“My mother and I had moved from San Diego to Manhattan Beach in 1943. We’d lived in San Diego since I’d been born, in 1937... In Manhattan Beach we lived about seven houses north of the Manhattan Beach Pier. Whenever I could I’d stay out on the pier all day and into the evening, learning about the fish, the ocean and the tides from the older fishermen. By the time I was eight [1945], I’d got myself a job dishing bait on the pier...”¹⁸

Below the pier, the Manhattan Beach Surf Club was in full swing, with Dale “The Hawk” Velzy presiding. The surfboard shaping going on underneath the pier fascinated the kid and he spent hours just standing around and watching.

“I was kind of like a mosquito always buzzing around Velzy,” Noll recalled. “I had to get in there and see what was going on, boy, whenever he would put down a tool, I’d be right there to grab it. God I just drove him nuts, every time I’d pick up his drawknife, the Hawk would scream, ‘Hey, put that down son, you’ll cut yourself.’ Somehow I had this hunch that he would eventually teach me. After months of dogging his every step and being his shadow, I was allowed to do some small task. I think it was sweeping up the balsa shavings. I was so pumped, it was like I’d arrived. It was totally bitchin’.”¹⁹

“I started surfing in 1948,” Noll wrote, “when I was eleven, during the summer before seventh grade. Every day, as I was walking to and from the bait house, I’d see Jack Wise, Barney Briggs, Larry Felker, Dale Velzy and all the other guys who made up the Manhattan Beach Surf Club, surfing the waves beside the pier. It looked like so much fun, I thought, ‘I’ve just gotta do that.’ So I cornered some guy with an old redwood surfboard and got him to sell it to me. He took my money for some old hunk of junk that he was probably going to push off some cliff for a surf sacrifice. Instead he sacrificed it to me for fifteen dollars.

“It was a lot of money and a lot of board to be pushing down the street. It would take me forty-five minutes just to get the board in the water. It was made of solid redwood and weighed about a hundred and ten pounds - twenty pounds more than I weighed! I nailed some rollerskate wheels onto a wood plank and used that to push the board down to the beach. My mom would help me push it to the steps at the pier. Then I’d five the board a shove and watch it bounce down the steps. The fin would come off every time, so I left a couple of sixpenny nails at the base of the stairs near a rock that I’d use to pound the fin back on. Then I’d drag the board to the water and try to surf it.

“When I was done for the day I’d leave the board under the pier, sometimes for two or three days at a time, as long as the surf looked good. If it looked like it was going bad for a while, or if I had to be someplace else for a few days, I’d get someone to help me carry the board back up the stairs and put it back on my skate plank. Then I’d push it home, seven houses the other side of the pier...”²⁰

Mike Stange, a friend of Noll’s, recalled his start, at about the same time. “In 1947 my older brother, Pete, became one of the very first county beach lifeguards, so I grew up around the water and around some real characters. Fred Beckner, a city lifeguard, used to take me and my neighbor Don out into the old channel at Playa del Rey in the middle of winter on rubber surf mats when the surf was huge. We’d go out beyond the jaws of the two jetties and pick up waves that must have been twelve feet high. I remember I could see the beaches on both sides of the jetties, Venice and Del Rey, when I was on top of the wave, ready to speed down its face. I could hear Beckner, laughing and shouting at us, ‘O.K., O.K., ha ha, paddle, paddle, take off!’ Don and I were about ten. The old-timers didn’t have much pity.

“In those days the lifeguards used hollow boards made by an early redwood-board surfer, Pete Peterson. We called them kook boxes because you felt like a kook on them. I remember riding one of them at Playa del Rey. You’d stand up way on the back to turn the thing. There was no way you could really maneuver it like a surfboard.

“I started surfing at El Porto [1949], about a year after Greg started at Manhattan Beach. I was going to El Segundo High and very few people surfed El Porto. Of course, I knew of Greg, because the surfers at the Manhattan Beach Pier were the main group, the innovators of everything.”²¹

“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,” continued Noll. “A few summers ago, I built a surfboard for my two youngest kids... Within a half-dozen waves they were standing up. I spent my entire first summer trying to catch a wave. I’d take that board out and just stuff it into the sand and scare the sand crabs, time after time. When I finally did catch and ride a wave, I felt like I had conquered the world.”²²

“You’ve got to watch out for these bony-kneed kids,” cautioned Bev Morgan to Dewey Schurman. “Greg Noll was the skinniest, boniest-kneed kid. For sport we used to pick him up from behind, hold him around the chest and squeeze him until he would pass out. We were all just dumb kids then, and lucky we didn’t blow his heart up. Pretty soon he’d pass out, and then we’d let him go. Usually he’d pass out for five minutes or so. One time he stayed passed out all night and I really got nervous and quit doing it.”²³

Years later, continued Morgan, Noll “turned into a 280-pound giant. He didn’t have a neck. His head just went down into his shoulders. He walked up to me one day and said, ‘Do you remember the times you used to squeeze my chest and make me pass out?’ And he grabbed me by the head and started squeezing my skull. Everything went black. My brain was going black. He was so strong I couldn’t believe it. And from then on, I always took good care of bony-kneed kids.”²⁴

Sonny Vardeman: “Greg [Noll] and I have been friends since grade school. While he belonged to the Manhattan Beach Surf Club, I was a member of a surf club called the Hermosa Beach Seals, along with our friends Mike Bright and Steve Voorhees. We’d see each other at the beach all the time. During the early fifties, there were very few surfers. You’d see the same guys at the different spots up and down the coast. That’s how we all got to know each other.

“In high school, we all hung out on the beach together. Mike Bright and a few of us played on the football and basketball teams, then surfed during the summer. Greg wasn’t much into high school athletics. He hung out at the Manhattan Beach Surf Club, spent most of his time on the beach. Greg is a very proud man. He doesn’t like to be a loser. I think that’s what made him good in paddleboard racing. I also think that was one of the reasons he didn’t go out for high school athletics. If Greg can’t do something well, he won’t participate in it.

“Greg devoted most of his energy to surfing...²⁵

Sonny Vardeman: “Greg [Noll] really learned about big-wave riding from Buzzy. If you compare films of Buzzy and Greg, you can see that Greg emulated Buzzy’s style. Greg admired George Downing, but he emulated Buzzy’s style.”²⁶

The Manhattan Beach Surf Club

Before Greg Noll was even a gremmie, “The Manhattan Beach Surf Club began as just a bunch of loose guys,” Noll wrote. “When I started hanging around them, my parents thought it was a healthy thing. They had nothing else to compare it to. The only thing they would get concerned about was the outward appearance of some of these guys. They looked really scroungy.

“Surfing in those days was different from what you see today. Surfers were grubby guys who spent most of their time in the water. Some worked as lifeguards. Some didn’t work at all. They spoke a funny language and nobody understood them. The city fathers had given the Manhattan Beach Surf Club a little spot under the pier, hoping that they’d clean up their act and not spread themselves all over the beach. The city also gave them a bunch of rules that nobody bothered to obey.

“One of these rules was that there could be no members in the club under eighteen. I guess the city figured that these guys would be a bad influence on minors. It’s true, they were an influence on this minor and on my friend and surfing accomplice Bing Copeland, but I doubt that either of us would have called their influence ‘bad.’

“Bing Copeland started surfing that same summer that I did. There was another kid, Buzzy Bent, who surfed at his home turf of Windansea... in 1948, the three of us were the only young kids surfing in Southern California.”²⁷

According to Jerry Cunningham, retired Chief of the L.A. County Lifeguards and himself one of the original members, “Members included Dale Velzy, Bill and Bob Meistrell (who later became owners of Body Glove), myself and about 15 other guys, mostly lifeguards, plus two junior Club members -- Bing Copeland and Greg Noll.”²⁸

“Since Bing and I hung around the club so much of the time,” recalled Noll, “and eventually learned to surf pretty well, the guys in the club made us honorary members... We went to all the meetings and hung out with these guys for several years. We grew up quickly, surrounded by guys eighteen and older, in their prime. They lived to surf, drink, raise hell and score heavily with women. I saw these guys going up and down the coast on surf trips, drinking and bagging girls, and all I could think of was ‘What a neat life!’

“... After a summer of being hauled up and down the coast from Malibu to Windansea by assorted characters from the Manhattan Beach Surf Club,” continued Noll, “starting seventh grade was quite an adjustment. I no longer had much in common with other kids my age. They were playing silly games, pulling girls’ pigtails. All the while I’m wondering, ‘Where are the wine and women?’”²⁹

“Mike Stange and I got into surfing at the absolute perfect time, during the last glimmer of the redwood/balsa days,” continued Noll. “In many of the photographs from that era, you see redwood and balsa boards side-by-side. When I first started surfing, 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.

“Then along came the gremmies -- me, Bing Copeland and Buzzy Bent -- watching these guys stick those long redwood boards in the shorebreak and pearl on them. There was no scoop on the nose of those boards, and they were so heavy that one arm became longer than the other when you carried them down to the water. Still, surfing looked like a neat thing to do, once you mastered it.

“You hear about those of us who began surfing during that era as the ‘pioneers of modern surfing,’ but I don’t think any of us had any sense of history about what we were doing. We were having fun. It does intrigue me that our era produced so many distinct individuals. I don’t see that happening as much today...”³⁰

“During eigth grade I used to go down to the pier in the mornings to surf before school,” said Noll. “I’d wake up Bev Morgan at the Manhattan Beach Surf Club, and he’d go with me. Morgan was already out of high school and drove this cut, chopped and lowered Chevy with chrome pipes and a hole in the back window where the surfboards could stick out. That Chevy was quite a showpiece and any kid’s dream car.

“Morgan and I had a deal. In exchange for a big, hot breakfast at my house after surfing, he’d drive me to school. We timed it to perfection. When all the kids were lined up, waiting to go into class, we’d roll up in the Chevy, revving the motor -- rummmm, rummmm, rummmm. Morgan would get out, open my door and dust me off with a whisk broom, as though he were my personal chauffeur. All my buddies and teachers were there, watching our routine. I loved seeing their reactions...”³¹

Dale “The Hawk” Velzy

Greg Noll, Mike Stange, Bing Copeland and Bev Morgan were in the same orbit as Dale Velzy, one of the great surfer/shapers of the Twentieth Century. Velzy started making boards in the 1940s and went on to gain notoriety in the 1950s for his balsa shapes and, later, in the 1960s for his polyurethane foam boards.

A story is told of the first meeting between Velzy and then-gremmie Lance Carson on May 3, 1947. Carson would go on to legendary status at Malibu:

“The distinctively pungent aroma of fresh cut balsa and sea water permeates the air,” when Dale Velzy, bulldog tattoo on his arm, is approached by Donald Carson and his son, Lance. Velzy pulled from a pint bottle of some sort of alcohol, while he explained to the Carsons about the different grades of balsa. “You see, the splotchy smoky streaked wood is the lightest, and the AA grade speckled balsa is your most consistent.”³²

The elder Carson was an engineer who worked on Northrop’s flying wing. Utilizing the knowledge he got from talking with Velzy, he worked at night on a 5-foot-long, V-bottomed, chambered balsa surf-foil for Lance, which he finished on May 19, 1947. Under Velzy’s supervision, Lance learned how to use his first board.³³

“Velzy’s a classic,” agreed Greg Noll. “Absolutely an incredible person. What I like about him is that he’s never changed. He’s still shaping boards at his house. Last time I saw him, he was hand-shaping hot curl redwood boards -- wall hangers. He told me that each one takes about a month to make. He was selling them for a thousand bucks apiece to rich guys... Velzy is still a fifties hustler... The beauty of these boards is incredible. He puts about six coats of resin on them and hand rubs it out. There is no one doing anything as beautiful today as Velzy is doing with these boards. Guys who shape foam boards today, who never had any experience on redwood, would go nuts if they had to lay a power planer on one of those redwoods...

“There are some real good stories about Dale Velzy. Like most South Bay surfers, he also worked for the lifeguard service. He had the night shift. He was supposed to check all the towers, from El Porto to Hermosa Beach, to make sure there was no vandalism. Half the time he’d crawl in one of the towers and sleep through his shift.

“One day, a body floated up off of the Manhattan Pier. The ‘guards had to go out and get it. It had been dead about a week. They put the body in one of those body baskets and wrapped a bunch of towels around it. When they got the guy into shore and the coroner’s office took over, they just threw the towels in the back of a tower, intending to take care of them later.

“So here comes Velzy on the night shift, looking for a place to crap out. Parks his truck, unlocks the tower door and dives into this inviting-looking pile of towels. I guess he didn’t smell the rotten skin until it was too late. Legend has it that Velzy was still in the showers at Hermosa three days later, scrubbing with a wire brush.”³⁴

“In the summertime, about 12 of us guys would sleep in front of the Manhattan Beach Surf Club. During the day, there were so few people around that we could just leave our sleeping bags right there in the open. One day, Bing, Bev Morgan and I were surfing at the Palo Verdes Cove and we found a dead skunk that someone had recently run over. We threw a line around its legs and dragged it back to the pier behind the car -- and we put it in Velzy’s sleeping bag.

