Surfing from an Historical and Cultural View, part of the SHACC Collection, by Malcolm Gault-Williams
Monday, December 26, 2011
Wednesday, October 12, 2011
Ron Drummond
Ron Drummond (1907-1996)
In his late 20s by the mid-1930s, Ron Drummond was born in Los Angeles , raised in Hollywood
and, as a kid, summer vacationed at Hermosa
Beach . During summers, in the 1920s, Ron learned to
bodysurf and then board surf. He was particularly into canoes and bought his
first one around 1921, at the age of 14. On a dare from his brother, he dragged
his canoe out into the surf only to have the canoe broken in two by a good
sized wave. Undaunted, a tall (6-foot, 6-inches) Ron “Canoe” Drummond would go
on to become known up and down the Southern California
coastline, eventually canoe surfing waves as large as 15 feet.[1]
Ron was the quintessential “canoe surfer.”
“Well, I’ve been interested in canoeing ever since I was
fourteen years old,” Ron told surf historian Gary Lynch in an interview eight
years before his passing at the age of 89. “I remember my brother, Tommy. He’s
older; year and a half older than I am. He says, ‘Aw, you’re dumb to try to go
out in the ocean in a canoe.’ First time I brought a canoe down... we used to
spend our summers at Hermosa Beach ,
and I brought the canoe down there. The next morning we went down to go out in
the ocean in it, and the waves about six feet high, thick and curling. And I
says, ‘I don’t want to take it out through that.’ And he says, ‘Oh, you
chicken!’ So, I couldn’t take that, so we went out... Sure enough, one broke
and right into the canoe. Broke the gunnels in several places, burst the hind
end all out, and it took me about two weeks to repair it. That’s when he says, ‘Aw,
you’re dumb anyway to try to take a canoe out in the ocean.’ That made me
determined that I was going to learn to enjoy canoeing on the ocean. So, I
think I’m the only one in the world, probably, that enjoys a Canadian-type
canoe surfing and doing various stunts out in the ocean. It’s meant a lot in my
life, canoeing. I’ve really enjoyed it. I remember, I said to Tom Blake, ‘I
think I’ll quit canoeing and take up my surfboard again. I need to practice on
surfing.’ ‘Oh,’ he says, ‘forget the surfboard. That’s really something,
something different. You keep that [surfing with a Canadian-style canoe] up.’
So, on his advice I kept canoe surfing. It is a great sport.”[2]
The tall, lanky Drummond became a track star while attending
UCLA in the mid-1920s, specializing in discus and the shot put. Throughout his
life he continued to swim, canoe, and bodysurf on into his mid-80s.[3]
“I knew [Pete] Peterson when I was a kid in high school,” Ron
recalled of that era’s most noted Southern Californian surfer. “His father
owned the bathhouse at Crystal Pier in Santa Monica ;
Ocean Park , I guess it was… I remember one
time when I was in high school, I was down there body surfing. I was out
catching the biggest ones, I guess they were about six feet high, something
like that. All of a sudden I looked way out at sea and I saw this huge big
swell coming. My Gosh! What is this?! I figured it was going to break on me, so
I started swimming out so I could get out before it’d break. I was swimming out
as fast as I could, and I was just in exactly the right place to catch it. So I
said, ‘Well, here goes nothing!’ And I rode this one. It was an earthquake
wave, and I rode it and I skidded right up on the beach amongst all the beach
umbrellas and blankets and picnic paraphernalia and all that sort of thing,
right up to the concrete wall at the edge of the dry, sandy beach… That was
about ten o’clock in the morning… About three o’clock that afternoon another
one like that came in. I was on shore then, but two waves that day came in.