“Now, Velzy was a notorious womanizer. Out late every night. That particular night, we all bunked down in our sleeping bags and waited for Velzy to roll in. We had pushed his bag out a ways from ours. The smell coming from it was horrible. About two in the morning, here comes Velzy after a hot date, just drunk enough not to realize what was going on. He crawls into his sleeping bag with the dead skunk... suffice it to say, it was a classic prank...³⁵

Bev Morgan recalled this prank, also. “Bing Copeland, Noll and I were coming back from down south one day in my Chevy,” said Morgan. “In Palos Verdes right around the Cove, Greg spotted a run over skunk. This thing was ripe. I wouldn’t let them put it inside of my car. So we attached it to a drag line and towed it. On the curves, I’d slide the car which would whipsaw the skunk right up to the passenger car door. God it smelled horrible. The look on Greg’s face when this happened was pretty funny. When we got back home, I thought that the deal was over, but Noll decided to put the carcass inside of Velzy’s sleeping bag. Later that night Dale stumbled in from a date a little drunk and jumped right into his bag. Damn, that sobered him up in a hurry. Velzy went off and buried it, but his loyal dog Kahuna would keep digging it up and bringing it back. He’d try to get rid of it, but the dog would find it every time. After a couple of weeks of this, everything Dale owned reeked of dead skunk; his clothes, his dog, his car, all smelled to high hell. A month later he was still taking long showers trying to get rid of the stench.”

“God it smelled bad,” admitted Velzy, “you have no idea how terrible it was.”³⁶

On April 10, 1949, Sabu and Velzy wrestled in the shorebreak with a dead 250 pound sea lion. The men proceeded to remove the eye teeth of the seal with their bare hands. A couple of hours later, they were sporting traditional Chumash ceremonial necklaces made out of seal teeth.³⁷

The Bait Boy’s 1st Shape

“Everything went really well between Velzy and me for about three years,” Greg Noll recalled, after he and friends pulled the dead skunk prank on Velzy. “He built boards at the Manhattan Pier and I hung around all the time, soaking up all I could about shaping balsa-wood boards.”³⁸

“For three years, we got along pretty good,” Noll reiterated. Velzy moved out from under the pier to a shop location not far away. “One day Dale and Bill Barr were walking out the door of his new Center Street shop which was just up the alley from the pier. They were going out to have lunch and do some drinking. A 12’6” Pacific Systems board was there that he was reshaping for a customer, so I asked him, ‘Hey, Hawk, mind if I scrub on this a little.’

“This same interaction had occurred hundreds of times in the past always with the identical negative conclusion. No one knows why, but this time it was different, for without seeming to pay any attention, Velzy replied, ‘Sure grem, take a couple od swipes, but stop cutting before you fuck it up.’”³⁹

“I jumped on it,” continued Noll, “and balsa was flying all over the place. I was going nuts like an elf locked in Santa’s workshop. In a few minutes it was obvious that I’d already gone too far and there was no hope of turning back now. My only chance was to finish this bugger off before they got back. I was really afraid of blowing it and buckets of sweat were streaming off of me and going all over the board. When they got back they were really shit-faced, and I was shaking like a leaf because the judgement day was at hand. There was no doubt that the Hawk was going to kill me. Why oh why hadn’t I stopped? I knew I’d screwed up bad. My asshole was puckering up because I was so nervous.”⁴⁰

“One day,” in 1950, Noll wrote in his autobiography about the day he reshaped his first board, “Velzy and Billy Barr decided to go to lunch together. He’d been working on a board and I asked him if I could just take off the rough wood with a drawknife while he was gone. Velzy said, ‘Yeah, but don’t do any more than that or you’ll screw up the board.’

“Velzy and Barr ended up in some saloon until late afternoon. Rolled in shit-faced about four o’clock. By that time, I had finished shaping the whole board. Velzy walked in, picked up the board, looked down the deck. Looked over at me. Looked down one rail, looked over at me. Looked down the other rail, looked over at me. Looked at the bottom...”⁴¹ The board was now 9’3” and Velzy thoroughly inspected it while the 13-year-old Noll held his breath. Velzy finally said, “Not bad, now get out of here you little shit, you’re on your own now,”⁴² which amounted to graduation from the School of Velzy.

The Pacific Systems board was Jerry Cunningham‘s, a lifeguard at Manhattan Beach and a member of the club. “I shortened my board,” Cunningham wrote, “and tried to improve its shape, but wasn’t too successful. Simmons boards were becoming the rage around 1951 and all balsa boards started to appear. Dale Velzy opened his first surfboard shop, as I remember, in a small building on the north side of Center Street (the pier street) at the alley, just up the hill from the pier. Greg Noll, who was probably just starting high school at the time, worked for Velzy in his shop.

“So -- I took my board, which had redwood rails, balsa center with a 3/4” redwood stringer down the center, to Velzy, and asked him to saw off the rails, laminate on balsa, reshape it into a ‘new’ board and glass it. When I got it back, it was 9’3” long (it was 12’6” when I bought it!) and had a great (for the time) shape.

“Dale told me that he let Greg Noll shape my board (under his watchful eye), and I remember that this was the first board that Greg had completely shaped.

“I surfed the board until November 1952 when I went into Navy Flight Training. I got my wings in April 1954, and was assigned to a squadron based at Barber’s Point, Oahu. It couldn’t have been better. The Navy shipped my board over as ‘household effects’ and I surfed with it at Waikiki (where the gals were), Makaha and Sunset Beach!”⁴³

“The board came home with me (and my new wife),” Jerry Cunningham added, “in November 1956. I went back to work on the beach, back to college and I surfed it occasionally for the next few years. Finally, the board went up in my garage for retirement.”⁴⁴ It was there that sufboard collector Griff Snyder found it in 1991 and later reunited it with Greg Noll in the mid-1990s.⁴⁵

“That was the last board I ever shaped for Velzy,” Noll recalled in his autobiography. “Time to wean the gremmie.

“Two months later, I was doing reshapes, and not long after that, I was shaping new boards under my own name. Velzy and I remained good friends all through the years, but I wasn’t his little gremmie any more. I was the competition.”⁴⁶

Velzy, wrote Nat Young, had been “forced to move his shaping trestles,” from the Manhattan Beach Surf Club, “to under the pier when the other members complained about the amount of balsa shavings strewn all over the club room!”⁴⁷ He moved to a commercial structure close to the pier and it was here that Greg Noll did his first reshape. According to Young, Velzy then “moved to Malibu“ where “he wanted to ride better quality waves than his native South Bay could offer, and he wanted to refine his surfboard designs. However, Malibu was still quite isolated and he found there was only a limited market for his labours of love. So Velzy moved back to South Bay, opening a shop in Venice.”⁴⁸

“There weren’t that many people on the coast then who could shape balsa wood,” exlained Noll. “Besides Velzy, there were Bob Simmons, Joe Quigg, Matt Kivlin, Dave Rochlen and Hobie Alter. Hobie was just getting under way at that time. Rochlen, Kivlin and Quigg were the Malibu gang. Their ‘Malibu boards‘ were more maneuverable than anything around and revolutionized board design during that time.

“Most of the boards came out of garage operations... Velzy was really the first that I know of to have a full-on, full-time surf shop.

“Velzy has been from the outhouse to the penthouse,” summed-up Greg Noll. “He’s a living museum piece. He’s still shaping boards on special order and he’s enjoying himself. He’s got his niche in life and he seems satisfied with what he’s doing. Some guys get to a certain point, a certain age and reach a peaceful thing. I think Velzy is there. The guy is still my hero.”⁴⁹

John Severson at San Clemente

“San Clemente,” recalled John Severson, “was discovered in the late forties by a loose-knit group of guys we called ‘The Pasadena Playboys.’ They surfed San Onofre, played two-man volleyball and threw parties. They came from somewhere beyond Santa Ana. We were suddenly involved in an information blitz, and more importantly, their little sisters.”⁵⁰

John Severson would go on to make a name for himself in the 1950s as a surfer, the early 1960s as a surf filmmaker, and from 1960 on, as the founder and editor of Surfer magazine. But, in the 1940s, he was just growing up in the San Clemente area -- a gremmie.

About his first surfboard, John Severson’s brother Jim remembered: “I bought that board from [Doheny lifeguard Dave] Tansey in 1949 for $15 cash. Once you got it moving, you’d shuffle to the back and stomp on the right corner. After that you’d shuffle to the middle and stand around. Doheny was a long, smooth right-hander and nothing could stop you. After two years and six reshapes (mostly due to water logging), we sacrificed it one night at a keg party in a roaring bonfire. Fittingly at Doheny Beach. Used surfboards were coming down the pike fast and cheap now that the new Malibu Chip was popular. From $10 to $40 you could get a hollowed redwood with plywood deck, redwood-balsa combos and an enormous variety of home-conceived, Popular Mechanics-style ‘surfing boards.’ John bought a 13 foot virtually square plank for $2 and put it up for rent for 50 cents an hour. He didn’t make his money back until he sold it for $3.”⁵¹

“I remember Hal Sachs,” brother John recalled, “Don Small, Roger Moore, Jim and Jack Klein, Grubby Clark, Frank Dowdall, Bud Burrell and others telling us about the real world, surfing, the rules of beach V-ball, and introducing us to the ‘Malibu Chip,’ beer, ‘tough skin’ to cover our fried noses and lips, and don’t forget their sisters.” About The Pasadena Playboys specifically, John Severson said, “They were pretty good role models because they were all college men and dedicated to their educations, as well as their summers.”⁵²

“We went through our cast-off boards in a few years, and by about 1950, had new Malibu’s. This is when we started to regularly surf the pier and T-Street. The earlier boards were too clumsy for the quick pier waves. Lifeguard Hal Sachs was one of the first we saw surf at T-Street and the pier, and that opened our eyes. We joined him, and for a few years were the San Clemente Surfers -- the first locals. It was an afternoon party at the pier, and later, mornings too, when we were lifeguards.”⁵³

“We used that pier,” recalled Vince Nelson. “I remember Jimmy’s duel with the pilings; Don Quixote on a surfboard. Jim reasoned (incorrectly) that you could ride next to the piling, reach out and throw one arm around it while executing a hard turn, and thereby do a 360º ending up in the original direction. It was so bitchin’ watching Jimmy swivel onto the piling and shred down the mussels and barnacles as his board definitely continued its original direction. Never one to give up, Jimmy then reasoned (also incorrectly) that as you rode under the cross member between pilings you should be able to reach up and grab the beam and your momentum would swing you enough to kick up onto the top of the beam. Jim failed to take into consideration that while his fingers were clutching the top of an 18” beam, his forearms would not be free to swing up without breaking. He had the momentum alright! As his forearms hit the bottom of the beam, his fingers left the top and he met his board in the reverse prone position in an ass-busting melee of soup, pilings and Severson.”⁵⁴

“Ohh,” Nelson continued, I “remember Santa Ana conditions with a red tide thrown in. Surfin’ after dark and diving to the bottom, then waving arms and legs creating a phosphorus spectacular. Earl Miller sleeping under the pier with a hammock strung between pilings. Try that nowadays. During one such evening, I slid through the pilings and got out on the North side of the pier. I went up to the lifeguard room and stashed my board, got dressed and ambled back to some south side pandemonium. I asked a guy what was going on and he told me some guy named Vince hit the pier and might have drowned. Everyone was looking for his body. Of course, I caught a ration for that. I’m not sure my return was popular after all the anxiety... like I did it on purpose.”⁵⁵

“You know,” Jim Severson took up where Vince Nelson left off, “at first the south side of the pier was the popular side. Rubes and kooks went to the north side. That changed a few times over the years. In the late forties, Buddy Gable installed a set of rental cabanas, we knew when they were empty and it was party time.

“Wheels became everything as we grew up. Earl Miller had a Model A Coupe with a rumble seat, and 3 or 4 of us could get to San Onofre with some planning. Earl would get in, Bill Taylor in on the other side. I would put boards on both sides of the car in ‘L’ brackets Earl welded on. Then I’d throw my board in the rumble seat and climb in on it. No one could get out until the whole process was reversed. We surfed all year long without wetsuits. You’d just pick up an old wool sweater at the Goodwill for 25¢ and think you were warmer. The kelp was so thick, sailing down a wave the skeg got caught and you’d go flying through the air. But, boy was it glassy. Then the kep cutters came.

“A crowded day at the pier or T-Street was 3 or 4 guys. But with a bigger lifeguard staff and a few more surf-struck kids, it was growing.”⁵⁶

“Capistrano High School served from San Clemente to the hills of what is now Mission Viejo, and to Salt Creek (just hills behind the beach),” remembered John Severson. There were 160 in school when I graduated in ‘51, and just three of us surfed. Vince, my brother Jim and I. Walt and Ted were off in Military Academy, and we missed them. We were definitely oddballs among the cheerleader-jock hierarchy, but we didn’t care. We’d experienced a freedom and were getting pretty addicted to it. You’d talk surfing to other kids in school and no light bulbs flickered. Nothing. So we just stopped talking. Jim and Vince wouldn’t go out for football, so some farm toughs threatened them. ‘O.K.,’ said the surf muscled Jim and Vince, but the enforcers never showed.”⁵⁷

John Severson’s Cinematic Beginnings

“Around ‘46,” John Severson recalled his early interest in photography, “my mom was throwing out a defective Brownie camera, so I grabbed it and started shooting the beach life. Discouraged with the results, I got a better camera, and then around ‘49 or ‘50, I got a Mercury that shot 1/2 frame 35mm. You got 72 transparencies on a 36 exposure roll. It took me a year to shoot a roll. Then in ‘51, a camera shop friend talked me into a Keystone 16mm movie camera for $50. Film was about $10 a roll, so I could only shoot about three a year. I bought some Army surplus black and white, and started building a collection.

“I went straight to the surf with my film career,” Severson said, “and was soon known as the ‘Sam Katzman‘ of San Clemente. We were stunned when the first roll of us surfing the pier flickered onto the silver screen.”⁵⁸

“We had our apartment across from the City Hall,” Vince Nelson recalled. “Upstairs with a garage that opened onto De La Estrella street. That was where John’s cinematic career was born. I had been part of a lifeguard rescue of a prominent S.C. attorney’s wife, and in appreciation he left a case of beer on our doorstep once a week (got to remember to check that doorstep). As things happen in a small town, word got around and the lifeguards and some other locals showed up and hooted and enjoyed the show. We just ran that first reel over and over. John’s fertile mind saw the opportunity to pay for the film and so he said, ‘Hey, let’s charge two bits [25¢] a head and throw in a beer.’ Well, crowds grew as the word spread, and we’d take up a collection for more beer and run a double feature. Maybe it was our hunger to see ourselves on film, or maybe it was the case of free beer that launched John’s career. In any case, a star was born, at least by San Clemente standards.”⁵⁹

Surf, Cars, Parties & Girls

“About this time,” John Severson recalled, “Gordon Clark was raving about a new spot called Trestles, so we started going there. We were already tuned into Cotton’s Point. Barney Wilkes had pioneered Cotton’s, with an open-door policy provided by Lucy Cotton who had a mad crush on Barney. It was like the ‘Wiamea Bay’ of our area. The world, as far as we knew. We hadn’t heard of Hawaii’s big surf yet. One of my first waves at Cotton’s, taking all the courage I could muster, was in front of some blond Malibu hulk (I never saw him coming). ‘Don’t ever take off in front of me kid!’ Slinking back out to the lineup, a friend told me, ‘That’s Tommy Zahn.’ I had snaked a god. There was a sorry ending to that easy access when a bunch of South Bay gremmies trashed the Cotton’s grounds after a surf, and easy access was over.

“This was around ‘50, when the car opened up a whole new world of surf. Simultaneously, ‘Nofre and Doheny were passe, considered ‘arm-chair’ surfing. I was surfing Brook’s Street in Laguna, Salt Creek, Dana Point, Cotton’s and Trestles. And, of course, the pier and T-Street.”⁶⁰

“Now it was us,” Vince Nelson said, “hauling pitiful slobbering gremmies to the killer surf. I remember taking three S.C. yokels to Cotton’s when the surf was 8’ to 10’. As usual, it didn’t look too big from the beach. After ten minutes of paddling, we were scratching to beat an outside set, when behind me I heard panting, wheezing and sobbing. ‘Oh God, don’t let it break... please don’t let it...’

“‘SHUT UP AND PADDLE,’ I yelled. Out in the lineup I looked back. Nobody. Two Dicks and a Chuck retired from surfing that day. Chuck had a sister, but I digress.”⁶¹

“Don’t forget that with cars came girls, and beach parties,” Jim Severson reminded. “Typical beach party: six or seven guys with ukes, a few cases of beer and lots of girls. There were always new girls because of the fabulous State Park system. Two week limited stays forced turnover and a fresh supply, and every other camper had a teenage daughter or two. Vince would go to Santa Ana and bring back horse meat steaks, the size of spare tires. The fires, singing and smooching seemed non-stop.”⁶²

A favorite campsite song of the Severson’s and friends:

“Sing Glorious, Glorious,

one keg of beer for the four of us.

Sing glory be to God that

there are no more of us,

For one od us could drink it all alone.

DAMN NEAR!”⁶³

“There was this stiff, classical two-guitar guy living with Ted and Nancy Newland,” recalled Vince Nelson. “They asked us to loosen him up. By the end of the summer, he was mixing kickapoo juice in the bathtub with both strummers.”⁶⁴

“‘Hey you guys! Here comes the train!’ This plaintive cry was voiced by a party who shall remain nameless, except that his father owned Russell’s Stationary. The signal had been sounded for the male members of the beach party at T-Street to run for the overpass and pee on the train as it passed below us. What bitchin’ things fertile minds can devise... the image of ten or twelve streams has got me. I can’t go on.”⁶⁵

“I really feel fortunate to have done what we did,” Jim Severson appreciated. “A lot of people say they would never want to go through their teenage years again. I’d live those years again and again. It was such a quality time.”⁶⁶

“Time has this strange duality to it,” John Severson retrospected. “It seems slow while it’s happening, but whoosh -- there went 20, 40, 50 years! They say you’re made up of what you remember. I sure remember those kids days in pristine San Clemente. It was like an Edward Hopper painting, pure white houses with red tile roofs framed by vivid blues of the ocean and sky, all tucked in the greens and browns of palms and rolling hills. The skies were clear except for the traditional spring and summer overcast.”⁶⁷

“Then one fall,” continued John Severson, “a light Santa Ana was a little brownish, kind of smokey. What they hell is this? Then they slammed a freeway right through the middle of town, and the people came. They built on our trails and tried to modernize little San Clemente. Every time I go back through, I can still find traces of our past, and still feel the spirit of that great little town. And I’ll never forget that easy life”⁶⁸

O`ahu -- Town & Country, 1950

Back in the Hawaiian Islands -- which was still a territory of the U.S. at this time -- Walter Hoffman recalled his fourth summer on the South Shore of O`ahu.⁶⁹ “Our living quarters, Summer 1950,” amounted to “a $25 a month basement and backyard garden area where we kept our boards.”⁷⁰ In a photograph of that backyard, one can see a variety of surfing equipment of the period like: balsa/redwood planks, a kook box, small plywood paipo board with fin, and Malibu Chips. Summer 1950, the Malibu chips, “were just beginning to arrive in the islands in the hands of guys like Zahn, Quigg, Kivlin and Rochlen who would bring them over and sell them when they left.”⁷¹

Walter Hoffman had begun surfing on the mainland, at San Onofre, in 1945. “I saw it in National Geographic, or... I saw people surfing and I had to try it,” Hoffman said, not recalling which, exactly. He and his brother Flippy attended Hollywood High school and usually surfed Malibu.⁷² They often surfed with the actor Richard Jackel, one of many Hollywood personalities to surf well and frequently in the Malibu area during the 1940s and ‘50s. “... on the beach Dick was just one of the guys,” Walter attested. Remarking about a memorable dive on July 4, 1949, at the Hoffman beach house at Cresent Cove, North Laguna, Walter said: “We were diving for abs and selling them for 25 cents on the beach that summer. Dick came down to join us for the holiday and the first time he ever went spear fishing he got this 40 pound white sea bass. Incredible!”⁷³

On O`ahu, in and around the year 1950, the core surfing scene quickly developed into a bi-polar “town and country” surf culture. The town culture wa based at the Waikiki Surf Club and Tavern in the summertime. In the wintertime, the focus switched to the country culure headquartered on was the West Side, at Makaha.

“The period is primal to the contemporary roots of our lifestyle and sport,” wrote publisher Steve Pezman in his Surfer’s Journal, “both on land and in the water. From the cool surf trunks they had custom made at small shops like Lynn’s in Waikiki and M. Nii Taylors in Waianae, to the first Makaha guns that evolved from the Kivlin and Quigg balsa chip boards that they brought with them from Malibu and cross pollinated with the hot-curls of island watermen/craftsmen George Downing, Wally Froiseth and Woody Brown.”⁷⁴ Legendary Surfer, inventor of the hollow board and skeg, Tom Blake was still around, even. In what was probably his last visit to the islands, he was living on a small boat in the Ala Wai Basin.⁷⁵

In notations Walter Hoffman made for a reprint of some of the photographs he took of the big surf summers of the late ‘40s and early ‘50s, he recalled, “When I first got to the islands [1948] I heard about Makaha. So I started going out there in the winter [1949-50] and found out that, shit man, the place got really big. Dave Mojas and myself were the first two California guys really actively surfing it three to four times a week for the entire winter. That was the year I took movies (which I still have). I also sent still pictures to Flippy (brother Phillip) and Buzzy [Trent] telling them to get over here -- it’s bitchin, and Burrhead saw those and all those guys came the next year for the winter, and we camped on the beach at Makaha. From then on for the next few years we would rent houses near Makaha for the winter and in Waikiki during the summertime.”⁷⁶

“After spending a couple of summers in Waikiki,” reiterated Hoffman, “I went out to Makaha one early winter day, it was four foot and a lot of fun, so I kept coming back. I talked my friends from town into joining me and we’d go out there and camp on the beach. I talked a lot of guys into going out there and surfing with me. We could leave our boards and stuff right there on the beach for days and no one would mess with it or take anything. Buffalo, Henry Preece and Homer would come out from Waianae and surf with us and drink beer in the afternoons after work.”⁷⁷

O`ahu, 1951

By 1951, the Korean War had gone from bad to worse. U.S. General Douglas MacArthur disagreed with U.S. President Harry Truman on conduct of a “limited war“ and was summarily dismissed. Nevertheless, he returned home a hero for his outstanding military service which had spanned the period from World War I in the late 1910s to the Korean War at the beginning of the 1950s. That year also, both Carl Sandburg‘s and Robert Frost‘s Complete Poems were published, as was J.D. Salinger‘s The Catcher in the Rye, James Jones‘ From Here to Eternity and the first popular book on ecology (before hardly anyone knew what the word meant), Rachel Carson‘s The Sea Around Us. The Movie Viva Zapata was released in the United States and popular songs included “Getting to Know You“ and “Kisses Sweeter Than Wine.”⁷⁸

For surfers, it was a time of board transition from redwood/balsa combinations to fiberglassed balsa. Balsawood’s growing popularity notwithstanding, there was still interest in Hot Curl surfboards. For instance, while in Waikiki in 1951, Dave Rochlen “found an old redwood alaia-shaped surfboard that the Hawaiian children would play with and leave on the beach. [Matt] Kivlin traded some resin to Rochlen for the board and brought it home on the ship with him. He changed the overall deck shape, or template, and added as much V as the thin plank would allow. The original beach boy-type shape was probably made in the 1920s or 1930s and has some interesting butterfly patches. Notch in the nose,” so read a description of Matt Kivlin‘s 1951 Hot Curl surfboard. Made out of solid California redwood. At 9’10” long and 20” wide, the board is currently in the collection of Pete and Cathy Noble of Monterrey, California.⁷⁹

For Kivlin and Rochlen, personally, they were hanging with the babes they would later go on to marry. Matt Kivlin was with his first wife, Diane. Dave Rochlen was still courting “Honey Bear” Warren, daughter of then-Governor of California and future U.S. Supreme Court Chief Justice Earl Warren. At the Waikiki Tavern, they were surrounded by friends Tom Moore and Jerry Lynn and other Californians like Hap Jacobs. Keanuinui Kekai was also around and recognized as one of the leading water women in the Islands. It was she who would later marry Dave Rochlen. Even in the mid-1990s, Keanuinui was still winning canoe races as steerswoman for the Outrigger Canoe Club.⁸⁰

Walter Hoffman would soon go into the military, as the Korean War continued. Before that, though, he continued his partnership with Dave Mojas. “Dave Mojas and me at our house on Kuhio Avenue,” noted Hoffman of a famous photograph of the period. “We finished balsa (the new, light Malibu style chip) boards in our backyard there and sold them for $85-100. The guy that controlled the area where hundreds of balsa life rafts were stored on the base at Pearl Harbor ended up being our friend’s, the Patterson brothers, father. So he’d let us drive in there and we’d slice up the balsa rafts and glue the pieces into blanks and plan shape ‘em right there in the base hobby shop -- then we’d drive out with them on the roof of the car, one or two at a time. We didn’t have to pay for balsa or glue, only the cloth and resin. The guards at the base gate didn’t know, they thought they were our surfboards. We’d take them to the beach out at Diamond Head and finish shaping them with draw knives and saw horses right there on the sand -- the wind blew the chips away. The boards were patterned after Matt Kivlin‘s. We did one a week for two years and lived off it. It was beautiful!”⁸¹

“Me and Mojas rented boards we built or bought cheap when guys left for $1 an hour. A young Hawaiian we called ‘Dingo‘ (Philip) helped us run the rental and lived with us. I believe he’s still on the beach to this day.”⁸²

In addition to Makaha, Walter Hoffman was one of the first coast haoles to later ride Sunset Beach and Laniakea.⁸³

It was, “in the early 50’s ,” wrote Steve Pezman, that “another group of California surfers, including Burrhead and Walter Hoffman, joined with George [Downing] and some of the Waikiki crew in exploring Makaha. The Californians camped on the beach at Makaha and quickly adopted to the island style of living. They were treated to the aloha spirit and were much in awe of their Hawaiian watermen friends and their wonderful islands.

“In turn, the Hawaiian surfers had warm feelings for these few Californians who seemed so eager to learn their ways and who exhibited great skill and courage in the surf. Together they shared profound moments of discovery about what could be done on these majestic waves and how much a man could endure and overcome. They rode together with grace and control in warm violent seas that dwarfed those men but not their spirits.

“These early pioneers who traveled to Hawaii brought back to the mainland certain symbols of the warm aloha of Hawaii. They wore the flowered print silk shirts of the islands, casual, colorful, loose and easy. And the thong slaps. And the classic surfer shorts, cut longer to just above the knee to protect the leg from rubbing on the waxed deck. With a lace closure that could be firmly cinched to keep from being rudely removed by the waves. At Windansea Beach and San Onofre grass shacks were built, not unlike the palapas on the beach at Waikiki.”⁸⁴

By the Winter of 1951, there were numerous Californians camped at Makaha. These included: Glen Fisher, Card, Eli, Buzzy Trent, and Walter and Flippy Hoffman. Their local sponsor was George Downing.⁸⁵

Buzzy Trent 2

One of the guys who responded to Walter Hoffman‘s call to hit the Islands was Buzzy Trent. In high school, Buzzy was “a top sprinter and an all-state football player,” commented Peter Cole.⁸⁶ But, during World War II, Buzzy was just a gremmie under Bob Simmons, often going with Simmons on his surfaris through the southern California coastal zone. It was Buzzy Trent and Kit Horn who introduced Peter and Corny Cole to surfing, at Malibu, in 1944. Both would arrive on the North Shore in the later ‘50s, as big wave riders in their own right.⁸⁷

“He went out Makaha with me,” Woody Brown recalled of Buzzy’s first trip to the islands, in 1951.⁸⁸  
“You know, with Wally and I the first time. He’d never been out at Makaha before. ‘Wow!’ he said and his eyes were big. He asked, ‘We’re going out there?’