They were the results of earthquakes that day, I think down in Chile . I
thought that was rather interesting.”[4]
“Then, the first – second – date I had with Doris [Ron’s future
wife], it was right after the Long Beach earthquake, about 1930. I had to go down to Terminal Island , where I had been guarding for
awhile, to get a surfboard I’d left down there. So, we drove down there. We
drove all around and looked at all the buildings. The front of the big office
buildings right down in the street, just piles of rubble and that sort of
thing, from this earthquake. Then we went to the Long Beach Plunge for a swim
and then we went from the Plunge out to the beach, and I looked out there. I
saw waves coming in that were – crest of the waves were even with the deck of
the pier! I don’t know, that’s about probably 30-35 feet high, I suppose. I’m
not sure. But anyway, you know, a fellow’s got to show off in front of his
girl, so I went out there, waited for one of the biggest ones, and came in on
it. Went right straight down and then the long chute down this way, and then
all this white water. Finally got out ahead of it so I could breathe, and I
rode it and skidded up on the beach and nonchalantly walked up and sat down
beside Doris . About a dozen people came over
to talk to me, wondered who I was, never seen me before. I had a beard then.”[5]
“The first time I was on a surfboard, it was when I was a
lifeguard,” at the Los Angeles
beaches, Drummond recalled. “Let’s see, I guess it was before that. I met the
lifeguards down there, I guess, before I was a lifeguard. And one of them had a
surfboard, was rather thick… and was belled right up at the end, like that… And
I tried it, and you’d come down on a breaking wave, it would hit and come right
up. It wouldn’t pearl. In other words, that was the first surfboard I ever
rode, one like that.”[6]
“I’ve always wanted to be an adventurer, you know,” Ron
continued. “My father was an explorer… he’d been all over interior China, the
Philippine Islands and all the out-of-the-way islands, and had skirmishes with
headhunters, and all that sort of thing. Headhunters killed a lot of his men.
[One time, they lost a guy] …and a fellow – native carrier that he had in his
expedition – wanted to give him a Christian burial. So, Dad let them go in.
They sneaked into the enemy camp – these headhunters’ camp [at night] – and
they had their heads on poles and they were dancing around a big fire; real
jubilant that they’d got these heads. So, the bodies were off in the dark… my
father’s carriers got the bodies and my father took a picture of them carrying
these bodies later the next day, stretched up, you know, like they put a deer
on a pole: one end on one fellow’s shoulder and one on the other… they were
holding their noses... hot climate... [the dead bodies] were putrid.”[7]
“But anyway, all I was going to say is, I wanted to be an
adventurer, too. So, that’s why [when] I was studying mechanical engineering at
UCLA… I just figured, well, [mechanical engineering] really doesn’t interest
me... So, I heard that Eastern Canadian Mining Company was sending canoe
expeditions out to unexplored areas to get the geology of it, so if they ever
found anything that was favorable for the deposition of minerals, why, they’d
send probably 40-50 prospectors in there. So, I saw the manager of this company
when he came out to Los Angeles .
I heard he came out every year on business. He’s a nice fellow. He sort of patted
me on the back. He said, ‘Well, son, we only hire graduate mining engineers and
geologists.’ So, that let me down. Anyway, the next time he came out I went to
see him again. He said, ‘You’re really interested, aren’t you? You’re really
enthusiastic.’ So I said, ‘Yes, sir!’ So he said, ‘Well, I’ll tell you what you
do. You spend a year studying the subjects that I tell you to, and then we’ll
give you a try on one of our expeditions.’ So, I studied mineralogy and geology
and pre-Cambrian shield and blowpipe analysis and all that sort of thing that’d
make me of some use to them, and then I got on with them.
“The result was, my career partner, Jack Barrington, had been
the first white man on five rivers of northern Canada , and mapped them. We named
them and our names [along with the names of the rivers]… are on the Canadian
government maps now… I named one in Northern Manitoba, BarringtonLake, Barrington River ...
I found a needle hammered out of native copper, up inland from the northwest
corner of the Hudson Bay, so I named it the Copper Needle
River . That’s in big
letters now on the Canadian maps, the Copper Needle
River . I felt real proud
of that.”[8]
In 1931, Ron was the first one to publish a primer on
bodysurfing, entitled The Art of Wave
Riding.[9]
At 26 pages and a print run of 500 copies, the small book is one of the first
books ever published about surfing. “One feels sorry for those who have not
learned to enjoy surf swimming,” Ron wrote in his intro. “To spend a day in the
sand developing a ‘beautiful tan’ is pleasant; but the real pleasure of a trip
to the beach is derived from playing in the breakers.” Elsewhere in the book,
Drummond defined “glide waves” and “sand busters” and step-by-step bodysurfing
instructions. Understandably, this booklet has become a prize amongst
collectors.[10]
“I started to tell you why I’m deaf,” Ron kept on track with
Gary Lynch. “I got hit by lightning and it knocked me about 15 feet flat on my
back, and I’ve never been able to hear good since. It was such a loud noise,
you know, when you hear thunder way off how loud it is, but when it’s right
next to you, why, it ruined the nerves in my ear, so I’ve never been able to
hear well since.”
“When was this?” asked Gary .
“Oh, this was during the war, World War II, down in Port of Spain , Trinidad .”