“‘Sure, sure!’ So, he was game. We paddled out and, boy, we’re sitting there waiting for the wave and these monstrous swells just go by. But, they weren’t big enough to catch, you know. And Buzzy’s eyes bulged. ‘You mean, we’re gonna catch these?’ I’ll never forget that! ‘You mean, we’re gonna catch these?’ But, he did. He got into it.”

“Buzzy came over from the Mainland and he talked about big waves,” Woody retold the story to Ben Marcus, “and we said, ‘Come with us.’ We went to Makaha and it was a pretty good day, maybe 20 feet. I’ll never forget his expression. Buzzy saw these waves, and all you could see were two big eyes, and he said, ‘You mean we’re going to catch these?’ And we said, ‘Sure, Buzzy. Let’s go!’ But he got into it. He got into the swing.”⁸⁹

Mainland, 1951

In the garages of increasing numbers of home shapers, the corkscrew slivers of redwood and balsa were now being replaced by balsa only. Joe Quigg, who was instrumental in combining balsa with fiberglass and resin to make the new Malibu Chips, continued his shaping development. In 1950, Quigg introduced dramatic changes in board design. At a time when most boards weighed between 35 and 100 pounds, and measured 10 to 12 feet in length, Quigg began building a series of progressively shorter and lighter boards for Malibu area surfers. The lengths of boards seemed to come down month by month. From 9 feet 6 inches to 9 feet to 8 feet and shorter. By March of 1951, Quigg had the Malibu board length all the way down to 7 feet.⁹⁰

Quigg’s boards were the first to have the “complete combination“ of basic features integrated into one board. This combination of elements continues to be the basics of surfboard design to present day, with the exception that balsa has been replaced with foam and single fin design has evolved to tri-fin Thrusters. When Quigg was working out his initial designs in 1951, the specifications and construction included: all light balsa with one layer of 4 ounce glass, low rails, flat bottoms, deeper and thinner fiberglass fins, smooth flowing rail and tail rocker, and a bottom rocker template that can fit many modern boards, today. The 7 foot board weighed 19 pounds. Its elliptical, rounded pintail shape caused some surfers to call these designs “egg boards.” In 1953, young innovative surfers like Mickey Muñoz and Bobby Patterson campaigned the “egg board“ up and down the surfing beaches of Southern California.⁹¹

Muñoz and Patterson were not the only ones riding Malibu boards. Surfing was going through another one of its population explosions as dramatically increasing numbers of young surfers were hitting the waves. Greg Noll, Bing Copeland, Mike Bright, Sonny Vardeman and Steve Voorhees were part of this new influx. “Through most of high school, I was gone surfing anytime I could get a ride with the guys I knew from Redondo High,” remembered Noll. “When we were freshmen at Mira Costa High, Bing [Copeland] and I were the only guys who surfed. As soon as school let out, our buddies from Redondo High would be there with their cars and boards, waiting to pick us up. The guys at our school wondered, ‘What is this surfing deal?’

“By the time we were sophmores, in ‘52, guys like Mike Bright, Sonny Vardeman and Steve Voorhees had come into the surf scene and we started seeing more and more younger guys get interested. The school officials were concerned about the surfing craze. Some of the guys who normally would have been going out for sports were surfing instead. They didn’t care about the letter on the sweater and the squealing girls in the grandstands. I shared their feelings.

“During one of my many trips to the principal’s office, I was asked, ‘What do you guys do down there at the Manhattan Beach Surf Club? What are your goals, what do you want to become?’ I told him that I wanted to surf, I wanted to make surfboards, I wanted to go to Hawaii, I wanted to see the world and have a good time. From the principal’s point of view, that qualified me as most likely to end up a beach bum and never amount to shit.”⁹²

Malibu, 1950-51

Word snapshots of Malibu at the beginning of the 1950s show its development into the mainland’s surfing center, taking up where San Onofre had left off:

April 7, 1950, Joe Quigg and his girlfriend Aggie showed up at Malibu with a skimboard. Quigg had already invented “the first honed, narrowed and templated boards especially designed for stand-up skimming,” wrote surfing historian C.R. Stecyk. “These are no mere belly boards sliding along the sand. Nope. Quigg carves to sand berm cuts, climbs and skids over the incoming tidal surge. Aggie slides a few and wrenches her knee. There is no showing off here or taking of credit. This is just a guy and his girl having fun on a flat day.”⁹³

April 10, 1950 - Dale Velzy established his “Driftwood Emporium,” south of the pier, where he sold driftwood sculptures and, as Stecyk put it, “surfboards to the enlightened.”⁹⁴

May 5, 1950, Joe Quigg returned from a short trip to the islands. Back with Quigg were friends Kivlin and Rochlen. There was a lot of talk about the Hot Curl boards Wally Froiseth and the Makaha crew were riding. Quigg shaped his own 12-foot Hot Curl board as an experiment. The Hot Curl was very different from the Malibu Chips he was then also shaping. “Despite the fact that this board was intended merely as an example,” wrote Stecyk, “it developed quite a mystique. Some [surfers] began sawing off the fins of their Malibu boards as an emulation. Even Bob Cooper got deep into self revelation by spending a considerable amount of time with this Quigg hot curl. Eventually, Phil Edwards would also spend months riding this very board. In later years, Joe will be amazed by the surf publications repeated insistence upon making reference to this hot curl board. He will flatly characterize it as ‘A piece of junk, not at all creative, not at all representative.’ In parting he will add, ‘I wish they would burn it.’”⁹⁵

Malibu Perpetual Surfboard

An earlier Hot Curl experiment had been turned into a trophy labelled the “Malibu Perpetual Surfboard.” This was held by Tommy Zahn for his Malibu contest winnings in 1949 and then Joe Quigg in 1950 & ‘51.⁹⁶

The board was originally shaped by Matt Kivlin, around 1948.⁹⁷ Part of a thousand-year-old redwood tree that was felled in the 1930s, the milled pieces of it became a plank surfboard in the Santa Monica Canyon area. Under the influence of the Hot Curl design, Kivlin reshaped it to the dimensions of 8’8” long, 19” wide in the nose, 24” wide down the front length of it, 20” wide at the mid-point, and between 11” & 12” at the tail. It was 3 1/4” thick.⁹⁸

It was in 1948 that Kivlin and Joe Quigg first started messing around with the Hot Curl approach. This particular Kivlin reshaped plank “was recycled by Kivlin into a replica of Rabbit Kekai‘s Queens board,” wrote Craig Stecyk, in an article about how this board was lost for many years and then refound in the 1990s. “It was a sinker and the boys put it aside and moved on. Later when a trophy was required for the two-mile Big Rock Paddling Race to be held on Sunday, September 11, 1949, the abandoned hot curl project was requisitioned. Quigg carved the inscription and thusly the tree turned product turned surfboard turned hot curl turned into a trophy.”⁹⁹

Stecyk went on to muse that, “In a sense, this wooden vessel is representative of the pre-contact impetus of the ancients as interpreted by Kelly and Heath and advanced by the “empty lot,” Queens, Kuhio Beach and Waikiki Tavern crews merging with the Pacific Coast clan as articulated by Peterson, Harrision, Blake and Simmons and carried out by the Malibu irregulars.

“The fact that the Santa Monica Malibu theorists also interjected fins, fiberglass and balsa into the interaction served as a revolutionary accelerator. Zahn was the individual who got Rochlen, Quigg and Kivlin to come over to Oahu. In a feverish couple of years of innovation and cross-pollination, these were the guys who established the future we all now live in.”¹⁰⁰

September 29, 1950 - “The Malibu group ventures south on its way to a gathering of the tribes at the Windansea luau,” wrote Stecyk. “The light, short, all balsa Malibu boards they are equipped with are a source of interest and oftentimes provocation. At San Onofre, for example Burrhead, Hammerhead and the crew are particularly vocal in their criticism of the ‘potato chip boards.’ They dismiss them as being useless, since they could never ‘trim through the soup.’ The Malibu group, remaining silent, is content to surf aggressively around and through the pocket. On the occasion of the big luau, an event at which almost all of California’s surfing populace is in attendance, the Malibu elders sense vindication is at hand. Vicky Flaxman is taken aside and told that she will become the first [mainland] female to surf outside Windansea. Ms. Flaxman is honored, but somewhat apprehensive and agrees to do it as long as the guys remain outside in the lineup with her. Naturally, they don’t, and Vicky is forced to deal with the ten foot faces by herself. Her first wave results in a hideous wipeout and a long swim. The Hammerhead contingent nod their heads in a knowing manner. On her next wave Flaxman takes off far outside and adroitly maneuvers all the way to the beach, where she gingerly steps off onto the sand. The entire beach crowd breaks into applause upon Vicky’s dismount. History had been made, and a point had been proven.”¹⁰¹

Velzy Invents the Hang Ten

One day at Manhattan Beach, “Dale Velzy walked up to the front of his board,” told Bev Morgan to Dewey Schurman. “It was a big Simmons spoon board, and he figured it would support him. So here’s this guy standing within a foot of the nose of his 10-foot board, going across the wave. We couldn’t believe it. This was 1951. Previous to this, you stood a third of the way from the tail. You’d trim up and get on an angle, but there was no running around. If you were really fancy, you’d dip a foot in the water to turn. So here’s Velzy, walking about 6 feet from where you usually stood, right up to the nose. And he went back out and did it again. Then he did this amazing thing. He walked up and put five toes over the nose of the board. And by the end of the day, he was putting all of his toes over the end of the board and standing right on the tip. And that was the start of hanging 10.”¹⁰²

Greg Noll & the Redwood to Balsa Transition

“I learned about shaping balsa wood by watching Velzy at his shop by the Manhattan Beach Pier,” wrote Greg Noll. “Later, when I was fourteen, I teamed up with Mike Bright. He was from Hermosa Beach. We called him Bones because of his bony physique. Bones was a hell of an athlete... Bones and I got a little business going, reshaping balsa boards. Bones had, or thought he had, a little experience in glassing boards. Just like I thought I had experience in shaping them. Guys who were unhappy with their boards would bring them to us. We’d strip them down, I’d reshape them and Mike would fiberglass them. We made some real beauties.

“Except for one particular board. We set it up in Bones’ backyard on a couple of sawhorses. We stripped it down and reshaped it, then Bones started laying on the fiberglass and resin. He accidentally kicked the sawhorse leg and the board fell off into the sand. He tried to brush the sand off, but, of course, it was stuck in the resin. Finally, Bones just stood up and said, ‘Well, you won’t ever have to wax this board. It has built-in traction.’

“The type of fiberglass first used on surfboards required sun-curing. The catalyst then used was activated by the sun. You’d get weird results, like only half the board would set up. You’d finish glassing a board and the sun would go behind a cloud, slimming your chances of getting an even cure. We had to work with stuff like this for a couple of years before any advancements in fiberglass, resins or catalysts occurred.”¹⁰³

“What really was important about the transition from redwood to balsa,” Greg Noll said, getting to the heart of the matter, “was that it caused all hell to break loose. Now surfing styles began to evolve along with equipment changes. Suddenly there was a board you could actually surf. You didn’t have to spend all your time trying to keep the board from pearling and picking sand crabs out of your ears. And, it didn’t take you all summer to learn to catch a wave. The balsa board allowed more people to get into surfing. To really appreciate the evolution of the modern surfboard, every surfer today ought to take out a redwood board and try to catch a wave on the goddamn thing.”¹⁰⁴

Even so, Noll rode these things well. “... I can remember a time,” Ricky Grigg attested, “when no one turned faster than Greg Noll. He took on a different style when he ran into big waves. That’s when he got the name Da Bull. He’d sit out there like an immovable object. But when he was fourteen or fifteen years old, he was the best hotdogger on the California Coast.”¹⁰⁵

––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––

---

¹  Grun, Bernard. The Timetables of History,” Simon and Schuster/Touchstone, New York, N.Y., ©1991, pp. 530-531.

²  Elwell, John. Email to Malcolm, 18 April 2016.

³  Elwell, John. Email to Malcolm, 27 December 2016.

⁴  Elwell, John. Email to Malcolm, 29 December 2016.

⁵  Elwell, John. Email to Malcolm, 29 December 2016.

⁶  Elwell, John. Email to Malcolm, 27 December 2016. Dale Velzy quoted from memory.

⁷  Elwell, John. Email to Malcolm, 14 July 2016. The 1948 was to be published in REEF magazine, date unknown.

⁸  Elwell email to Malcolm, 18 April 2016.

⁹  Elwell, John. Email to Malcolm, 30 December 2016.

¹⁰  Elwell, John. Email to Malcolm, 30 December 2016.

^{11  Elwell, 1994, p. 45.}

¹²  1947 is the date given by Joe Quigg in the Lynch bio in Longboard magazine, but Elwell, Stecyk and Young have it in 1950. It makes sense that it was 1950, as that was the year of the break-up of the Simmons/Quigg/Kivlin collaboration.

¹³  Gault-Williams, Malcolm. Interview with Russ Takaki, March 16, 1997.

¹⁴  Browne, Bud. Gung Ho! ©1963. Peter Cole says to Buzzy, “Buzzy, you came over 11 years ago...” Assuming Bud shot the footage in 1961 or ‘62.

¹⁵  Noll, 1989, pp. 20-21. Ricky Grigg quoted.

¹⁶   Dixon, Peter. “The Complete Surfing Icon,” Longboard, Volume 2, Number 5, February/March 1995, pp. 70-71.

¹⁷   Noll, 1989, pp. 33-34. Sonny Vardeman quoted.

¹⁸   Noll, 1989, pp. 12-13.

¹⁹   Stecyk, Craig. “The Bait Boy’s First Board,” The Surfer’s Journal, Volume 5, Number 4, Winter 1996.

²⁰   Noll, 1989, pp. 13-16.

²¹   Noll, 1989, p. 22. Mike Stange quoted.

²²   Noll, 1989, pp. 16-17.

²³   Surfer magazine, “Greg Noll’s Revenge,” told by Bev Morgan to Dewey Schurman, October 1993, p. 61. See classic Zapata mustache photo of Noll circa mid-1950s.

²⁴   Surfer magazine, “Greg Noll’s Revenge,” told by Bev Morgan to Dewey Schurman, October 1993, p. 61.

²⁵   Noll, 1989, pp. 33-34. Sonny Vardeman quoted.

²⁶   Noll, 1989, pp. 33-34. Sonny Vardeman quoted.

²⁷   Noll, 1989, pp. 16-17.

²⁸   Stecyk, Craig. “The Bait Boy’s First Board,” The Surfer’s Journal, Volume 5, Number 4, Winter 1996. Letter from Jerry Cunningham to “Griff,” December 10, 1991.

²⁹   Noll, 1989, pp. 16-17.

³⁰   Noll, 1989, pp. 93-95.

³¹   Noll, 1989, pp. 18-20.

³²   Stecyk, Craig. The Surfer’s Journal, Volume 1, Number 3, 1992, p. 38.

³³   Stecyk, Craig. The Surfer’s Journal, Volume 1, Number 3, 1992, p. 40.

³⁴   Noll, 1989, pp. 20-27.

³⁵   Noll, 1989, pp. 29-30.

³⁶   Stecyk, “Tales of the Hawk,” p. 40. Bev Morgan quoted; Velzy, also.

³⁷   Stecyk, “Humaliwu,” 1992, p. 59. See classic photo.

³⁸   Noll, 1989, pp. 29-30.

³⁹   Stecyk, Craig. “The Bait Boy’s First Board,” The Surfer’s Journal, Volume 5, Number 4, Winter 1996. Greg Noll quoted.

⁴⁰   Stecyk, Craig. “The Bait Boy’s First Board,” The Surfer’s Journal, Volume 5, Number 4, Winter 1996. Greg Noll quoted.

⁴¹   Noll, 1989, pp. 29-30.

⁴²   Stecyk, Craig. “The Bait Boy’s First Board,” The Surfer’s Journal, Volume 5, Number 4, Winter 1996.

⁴³   Stecyk, Craig. “The Bait Boy’s First Board,” The Surfer’s Journal, Volume 5, Number 4, Winter 1996. Jerry Cunningham, letter to surfboard collector Griff Snyder, December 10, 1991.

⁴⁴   Stecyk, Craig. “The Bait Boy’s First Board,” The Surfer’s Journal, Volume 5, Number 4, Winter 1996. Jerry Cunningham, letter to surfboard collector Griff Snyder, December 10, 1991.

⁴⁵   Stecyk, Craig. “The Bait Boy’s First Board,” The Surfer’s Journal, Volume 5, Number 4, Winter 1996. Jerry Cunningham, letter to surfboard collector Griff Snyder, December 10, 1991.

⁴⁶   Noll, 1989, pp. 29-30.

⁴⁷   Young, Nat. The History of Surfing, Palm Beach Press, NSW, Australia, ©1983, 1987, p. 73. He has it as the Hermosa Surf Club.

⁴⁸   Young, 1983, pp. 72-73. Young gave 1948 as the date Velzy left Manhattan Beach, but this is obviously way off. The Manhattan Beach Surf Club probably got going around 1947-48 and Velzy probably got his first shop together at the beginning 1950s. He went into partnership with Jacobs in 1953.

⁴⁹   Noll, 1989. pp. 29-30.

⁵⁰   The Surfer’s Journal, “Sentimental Journey,” A recollection of growing up in the late forties and early fifties by the “San Clemente Surfers,” Jim and John Severson and Vince Nelson, Volume 4, Number 3, ©Fall 1995, pp. 97-98. John Severson. See also their recollections in Gault-Williams, “The Late 1940s.”

⁵¹   The Surfer’s Journal, “Sentimental Journey,” by the “San Clemente Surfers,” Jim and John Severson and Vince Nelson, Volume 4, Number 3, ©Fall 1995, p. 97. Jim Severson.

⁵²   The Surfer’s Journal, “Sentimental Journey,” by the “San Clemente Surfers,” Jim and John Severson and Vince Nelson, Volume 4, Number 3, ©Fall 1995, p. 98. John Severson.

⁵³   The Surfer’s Journal, “Sentimental Journey,” by the “San Clemente Surfers,” Jim and John Severson and Vince Nelson, Volume 4, Number 3, ©Fall 1995, p. 98. John Severson.

⁵⁴   The Surfer’s Journal, “Sentimental Journey,” by the “San Clemente Surfers,” Jim and John Severson and Vince Nelson, Volume 4, Number 3, ©Fall 1995, pp. 98-99. Vince Nelson.

⁵⁵   The Surfer’s Journal, “Sentimental Journey,” by the “San Clemente Surfers,” Jim and John Severson and Vince Nelson, Volume 4, Number 3, ©Fall 1995, p. 99. Vince Nelson.

⁵⁶   The Surfer’s Journal, “Sentimental Journey,” by the “San Clemente Surfers,” Jim and John Severson and Vince Nelson, Volume 4, Number 3, ©Fall 1995, p. 99. Jim Severson.

⁵⁷   The Surfer’s Journal, “Sentimental Journey,” by the “San Clemente Surfers,” Jim and John Severson and Vince Nelson, Volume 4, Number 3, ©Fall 1995, p. 99. John Severson.

⁵⁸   The Surfer’s Journal, “Sentimental Journey,” by the “San Clemente Surfers,” Jim and John Severson and Vince Nelson, Volume 4, Number 3, ©Fall 1995, pp. 99-100. Jim Severson.

⁵⁹   The Surfer’s Journal, “Sentimental Journey,” by the “San Clemente Surfers,” Jim and John Severson and Vince Nelson, Volume 4, Number 3, ©Fall 1995, p. 100. Vince Nelson.

⁶⁰   The Surfer’s Journal, “Sentimental Journey,” by the “San Clemente Surfers,” Jim and John Severson and Vince Nelson, Volume 4, Number 3, ©Fall 1995, pp. 100-101. John Severson.

⁶¹   The Surfer’s Journal, “Sentimental Journey,” by the “San Clemente Surfers,” Jim and John Severson and Vince Nelson, Volume 4, Number 3, ©Fall 1995, p. 101. Vince Nelson.

⁶²   The Surfer’s Journal, “Sentimental Journey,” by the “San Clemente Surfers,” Jim and John Severson and Vince Nelson, Volume 4, Number 3, ©Fall 1995, p. 101. Jim Severson.

⁶³   The Surfer’s Journal, “Sentimental Journey,” by the “San Clemente Surfers,” Jim and John Severson and Vince Nelson, Volume 4, Number 3, ©Fall 1995, p. 101. Jim Severson.

⁶⁴   The Surfer’s Journal, “Sentimental Journey,” by the “San Clemente Surfers,” Jim and John Severson and Vince Nelson, Volume 4, Number 3, ©Fall 1995, p. 101. Vince Nelson.

⁶⁵   The Surfer’s Journal, “Sentimental Journey,” by the “San Clemente Surfers,” Jim and John Severson and Vince Nelson, Volume 4, Number 3, ©Fall 1995, p. 101. Vince Nelson.

⁶⁶   The Surfer’s Journal, “Sentimental Journey,” by the “San Clemente Surfers,” Jim and John Severson and Vince Nelson, Volume 4, Number 3, ©Fall 1995, p. 101. Jim Severson.

⁶⁷   The Surfer’s Journal, “Sentimental Journey,” by the “San Clemente Surfers,” Jim and John Severson and Vince Nelson, Volume 4, Number 3, ©Fall 1995, p. 101. John Severson.

⁶⁸   The Surfer’s Journal, “Sentimental Journey,” by the “San Clemente Surfers,” Jim and John Severson and Vince Nelson, Volume 4, Number 3, ©Fall 1995, p. 101. John Severson.

⁶⁹   Surfing, “Saturday Night Fever,” Volume 31, Number 11, November 1995. 6th Annual Waterman’s Ball honoring of Walter Hoffman.

⁷⁰   Hoffman, Walter. “Tales of Town and Country,” The Surfer’s Journal, Volume 2, Number 2, Summer 1993, p. 83. See photograph on same page.

⁷¹   Hoffman, 1993, p. 83.

⁷²   Surfing, “Saturday Night Fever,” Volume 31, Number 11, November 1995. 6th Annual Waterman’s Ball honoring of Walter Hoffman.

⁷³   Hoffman, 1993, p. 81. See photos of Walter Hoffman and Richard Jackel and one of Dick Jackel holding up his 40-pound white sea bass..

⁷⁴   Hoffman, 1993, p. 79. Pezman’s intro.

⁷⁵   Hoffman, 1993, p. 86. See photo. No date.

⁷⁶   Hoffman, 1993, p. 79.

⁷⁷   Hoffman, p. 90. See photos on pages 90 and 91. Preece incorrectly spelled “Priest.”

⁷⁸   Grun, pp. 532-533.

⁷⁹   Santa Monica Heritage Museum, “Cowabunga!” exhibit, February 1994.

⁸⁰   Hoffman, 1993, p. 89. See photos on p. 88 & 89.

⁸¹   Hoffman, 1993, p. 83. See photos on same page.

⁸²   Hoffman, 1993, p. 84. See photo, on the same page, of Hoffman and Mojas with rental of “light Malibu surfboards.”

⁸³   Surfing, “Saturday Night Fever,” Volume 31, Number 11, November 1995. 6th Annual Waterman’s Ball honoring of Walter Hoffman.

⁸⁴   Pezman, Steve. “Surfer Style,” special edition of Surfer magazine, 1983. Quoted in Lueras, 1984, pp. 117-118.

⁸⁵   Hoffman, 1993, p. 90. See photos on pages 90 & 91.”

⁸⁶   Browne, Surfing The 50’s, ©1994. Peter Cole.

⁸⁷   Browne, Surfing The 50’s, ©1994. Peter Cole.

⁸⁸   Browne, Gung Ho! ©1963. Peter Cole. reference.

⁸⁹   Marcus, Ben. “Woody Brown: ‘I’d Rather Eat Life,” Surfer, Volume 34, Number 11, November 1993, p. 99. In Bud Browne’s Surfing The 50’s, Peter Cole said that, “Buzzy came over to join Walter and Flippy Hoffman in 1952.”.

⁹⁰   Lynch, Gary. “Joe Quigg and the Shape of Things to Come,” Longboard (formerly The Longboard Quarterly), Volume 2, Number 5, February/March 1995, p. 32.

⁹¹   Lynch, 1995, p. 32.

⁹²   Noll, 1989, pp. 31-32.

⁹³   Stecyk, “Humaliwu,” 1992, p. 57.

⁹⁴   Stecyk, “Humaliwu,” 1992.

⁹⁵   Stecyk, “Humaliwu,” 1992, p. 50.

⁹⁶   Stecyk, Craig. “Perpetual Musings,” The Surfer’s Journal, Volume 5, Number 2, Summer 1996.

⁹⁷   Stecyk, Craig. “Perpetual Musings,” The Surfer’s Journal, Volume 5, Number 2, Summer 1996.

⁹⁸   Stecyk, Craig. “Perpetual Musings,” The Surfer’s Journal, Volume 5, Number 2, Summer 1996.

⁹⁹   Stecyk, Craig. “Perpetual Musings,” The Surfer’s Journal, Volume 5, Number 2, Summer 1996.

¹⁰⁰   Stecyk, Craig. “Perpetual Musings,” The Surfer’s Journal, Volume 5, Number 2, Summer 1996.

¹⁰¹   Stecyk, “Humaliwu,” 1992, p. 60.

¹⁰²   Surfer, “The Birth of Nose-Riding,” told by Bev Morgan to Dewey Schurman, October 1993, p. 59

¹⁰³   Noll, 1989, pp. 31-32.

¹⁰⁴   Noll, 1989, p. 96.

¹⁰⁵   Noll, 1989, pp. 20-21. Ricky Grigg quoted.