Like others of his generation, Ron was drawn into World War II, although he was
already into his 30’s, age-wise, at war’s start. “I was unloading pillboxes and
tanks and things like that from a ship, and the boom came up over that ship. It
had a sealed deck, and then slings came down. I was just reaching for a sling
to hook up a pillbox, and my hand was about six inches, I guess, from the
sling. If I’d had it six inches farther – if I’d had a hold of that sling – it
would have killed me, because it burned that sling almost completely through,
three-quarter inch sling. Where it was up against the edge of the bit. I was lucky there... That’d be one of my close calls, I guess.”[11]
Drummond’s “close calls” did not keep him from seeking bigger
and bigger surf to paddle his canoe into. During and after the war, he joined a
select group of Southern California’s best watermen to ride California ’s then-known biggest waves at the
Tijuana Sloughs.
“Back in the early ‘40s I surfed the Sloughs when it was huge,”
Lorrin ‘Whitey’ Harrison told Serge Dedina in
1994. “It was all you could do to get out. Really big. We were way the hell
out. Canoe Drummond came down.”[12]
“We paddled out and the surf was probably about 20 feet high or
so,” Ron remembered. “I looked out about a mile where some tremendously big
waves were breaking. I asked if anybody wanted to go out there with me, but
nobody did. So, I went in my canoe and paddled out there. I set my sights in
the U.S. and in Mexico , and
figured out where I wanted to be. One of the biggest sets came through and I
caught a wave that was bigger than most. I rode down it when it closed over me.
I was caught in the tunnel. Well I rode near 100 feet in the tunnel and just
barely made it out. If that wave would have collapsed on me, it would have
killed me.”[13]
Ron went into a little more detail with Gary Lynch, probably
talking about the same wave: “Did I ever tell you about the big wave I caught
in a canoe down in the Tijuana Slough? … Boy, that was a whopper. That was
about forty feet high, I guess. I was right inside the curl. Boy, I thought I
was never going to make it… That was [another] one of my close calls… I guess.
“Dempsey [Holder] was the chief lifeguard down there…” On the
day when Tommy Zahn and Peter Cole came out, after Dempsey had called them to
get down to Imperial Beach pronto, Tommy and Peter paddled out, were amazed at
the size of the waves and further amazed to find Drummond already out there… “out
there where the big waves were breaking, ‘cause Dempsey talked to me later and
he said I’m the only one that had ever ridden those big waves. They were about
20 feet high in near shore. That’s where he was, I guess.
“Well, a 20-footer is a good wave, but they’re about twice that
big outside. None of the fellows would go out there with me. They’re scared of
them. They can see they are just booming over thick like that… you could run a
freight train through the curl.”[14]
Canoe Drummond is generally recognized with having ridden his canoe
in surf as big as 15-feet. He and his Canadian style canoe were featured in a
1967 issue of Surfer magazine. He also appeared in two surf movies: Big
Wednesday (the Severson flick, 1961) and Pacific Vibrations (1970). He
continued to swim, canoe and bodysurf into his mid-80s. In 1990, he appeared in
a Nike ad featuring senior surfers that ran nationally within the U.S. He passed
on in 1996, at age 89.[15]
Links:
Capistrano Flip: http://www.canoekayak.com/canoe/capistranoflipcanoe/
Classic in-water shot: http://4.bp.blogspot.com/_snK4FObvgXg/SuJMuIfbM0I/AAAAAAAAAWc/Zkv3t_pgRw8/s1600/rondrummond.jpg
Action in-water shot: http://3.bp.blogspot.com/_Y1TSrohwgZQ/S6qB8z8PgiI/AAAAAAAAA9o/yefO-bY7kjc/s1600/Gem-of-the-week.jpg
Same shot, reduced: http://www.surfingheritage.org/2010/03/ron-drummond-canoe-surfing.html
[1]
Warshaw, Matt. The Encyclopedia of
Surfing, ©2003, p. 168.
[2]
Lynch, Gary . Interview
with Ron Drummond, July 30, 1988.
[3]
Warshaw, Matt. The Encyclopedia of
Surfing, ©2003, p. 168.
[4]
Lynch, Gary . Interview
with Ron Drummond, July 30, 1988.
[5]
Lynch, Gary . Interview
with Ron Drummond, July 30, 1988.
[6]
Lynch, Gary . Interview
with Ron Drummond, July 30, 1988.
[7]
Lynch, Gary . Interview
with Ron Drummond, July 30, 1988.
[8]
Lynch, Gary . Interview
with Ron Drummond, July 30, 1988.
[9]
Drummond, Ronald B. The Art of Wave
Riding, ©1931, Cloister Press, Hollywood , California .