Mary Ann Hawkins (1919-1993)

Mary Ann Hawkins was the undisputed standout woman surfer of the 1930s, winning the women's division of the Pacific Coast Surfing Championships in 1938, 1939 and 1940. She was also attractive, prompting one surf journalist to write that she had “the figure and looks of a movie star” and was “grace personified in the water.”[1]

(Mary Ann and Bud Morrisey [alternately spelled "Morrissey"]

Photo by Doc Ball)

Mary Ann was born and raised in Pasadena. Her father was a book-keeper and her mother a collector of antique dolls. At six years old, by her own recollection, Mary Ann was sickly and weak, so her parents enrolled her in a YWCA swim program. A couple of years later, it was Duke Kahanamoku’s swimming that captured her imagination. “I was about 10 when I saw Duke in the pool in Pasadena,” she recalled. “He was this big, beautiful Hawaiian man, making bubbling noises with his mouth and making everyone laugh. Duke would have been around 33. He fascinated me and I’ll never forget the first time I saw him.”[2]

“In 1929,” wrote surf writer Ben Marcus, “she won her first honors for all around swimming and diving with the Pasadena Swim Club and had buried her parent’s mantel piece with 37 first-place ribbons. In 1933, Hawkins competed at the Southern Pacific Association Swimming and Diving Championships and won the 880-yard freestyle, beating the old record by 8 seconds. In 1934, she broke the 800-yard record again, and also won the National Junior championship in the half-mile, and the 100 yard freestyle.”[3]

She recalled that at the age of 15, “because of my love for ocean swimming – ocean races more than pool races – my mother bought a little house down in Costa Mesa, near Newport Beach and Corona Del Mar. That was 1934.” That same year, Mary Ann competed with the Ambassador Hotel Swim Team in an 880-yard paddleboard race and won-against men.[4]

For a brief time, while hanging out with the likes of Tarzan Smith, Mary Ann was part of the Corona del Mar surf crew. While enjoying that status, she may have been part of the first surf expedition to San Onofre. “A group of surfers had come back from Mexico, and on their way back they had spotted San Onofre, and thought it looked like a great spot to surf. So they came on down to Corona del Mar and gathered up a second car load, including me, and the two car loads of us drove down to where they’d seen this fabulous surf. There was no road that we knew of to get in, or else it’s because you had to pay to get in, in those days… we parked on the road, and walked over fields, and went down the side of the cliff there to San Onofre, and surfed that way. And that was the beginning of San Onofre’s surf thing.”[5]

Mary Ann’s stay at Costa Mesa and as a regular at Corona del Mar was brief, as she and her mother moved to Santa Monica in 1935. Now solidly in surf mode, she got her own board, which was almost unheard of in California in the mid-’30s. Although girls were part of the beach scene, few took to riding other than tandem. Also, the weight of surfboards was considerable. They were so heavy that they had to be literally dragged up and down the trail at places like Palos Verdes Cove. At the time, Mary Ann probably weighed less than her surfboard. “I wasn’t very good,” she said modestly, “and I was always the only girl out there surfing.” At Santa Monica, she fell in the Palos Verdes Surfing Club, including Tulie Clark, Hoppy Swarts, Bud Morrisey, Barney Wilkes and E.J. Oshier and her surfing improved.

Mary Ann tried out for the Olympics in 1936, at the age of 17, but didn’t make it in for reasons unknown. Despite this, she never expressed any disappointment that she did not follow in Duke’s wake in competitive swimming.[6]

(Mary Ann and Bud Morrisey)

Even so, her swimming records were impressive. Mary Ann had started her swimming career at age nine and by the age of 17, she was the Amateur Athletic Union (AAU) 500-meter freestyle champion. It is obvious she enjoyed surfing and paddling more, however. Between 1935 and 1941, “she was the darling of the California surf scene,” wrote Matt Warshaw, “winning nearly every women’s surfing and paddleboarding event she entered. She also served as a model for the next generation of California female surfers, including Robin Grigg, Vicki Williams, and Aggie Bane.”[7]

In 1939, Mary Ann “was invited to compete in the 1939 Duke Kahanamoku Swim Meet in Honolulu, where she broke the Hawaiian record for the 220 meter freestyle…”[8]

It was a big jump to make for an eighteen year-old woman, but she took the steamship ride to the Hawaiian Islands and competed in the Pacific Aquatic Festival.[9] She won the women’s half-mile and the 880-yard and broke a record in the 220-yard. More importantly for her, however, was the chance to surf Queens  and meet Duke Kahanamoku, who had inspired her as a young girl. “My very favorite surf spot in all this world is Canoe Surf in Waikiki,” Mary Ann declared many years later. “In 1939, when I was over there, Duke helped me in every way. He’d always have me get to his right, he’d coach me… Duke and his brother and I were a team together. He picked me to team with him, to surf against the Australians.” That surfing competition was cancelled, but Mary Ann came home from Hawaii with her most cherished memento: a photo of her shaking hands with Duke.[10]

From 1938 to 1940, Mary Ann reigned as the women’s division champion of the Pacific Coast Surfing Championships, and was also the paddleboard champion. In the late 1930s, aquaplaning was also a popular sport in southern California. The Catalina Aquaplane Race was a 44-mile pull from Avalon, on Catalina Island, to Hermosa Beach, and Mary Ann won that, as well.[11]

A teenage swimming, paddling and surfing champion in the 1930s, Mary Ann drew lots of attention going on into her 20s. She was featured surfing in a 1938 issue of Life magazine. Shortly afterward and after appearing in newspapers and magazines for her various triumphs and feats, as well as being the poster girl for Palos Verdes,[12] Mary Ann began to attract the attention of Hollywood. She was asked to double for Judy Garland, but was told she was too athletic to fool the camera – Garland was less than five feet tall. After trimming down, Mary Ann’s first role was an extra in the pool doing water ballet for Washington Melodrama in 1941.

Mary Ann doubled for Dorothy Lamour in Aloma of the South Seas (1941) and Beyond the Blue Horizon (1942), and then worked with Johnny Weissmuller in Jungle Jim (1948) and most of the 12 Tarzan pictures that ran from 1932 to 1948. She performed many stunts, including swinging from vines, swimming across burning rivers and putting her head in the mouth of a tiger.[13]

For a while in the 1940s, Tommy Zahn was a contract player at Twentieth Century Fox, dating Marilyn Monroe, Darrilyn Zanuck, and working out with Mary Ann. “She was a great diver… I mean, I’m speaking of platform and springboard. And she was, of course, this stunt woman in Hollywood. She could do just about anything – very well coordinated and easy to work with, a lot of fun to go surf with. She used to work out with me too, and give me a heck of a workout. Great swimmer.”[14]

After WorldWar II, Mary Ann became a regular at Malibu, riding a custom board made by Joe Quigg. “I absolutely loved it,” she recalled, “and that board seemed to pick up waves all on its own. Unfortunately that board was stolen… Then I had Velzy make me a board.”

Mary Ann Hawkins “was the marrying kind,” tying the knot four times. She went from being a Hawkins to a Morrissey to a McGuire to a Sears to a Midkiff. The fact that she had four husbands embarrassed her a bit and, unfortunately, helps obscure her total record of accomplishments. Her first marriage was to surfer/shaper Bud Morrissey and they had a daughter, Kathy. The first marriage ended in the late 1940s and in 1950 she married another waterman named Don McGuire. That marriage produced a son, Rusty, but ended in tragedy when McGuire drowned while boating to Catalina Island with a Hollywood stuntman named Paul Stader. The boat foundered about 10 miles off Catalina. Stader made it to safety, but McGuire did not, leaving Mary Ann with two children.

In 1954, Life Magazine did a feature on the movie Oklahoma which showed Shirley Jones jumping 15 feet from a burning haystack. Mary Ann McGuire broke her ankle doing that stunt – her only serious injury as a stuntwoman.

In 1955 Mary Ann married Fred Sears, a movie director with a long, decent string of credits including Earth vs. The Flying Saucers and the first full-length rock and roll picture Rock Around the Clock. That same year, while working on The Prodigal, Mary Ann Sears wore a costume made of 10 pounds of pearls and performed a fall from a 24-foot platform into a nine-foot diameter, six-foot deep pool on fire.

According to Mary Ann’s personal resume, in 1956 she doubled for Carole Baker and Elizabeth Taylor in Giant, and also had an acting role.

Her marriage with Fred Sears was short. A year after the marriage ceremony, Mary Ann was once again a single mother of two: Rusty McGuire and Kathy Morrissey. She moved the family to Hawai’i in 1956 to work on another movie. She surfed Canoes as much as possible and was hired to do a water show at the Hilton Hawaiian Village during a time when air travel was opening the Hawaiian Islands up as a world-renowned vacation spot.[15]

Mary Ann’s water shows featured special appearances by her friend Esther Williams, beachboy Sam Kahanamoku and Duke Kahanamoku.

Ricky Grigg’s sister Robin provided more detail about Mary Ann’s water shows and her use of the pool to teach swimming. Robin Grigg was one of the most accomplished water women of the 1950s. In 1959, she moved to O’ahu “with a degree in Physical Therapy from Stanford in one hand and a Dave Sweet surfboard in the other.”[16] Robin finished third in the Makaha Invitational that year and lived with Mary Ann for awhile. She lived in Hawai’i from then on. “When Mary Ann got to Hawaii, she befriended Henry Kaiser who owned what would become the Hilton Hawaiian Village,” Robin recalled. 

“Kaiser built her a special pool that was only two or three feet deep and was heated to 90 degrees. Mary Ann began teaching swim classes at Kaiser’s hotel and she specialized in teaching very young babies to swim. I moved in with Mary Ann and her two kids in a two-bedroom apartment on the other side of the Ala Wai Canal, near Iolani High School. I began working with Mary Ann, teaching swimming, and it was a lot of fun.”

Mary Ann also performed water ballet in an underwater swimming show at the Reef Hotel in 1960. “The swimmers could perform in a big pool that had an underwater window into the dining room,” Robin said. “That was popular, and Mary Ann also ran a weekly water extravaganza. I eventually left Mary Ann to start a Physical Therapy practice, but she continued with her swim schools and did very well.”[17]

She not only did well for herself, but also did well for thousands of novice swimmers aged six weeks to three years old. For thirty years, from 1956 to 1986, the Mary Ann Sears Swim School in Waikiki instructed thousands of babies to hold their breath while swimming under water and breathe on the surface. Comfort in the water came naturally to Mary Ann but she believed this affinity was natural to all humans, and she proved it by taking children as young as six weeks old from the bottom of the pool to the top, and teaching them what they instinctively already knew how to do.

“Who knows how many lives Mary Ann saved,” pondered surf writer Ben Marcus who wrote that she knew of at least three, “and who knows how many future surfers – known and unknown – she introduced to the ways of the water.”[18]

Mary Ann’s teaching babies to swim was once quite controversial. The National YWCA, the American Medical Association and the American Academy of Pediatrics all thought her practices with babies less than three years old would lead to ear infections, water intoxication and other viral infections. Their fears were never born out by the reality.

Over the years, her work with children drew the attention of writers both in Hawai’i and nationally. A notable article was published April 22, 1979, in the Sunday edition of the Honolulu Star-Advertiser. It included a glowing testimonial from a parent:

“Barbara Elm, the ecstatic parent of a Mary Ann Sears student claims: ‘As the mother of an 18-year-old swimmer, I believe that no swim school teaches their students as rapidly, and as well, and as successfully at a young age… as Mary Ann Sears, who each year teaches countless infants to swim and graduates dozens of “water-safe” babies.’

“‘It is important to note Mrs. Sears’ credentials,’ Elm continues, ‘because a parent can’t be too cautious where the safety and well-being of his child is concerned.’

“Mary Ann Sears’ credentials would make one’s head spin.”[19]

On ABC-TV’s You Asked For It, Mary Ann held her breath for two minutes and fifteen seconds, setting a world record at that point.

By 1978, Mary Ann had married again, this time to Jack Midkiff. She and Jack moved to a beach house on the northern part of the the island, at Mokule’ia, where they lived happily for seven years. She still surfed, but less and less as she got older. Her last surf session was in April of 1983. She surfed that day to remember her son Rusty McGuire who – like his father before him – died in the water. Rusty had drowned in a tugboat accident in Alaska, shortly before.

“The last time I surfed was out in front of my home in Mokuleia, to remember Rusty,” Mary Ann said. “I just felt that if I got out in the water again maybe I’d be closer to him, closer to God, because Rusty hadn’t yet been found… It was a beautiful day in April, but it was so lonely, because quite often Rusty and I had boogie boarded out there. So that was actually the last [time]… I was ever on a board, and when I caught a wave, I didn’t stand up because I wasn’t in condition anymore to do that.”[20]

In 1985, Jack and Mary Ann Midkiff moved to Tucson, Arizona. Retired there, she played golf, took it easy and “probably spent more than a little time in the pool.” She passed away, from cancer, at the age of 73, in 1993. Her memorial, held at the Outrigger Canoe Club, was attended by hundreds and she was eulogized by every newspaper columnist in the Islands.

“The most prominent thing that comes to mind in speaking of Mary Ann,” Tommy Zahn said in 1990, “is that there have been great swimming ladies and great board surfing ladies – there’s very few body surfing ladies, by the way. But, I think she is probably the finest – I was gonna say ‘water man!’ – water person of the last several generations. I haven’t seen or heard of anybody with her versatility.”[21]

[1] Warshaw, ©2003, p. 257. Quoting Jeff Duclos from an article written in 1999.

[2] Notes from Ben Marcus, March 2008, with special thanks to Gary Lynch, Robin Grigg, Malcolm Gault-Williams, Dr. Norman Ball and Kathy Merrill Kelley. Mary Ann quoted.

[3] Notes from Ben Marcus, March 2008. Mary Ann quoted.

[4] Hawkins, Mary Ann. Letter to Gary Lynch, March 15, 1989. Punctuation corrected. See also the chapter on Tarzan Smith, “Mary Ann Hawkins, 1934.”

[5] Notes from Ben Marcus, March 2008. See also chapter on Whitey Harrison, “San Onofre.” Mary Ann’s recollections would put the first organized assault on San O as being in 1934.

[6] Notes from Ben Marcus, March 2008.

[7] Warshaw, Matt. The Encyclopedia of Surfing, ©2003, pp. 257-258.

[8] Warshaw, Matt. The Encyclopedia of Surfing, ©2003, pp. 257-258.

[9] Warshaw calls it the “Duke Kahanamoku Swim Meet” and Marcus calls it the “Pacific Aquatic Festival.” Not sure of which one is the right title, unless they were separate competitions.

[10] Notes from Ben Marcus, March 2008. Mary Ann quoted.

[11] Notes from Ben Marcus, March 2008.

[12] See chapter on Doc Ball.

[13] Notes from Ben Marcus, March 2008.

[14] Gault-Williams, Malcolm. “Tommy Zahn: For the Pure Joy of It All,” ©2002.

[15] Notes from Ben Marcus, March 2008.

[16] Ben’s wording.

[17] Notes from Ben Marcus, March 2008. Robin Grigg quoted.

[18] Notes from Ben Marcus, March 2008.

[19] Honolulu Star-Advertiser, April 22, 1979.

[20] Warshaw, Matt. Encyclopedia of Surfing, ©2003, p. 258. See also Marcus, March 2008.

[21] Gault-Williams, Malcolm. “Tommy Zahn: For The Pure Joy of It All,” ©2002.

Virginia Beach Surf History

Aloha and Welcome to this chapter on the surfing history of Virginia Beach, Virginia, East Coast USA. It is comprised mostly of an article written by Stewart Ferebee, in 2011.

Virginia Beach Surf Media

Pete Smith: https://youtu.be/Ijf0avFQanY

Stewart Ferebee's "The Surfing Life" was originally published in Virginia Living Magazine - 8/4/2011 (updated/corrected by Stewart on 1/27/2014)

John T. Ferebee, Virginia Beach 1944

Boards in arm, three teens in their twenties go cycling along the feeder road leading into the low-rise suburban sprawl of the Northend, past the balmy low-slung Live Oak grove and the frilly bejeweled Mimosa, speeding by, on windless endless days of summer. Light northwesterlies now hone clean the aquatic corduroy of an oily slick daybreak Atlantic, countering sideways with sideways, wind for swell. Drawing lines in their heads as they pedal in anticipation; there already in psychic momentum before they've ever even touched the water. This is what we pray for.

The story of surfing in Virginia Beach is one of dedication. Because in the grand scheme of things its not a place known for its quality surf by the world class standards of California or Hawaii, Australia, South Africa or Indonesia. The culprit is a 300 mile wide energy-sapping joy-killer of swell-reducing shallows known as the Continental Shelf which mockingly insinuates itself off much of the East Coast. Virginia Beach may not have the best waves but surfing here has a history—a formidable one that goes back 100 years and comprises multiple generations. And there is a story to go with the tradition—one of dedication by a handful of intrepid thrill-seekers in the early decades of the 20th century, and now, by modern throngs seeking their own stoke or recognition. Surfers here assiduously seek those small windows when the conditions are right; where light opposing winds compliment a maximum swell at optimum tide. And then just hope you don't get busted for missing work, skipping school or backing out of those plans you made with your sweetheart.

As surf journalist Matt Warshaw points out, “The jaded and enervated surfers sprinkled throughout California are nearly impossible to find on the East Coast, where waist-high waves are often treated as a gift, not an insult.” Marty Keesecker, a Virginia Beach surfer and surfboard shaper of nearly 50 years, is even more pragmatic: “There is something to be said for tenacity,” he says. “If you put the time in, and you drive enough, you’ll find something to ride. If you’re patient and you don’t expect a lot, you’ll have fun and it’ll be enough to keep you in the water for an hour or so. In Virginia Beach, you can’t expect it come to you, you have to go to it.”

Not a great deal is known about the strange, imported coffin-like parcel Walter F. Irvin brought back east from Hawaii in 1912 that would signal the coming phenomenon known as surfing. Irvin’s consignment, which must have flummoxed terminal baggage handlers upon his disembarkation in Tidewater, was a 9-foot-long, 110-pound redwood olo, Hawaiian for longboard. It was a gift for Irvin’s young nephew, James M. Jordan Jr.  According to brothers Jimmy and Shep Jordan in their 1974 book Virginia Beach: A Pictorial History, it was the first board of its kind on the East Coast: James M. Jordan Jr. was their grandfather. While the 1912 board was unique, it wasn’t the first hint of the sport of surfing. In the essay “A Royal Sport: Surfing in Waikiki,” published in a 1907 issue of The Lady’s Home Companion, adventure writer Jack London detailed the aquatic feats of early surf pioneer George Freeth and brought news of the Hawaiian art of wave riding to the new-century masses, writing: “I saw him tearing in on the back of a wave standing upright, with his board carelessly poised, a young god bronzed with sunburn.” Word spread.

In the following years, James Jordan would become locally famous for his exotic arm-paddled water-craft and wave riding abilities. For most eastern Victorians however, many of whom did not even swim, the spectacle must have all been taken with a novel whimsical shrug. Only as time moved along would the fact begin to resonate so thoroughly on a local level, that it was Jordan’s flag planted which might very well stake Virginia Beach as the birthplace of East Coast surfing. Imagining the vast spaces of that era’s oceanfront, imagining the scene; the place, the pace, the parcel itself; a lithe young man, soaked from the Gulf current’s warmed brine, hauling shoulder-hoisted the deftly balanced olo proudly in a terse and yet aloof sand-scrinching, midday jaunt, from waterline back up to cottage line. Toweling off, considering the tides; ‘Perhaps another go-out later,’ he winces through the a.m. glare. Victorian ladies stroll by the grassy beach-lined lawns sheltered beneath parasols, palming their hats gaily in the summer breeze. Genteel glances and leisurely nods; the casual elegance of a time which moved to a different time. ‘Come Josephine, In My Flying Machine’ crackles warped and softly from a distant Victrola.

In the 1920s and 1930s, amidst the cedar shake grandeur of the Virginia Beach cottage-hotel era, each little redoubt had its own stationed lifeguard. During that time, enterprising individuals like Babe Braithewaite, Hugh Kitchin, Dusty Hinant, John Smith and Buddy Guy would be the first to organize a formal beach service of lifeguarding and chair/umbrella/float rentals along theVirginia Beach oceanfront. The occupation known as “beach bum” was a long way off, but essentially those guys were pioneers of the surfing and beach subculture that would become a craze in subsequent decades, culminating in the cheesy fun of the late 1950s to mid-1960s “Gidget” era.

Thanks to the design innovations of paddleboard maker Tom Blake, surfing was attracting new devotees. Blake, a Wisconsin native who moved to Hawaii in the mid-1920s, revolutionized surfing by making hollow boards that were much lighter than the traditional, solid redwood and Olo boards, the kind Irvin brought from Hawaii in 1912. These new boards were much easier to carry and transport than the old ones, thus spawning surfing’s first micro boom. “Blake changed everything,” former Surfer Magazine editor Drew Kampion wrote in 2000. “He almost single-handedly transformed surfing from a primitive Polynesian curiosity into a 20th century lifestyle.”

And it wasn’t long before a new crop of lifeguard/surfers and fun addicts began heading to the oceanfront from Norfolk and various rural Princess Anne County communities. One of them was a Chesapeake Bay harbor pilot, Capt. Robert Barrett Holland, who would head one of the most prodigious surfing families the sport has ever known. His son Bob Lee has been a prominent member of the Virginia Beach surf scene for more than 70 years—from the 1930s to the present. Now in his 80s, Bob Lee Holland is still surfing—and most notably not on “logs,” or the traditional longboards that are the preferred gear of the “old guys,” but on contemporary shortboards.

Bob Lee Holland’s children, Bobby, Johnny and Honey, all followed in their dad’s footsteps and set the bar for surfing performance and competition at the beach from the mid-1960s through the 1970s and beyond. Mary Sydney Barker, a niece, recalls that when she was very young, in the mid-1960s, “My grandfather, Capt. Holland, said to me, ‘When you can stand on an inflatable mat and ride the waves in, I will buy you your own surfboard.’ I surfed on the mats for a few years and when I was 12 he bought me my first surfboard—a 9-foot-2-inch Hobie. There weren’t many girl surfers around then; Becky ‘Bobby’ Mellot and I surfed at the North End with a girl named Leslie Thurston. We would surf in the mornings before the wind came up.”

In contrast, modern surfboards are very thin, short and relatively inexpensive—about $500 to $600. Contemporary surfers buy new boards fairly regularly. Jordan Brazie, a 23-year-old surfer-shaper who has been surfing since he was 12, owns 11 boards and uses all of them—“whichever is the most functional for the waves of that day,” he says. “You have to have a quiver if you want to surf all year.”

But in the early days of the sport, boards were cherished items—hand-made and regarded more like boats. Surfers personalized them with artistic touches much like airmen created nose-art for World War I-and-II-era planes. Hugh Kitchin whitewashed the name “Hugh Boy” across his board from rail to rail. Capt. Robert Holland’s board was emblazoned with the twin flags insignia of the Chesapeake Bay Harbor Pilot Association.

My late father, a Norfolk native, was an avid Virginia Beach surfer from the mid-1940s through the 1980s. He hand-painted the French word coquette (flirt), on his board in a two-tone gothic script. He began surfing when he was 15 then became a lifeguard at the Cavalier Hotel and Beach Club on 43rd Street. The majestic old structure, the most iconic landmark of the entire oceanfront, was built in 1929 (the same year brewery tycoon Adolph Coors threw himself from an upper floor), and of course it still stands today. One prays it always will.

Legend has it that my fathers introduction into surfing concerned one blustery December morning during the august years of World War II, following a saturday night which got so late it became the next day. A night which concerned pipes and tobacco, Lucky Strikes and Stan Freeberg records. And powerful, clear, amber liquid poured over ice into tall glasses. Fellow Norfolk native Mason Gamage of Algonquin Park was onboard for that weekend’s oceanfront festivities. Gamage, several years older than the rest, fresh out of the Coast Guard, was an outdoorsman and sailor, and already surfed. Nursing a hangover and yet full of bravado, Gamage and my father both paddled out into the cold stormy brown Atlantic conditions on two 13 foot wooden boards. In this modern world of high tech neoprene, the winter protection for a surfer, it is almost impossible to even begin to comprehend this anecdote, decades before the wide spread use of the now vitally indispensable cold water wetsuit. Nevertheless, a seed was planted; and as veteran surfer Mike Clark points out, "Once you get salt water in your veins, it is hard to stay away from it."

In 1950, my father forsook his beloved beach boy lifestyle in Tidewater to fly F-86’s out of Kimpo in Korea. He returned about five years later and began his career in the insurance industry, resuming his surfing on weekends. He met my mother, Ann Meredith Stewart, in 1956 and they spent their first date sanding old varnish off his Tom Blake surfboard at a place near Rudee Inlet on the oceanfront’s south end, near the Sandbox—a café and home for years to the annual and infamous Subway party. It was an epic, if charming, first-date faux pas.

“At that time,” says Mike Clark, “there was no inlet and no pier at the south end. We could walk over to Croatan at low tide. Later, in the 1950s, I remember the building of the Steel Pier 15 blocks south of the wooden pier. You can tell a real native when they say Wooden Pier; that is how we referred to them—steel and wood.” Clark adds, “Shooting the pier was a hoot. My dad bought our first board from Dawson Taylor at Fuel Feed Hardware, a Hobie. It was before the Smith & Holland shop opened. My brother and I shared the board.” Norfolk native Scott McCasky, a competitive surfer for more than four decades, also has fond recollections of the south end’s golden, post-war era: “Every day you were there, surfing at the steel pier gave you the undeniable feeling you were in the right place at the right time.”

Pete Smith, age 71, is a mid-century “grom”—an old-timer who still retains a youthful stoke. In recent months he has shared with me many anecdotes about the early days of surfing in Virginia Beach and the ways in which the scene has changed. Looking at photos from the 1960s, he can name practically every individual who surfed in that decade. In a shot taken in front of the erstwhile Mariner Hotel, Smith points out the different types of boards displayed by the diverse group of surfers in the picture: The first generation of wooden hollow boards are held by the guys in the back row, and the new fiberglass boards are held by the guys kneeling in the front row. Three Hollands are in the photograph, along with Scott Taylor, Frank Butler, Skip Rawls, Snooker Turner and Babe Braithwaite’s son, Forbes. Says Smith: “The early years were amazing, because there was just so much community stoke and you knew everybody. It was a really good vibe. There weren’t any crowds; you’d be looking for people to surf with just to have someone to hoot and holler with. It was that transformative era where the old wooden boards were still around but the modern fiberglass boards were starting to show up. It was just a really special time.”

Significantly, a Californian named Les Arndt, then stationed at Fort Story, is also in the group picture. According to Forbes Braithwaite, Arndt was from Malibu and worked for top board maker Hap Jacobs before coming east for his military duty. “Arndt was driving past one day with another soldier,” says Braithwaite, “and saw me going surfing, carrying Scott Taylor’s balsa-wood board. He yelled, ‘Hey kid where’d you get that surfboard?’” Arndt himself recollects that Forbes was about 12 at the time, and was walking across Atlantic Avenue at 49th Street. The chance meeting prompted Arndt to spend two years with Virginia Beach surfers, especially Bob Holland and his family, during which time he helped to get “modern Malibu surfing started in Virginia Beach,” according to Arndt.

How? Thanks to Arndt’s West Coast connections, the group started importing and selling what was at that time a rare and exotic item—modern fiberglass boards from California. The group stored them in a garage owned by Forbes Braithwaite’s mother. In 1963, Pete Smith and Bob Holland opened the area’s first dedicated surf shop—Smith & Holland—one of the first businesses of its kind on the East Coast.

Not long after, Smith wrote a letter to Surfer Magazine, in California, trumpeting the burgeoning surfing scene inVirginia Beach. He wrote the note on the letterhead of the Golf Ranch Motel on Laskin Road, which was situated on the southeast end of Birdneck golf course and owned, along with the Mariner, by Pete’s uncle, John Smith. Pete worked there. John Severson, then editor of Surfer Magazine, showed the letter to Hobie Alter who was the top California board maker at that time. Some months later, Alter showed up at the Golf Ranch Motel on a day when Pete was working. For Virginia Beach surfing, that was a monumental moment. Alter was on the East Coast pushing his boards, and he negotiated a deal with Smith and Holland to carry his boards exclusively.

The early 1960s were a pivotal time in modern surfing. In addition to the new availability of Hobie Alter’s boards on the East Coast, the first East Coast surf contest was started in 1962 on Gilgo Beach on Long Island. Bob Holland drove a group of Virginia Beach surfers to New York for the event, including Butch Maloney, Gary Rice and an 11-year-old whirlwind talent named Ronnie Mellot, a future Golden Gloves Army boxing champ, local board shaper and all around wild man. Many of the VB guys took trophies at Gilgo—they dominated the field. In 1963, with cooperation from the local chamber of commerce, Holland, Maloney and Pete Smith managed to move the pro-amateur surf contest to Virginia Beach, re-naming it the Virginia Beach Surfing Festival. Two years later they changed the name again, to the East Coast Surfing Championships (ECSC). 2012 will mark the event’s 50th year, drawing high-ranking surf talent from around the globe. While ever-increasingly upgrading its carnival-bling to include many non-surf stage-draws such as BMX biking, Jet-Ski antics, and even Cornhole contests (beanbag), presumably in hopes of enticing more diverse and consequently larger audiences, such distractions on the other hand, threaten a diffusion of what is still implicitly touted, according to what it’s very initials imply, as a surfing championship. Prophetically harking back to 1972 and Chuck Dent’s antic rant-alogue from MacGillivray Freeman’s classic surf film, Five Summer Stories, surf-culture and surfing itself often find themselves at curious odds. A hallowed tradition to some, a three-ring spectacle to others; the ECSC is the East Coast’s longest running surfing competition.

Even from its very early years, the ECSC attracted world-class surfers such as David Nuuhiwa, Corky Carroll and Mike Tabeling, along with the best locals. Near the old Cue South, Pete Smith would preside from atop a simple lifeguard stand at the Steel Pier site with nothing more than a clipboard, a visor and a microphone, uttering witty, surf-speak-laced Southernisms in his consummate, slow-mo Tidewater accent. “It was just a special time in those early days of the ECSC,” recalls Smith, “when some of the real hot West Coast and Floridian surfers started coming to the contest. It was such a thrill meeting some of those guys we’d seen in all the magazines, and getting to see them surf.”

By the middle of the 1960s, the West Coast-informed surf boom was fully realized here in the East. In 1965, the Academy Award nominated documentary surf film “The Endless Summer” opened at the madly mod, and very much missed, Buckminster Fuller-designed Virginia Beach Dome; the tragically decommissioned and dissected artifact of what would nowadays be considered a world-renowned tourism-draw of exemplary Mid-century modernism. Filmmaker Bruce Brown traveled with the movie in those early days and narrated live over a speaker system in his laconic west coast  style, as the mellow twang of The Sandals soundtrack played from a reel-to-reel tape machine. My mother and father were there on opening night. My mother recalls Bob Holland’s youngest son, Johnny, zooming around barefoot on his skateboard, the newest must-have accoutrement of 1960’s surf culture. Johnny would become a standout competitive surfer, one of the most gifted wave riders this area ever produced, competing in the World Surfing Championships in California in 1966 going neck to neck along the way in preliminary events with many of this areas best surfers such as Billy Foote, George Desgaines, Fred Grosskreutz, Jimmy Parnell, Bobby Chenman, Billy Almond and Nat Meakins.

In June of 1968, Sports Illustrated did a cover story titled “Surfing’s East Coast Boom.” The cover photo, taken from the steel pier looking south, shows visiting California and Hawaii legend Phil Edwards gracefully negotiating the micro-curl of a fun-looking right-hander breaking in the once sacred, now mythical, 75-yard zone between the north side of the First Street jetty and the south side of the pier. (Roughly 10 years later, the rickety Steel Pier would catch fire and be demolished, prompting locals to rename the popular surfing spot as The Jetty or simply First Street. Surfing Magazine once referred to the area as a “a two-block surfing insane asylum.”) Edwards is quoted in the article, speaking to the core of what surfing is really all about—beyond the contests, sponsorships and commercialism: “I think maybe the best surfer in the world right now is some little kid whose name nobody knows. . . who is riding out there by himself; locked in some curl somewhere, having the ride of his young life. God, it’s the neatest thing.”

Almost as quickly as the change in surfboards took place as the post-war 50s entered the Pop era, so did the Longboards begin to obsolesce at the dawn of the speed-conscious mind shift which presaged the shortboard revolution. Spearheaded on a local level by pioneer board shaper Bob White and his Wave Riding Vehicles quiver of space-aged teardrop foils, lines would be defiantly be drawn in the sand denoting stances in style and of generation gaps; and drawn in the water in ways hitherto unimagined. The area’s first nationally recognized surfer of the new high performance generation, was a lithe, flame-haired, scat-talking wild child named Jimbo Brothers. Something of a prodigy, a beach-blanket ragamuffin of Dickensian proportions, Brothers would dominate local and interstate competitions of the late 60s and early 70’s; a sponsored team rider since the 7th grade, profiled in Surfer magazine by the time he was 10. “One year the newspaper published a picture of me with my trophies and I was struggling to hold up the silver bowl and the wooden plaque at the same time,” says Brothers, now in his late 50’s. “And the caption read, ‘Jimbo had more trouble with his loot than he did with the waves.’"

As the swinging 60's dwindled and the existentially ambiguous 70's reached cruising altitude, the contemporary Shortboard milieu would dominate the kinetic surfing scene at both the Steel Pier and the Wooden Pier, as well as on early pioneering ventures to the sometimes world-class conditions of North Carolina’s Outer Banks. As my brother Terry Ferebee would always point out, “You can’t really talk about surfing in Virginia Beach without talking about OBX.” Even for Norfolk boys Gregg Bielmann and his brother Brian, a future world-class, Hawaii-based surf photographer, early-era Hatteras road trips were instigated fairly often in hopes of scoring ‘Hassle-less’, crowd-free, proper surf. As the kaleidoscopic decade of changes pressed on, standouts such as Marc Theriault, Joe Marchione, Chucky Charles, Ed and Chip McQuilken, Bill Frierson, Ronnie Mellot, Ray Shackleford, Bennet Strickland, Allen White, Kurt & Tim Schmalz, Jeff Duff, Paul Darden, Ed Townes and Christian Binford would set the performance bar as surfboards would go smaller and more spearishly radical. Through Marshall McLuhan’s rear-view mirror, decade’s stack up in idyllic compression like so many Smithsonian diorama’s, where diverse transformations occur in time-lapse, all at once, both cultural and technological. Tail-ending the 60’s and front-facing the 70’s, a revolution in both surfboards and wetsuits will transpire; both, ironically, the by-products of the very military-industrial complex so derided by the inner circles of Vietnam War era surf culture bohemia. A cast of characters straight out of Tom Wolfe’s Pumphouse Gang rule the Steel Pier parking lot, that sacred ‘our turf’ zone consisting of stray dogs, ramshackle vehicles, surfer drop-outs, and fishermen-widowers. Al’s Surfshop beneath the ramp of the pier smells of resin, bloodworms, incense and wax; and nearby foosball tables rattle and clatter with roll-fake's, shout-out’s, shut-up's and crank-shots. While Trampled Under Foot by Led Zeppelin blares from the Jensen Tri-axles of Jeff Duff’s forrest green Karmann Ghia as it sputters its way off the Loop road towards fifty-cent tacos at Speedy Gonzales at Great Neck and Mill Dam. Dusk soothes everything, and in the days before video killed the radio star, BYOB surf movie nights at the ironically designated FOP hall (Federation of Police Hall) rounds out nicely the any-day of all-days, of the seemingly never-ending ever-present summer of the early-mid-late nineteen-seventies.

The most notable stylist and competitor of the late years of the decade’s new guard, was a 6-foot-4-inch paddling machine named Wes Laine who brought serious recognition to Virginia Beach and East Coast surfing in general. Laine placed ninth in the world on the pro tour circuit in both 1983 and 1985 competing in line-ups as far flung as Hawaii and South Africa. “Wes was the first Virginia Beach guy to make it in the big time,” says Tim Sullivan, a local surfer turned guitarist for the New York City-based surf music band, Supertones. “He paved the way for other East Coasters, and even 10-time world champ Kelly Slater.” Through Wes, vicariously, directly, or otherwise, The Free Ride generation found one of its exemplary representatives right here at our own beach-breaks. A local lineup was never more proud.

While competitions are one aspect of surfing, they do not figure extensively in the lives of most surfers, who simply surf for the sake of surfing—art for art’s sake as it were. “Are there any soul-surfers still among us; still expressing the original vision?”, as free-thinking local legend Chip McQuilkin once ruminated on the ever-encroaching influence of commercialism on surfing. “For without soul,” he warned, “there IS no vision.” Still, owing to Laine’s pro-circuit success, there was a sharp rise in competitive intensity among surfers at the beach in the 1980’s and 1990’s. By then it was not at all unusual for local surfers to explore Hawaiian-alternative big-wave training grounds such as Puerto Rico and Barbados, following in the footsteps of early 1970’s pioneers like Marc Theriault and Ronnie Mellot. Adding also to the area’s distinct identity was a continuing tradition of local surfboard making—niche-specific wave-tools better suited to the corporocity of Virginia's swellular vernacular than many of the imported shapes built in California or Hawaii. The same tradition is alive and well today, noting talented young shapers such as Jordan Braizie and his Valaric label, and Austin Saunders at Austin. Throughout the golden era of the shortboard revolution, Bob White, Rosi, Con, America, WRV, Westwind, Bearcraft, Seasoned, and Hotline all bore the local standard. The surfer-shaper reigns in the days before automation. 

As another era exerts itself inexorably towards the future, and another checkered decade comes jangling to a close—another balmy Tidewater day at the Oceanfront wanes, as Allen White smooths another wave to pieces.

As the 80s forced its way in on the preceding decade, some people stuck with the beach music program. With the pinks, the greens. And the Shag. Others moved on. Others still, never went there in the first place. Punk rock changed everything. So did the Thruster. The revolutionary three-finned board developed by Australian surfer-shaper Simon Anderson would hegemonistically dominate surfboard design for the next two and half decades.

The 80s new modernity was exemplified locally by the enigmatic, freeform genius of Pete Smith’s son, Pete Jr., known colloquially in surfing circles as simply “young Pete Smith.” As Les Shaw, the owner of Wave Riding Vehicles, says, “You gotta understand, the most unsung raw talent to ever come out of this area was young Pete Smith, with that stream of consciousness surfing style he had. He was just light years beyond everyone else in his approach.” Of the Blaster era and the early Quad, there were other dynamic standouts as well: Jon Klientop and Charles Kirkley dominated local ESA (Eastern Surfing Association) contests as well as ECSC events. Other notables of the era included Jay Monroe, Lad Swain, Rich Rudolph and Tommy Rainwater, as the culminating decade of the millennium would introduce a whole new crop of competitive upstarts, including Chris Culpen and Jason Borte who would go on to dominate in contests, both locally and nationally.

And what of today’s young surfers? Interestingly, a free-thinking new crew of stylists would seem to at least potentially defy Oscar Wilde’s maxim that youth is wasted on the young. Theirs is a teen milieu which seeks retrieval from the past in order to move flowingly into the future; its creed ingrained by a reverence to history, tradition, and for the old guys. Semi-pro longboarder Cam Fullmer, who is 17 and a senior at Norfolk Academy, for example, grew up at the Northend and was taught by resident local Bud Easton, whose daughter Kate is—like Fullmer—a team rider for Freedom Surfshop. Fullmer and his tight circle are primarily longboarders, a neo-retro discipline which leaves many diehard Thruster-era types in a state of bemused stupefaction. That’s because the longboard is, to all appearances, an aquatic reversion to the horse and buggy. But given the consistently modest surf at Virginia Beach, it is a tool which is actually both efficient and functional. And there are other implications—both philosophical and cultural—that reach down into the very core of the user. “It’s less jock-like, maybe,” says Fullmer of the longboard wave-riding technique. He often uses the word ‘motionlessness’ to suggest what it is he is after in his surfing. Of a slight generational gap past Fullmer, fellow Freedom Surfshop team riders Sam Cocke and Mikey Hansen likewise exemplify the super-soulful and stylish aesthetic of the new sincerity, ever-touting the merits of the old-school.

Contrary to some prior generations' nonchalance towards their predecessors, Fullmer speaks reverently about local, old-school veterans like Bob Holland, Mike Clark, Mike Kalana and Bobby Holland Jr.: “Mike is—what?—like in his 70s?” says Fullmer. Gesticulating with glancing, flat-hand motions the way all real surfers do, he adds: “I mean, he can crank a turn; he can cross-step to the nose; he can ride in the pocket and work it with his knees and just ride a wave like its supposed to be ridden…ride a board like its supposed to be ridden. Those guys are always the best ones to talk to. I’d rather talk to them than 99 percent of the surfers my age. They always have something good to say about surfing or about life.” Glancing around at the radically changing psychic contour of the ever-developing oceanfront, he says: “Old Virginia Beach must have been just the coolest thing.”

He would get no disagreement on that point from Dave Shotten, who opened Freedom Surf shop in 2005. Shotten, who by his own admission is an eternal grom in a 44-year-old body, laments the fact that contemporary surf culture has become homogenized. “It’s been diluted with Orange County propaganda that caters to a naive young audience who want conformity.” Freedom Surf sells imported boards yet sports a community vibe, selling gear relevant to the area’s surf conditions. “We are the new kids on the block,” says Shotten. “But at the same time we’ve been gifted a legacy and tradition that has been handed down from some of the original pioneers who put boards in the water in Virginia Beach. Our vision is to look back into the past and celebrate what a surf shop means. We’re about taking a different path.”

In truth, surfing at Virginia Beach has always been something of a different path. We’re not on the map of world-class surf spots, and never will be. But surfers here show their sincere respect for the sea, possess a core dedication to the art form we love, and stay ever vigilant for conditions that produce the best waves.