[10]
Warshaw, Matt. The Encyclopedia of
Surfing, ©2003, p. 168.
[11]
Lynch, Gary . Interview
with Ron Drummond, July 30, 1988.
[12]
Dedina, Serge, 1994, p. 37. Lorrin Harrison quoted.
[13]
Dedina, Serge, 1994, p. 37. Ron “Canoe” Drummond quoted.
[14]
Lynch, Gary . Interview
with Ron Drummond, July 30, 1988.
[15]
Warshaw, Encyclopedia of Surfing, ©2003, p. 168.
Sunday, September 04, 2011
1930s: Mid-Decade
7. Mid-1930s
By the mid-1930s, “the surf world remained for the most part
tri-cornered – practiced in Australia, Hawaii, and California by less than
three thousand people total,” wrote surf writer Matt Warshaw in The History
of Surfing, “— and each region was separated from the others by layers of
cultural and geographic insulation… Over the previous thirty-five years, maybe
a dozen surfers had circulated between California
and Hawaii .
Even fewer went from Australia
to Hawaii , or vice versa, and surf travel
between California and Australia didn’t exist.
Occasionally a bit of surf news, in a magazine article or newsreel short, went
international... Beyond that, not much crossed over from one surf region to the
next.”[1]
Waikiki became the place of pilgrimage for California ’s most
influential surfers and it would remain so for the next several decades. In
Southern California and Australia ,
surf clubs – both formal and informal – were focal points of the surfing
lifestyle. Driving that lifestyle was the popularity of Tom Blake’s hollow
board internationally, along with the continued spread of stand-up surfing
itself.
Often overlooked in most discussions on the spread of surfing
during the first several decades of the Twentieth Century, is the contribution
and importance of the body board, what long
ago Hawaiians used to call the kioe. Even before the 1930s, there were
people riding wooden “belly boards” two-to-four feet long in Australia , California ,
the East Coast of the United States ,
and in England .
It is doubtful that these surfers were dedicated surfers, but more likely
beach-goers who enjoyed the salt water and riding waves flat on their stomachs
during summer vacations. Rather than dismiss these riders, it is important to
credit these body boarders. Much of surf lore, today, assumes that surfing was
begun by the advent of stand-up surfers in these areas. The photographic proof
documents quite the opposite. In some areas, body boarders preceeded stand-up
surfers by only a few years; in other places, by as much as one or two decades.
Florida
Beyond wooden body boards, the development of United States East Coast surfing was spearheaded by Tom Blake’s invention of the hollow board. By the mid-1930s, his influence stretched from Oahu to Southern California clear to
Of his influence in Florida ,
Tom recalled: “Florida
was virgin territory as far as I was concerned. Someone had brought a board and
left it behind and I got fooling around on it in 1922. Later on I went back, in
the early 1930s, trying to spread the idea of surfing and rescue boards. There
were no surfers at all then, for years. The surf was pretty good and I enjoyed
riding it. Slowly in the mid-1930s it started catching on. But it didn’t catch
on for rescue work for a long time.”[2]
Dudley and Bill Whitman, two of Florida ’s
first known native surfers, began on belly boards at Miami Beach around 1932. Around 1933-34, the
Whitmans were exposed to “the famous Tom Blake hollow board,” which was “fairly well
accepted at that time,” recalled Dudley Whitman. “Of course, eventually it
became the most popular board in Hawaii ...”[3] While touring in Florida in the early 1930s, Tom “came up to
see my brother and me because he understood we were riding Hawaiian surfboards.
He became one of our lifelong friends.”[4]
By the 1930s, Mainland USA
surfing was no longer confined to California .
Following importation of Hawaiian body boards, Duke Kahanamoku’s
demonstrations of the sport in New Jersey and New York , and Tom’s presence in the state, surfing got
underway in Florida .
The first Florida
surfers hit the waves around 1932. These were Gauldin Reed, Dudley and Bill
Whitman.[5]
“My brother Bill,” recalled Dudley, “who is five years older than me, and I
started surfing in Miami Beach in about 1932 on belly boards. My brother’s
quite a craftsman and we made some belly boards that were quite beautiful. John
Smith and Babe Braithwaite of Virginia Beach came to Miami Beach with the typical, 10-foot redwood
Hawaiian surfboard about that time. My brother and I, being belly boarders,
were totally amazed. So, my brother built the first Hawaiian surfboard that was
ever built in Florida .
It was 10 feet long, and made out of sugar pine. A year later, I followed... I
was only about 13 years old at that time.”[6]
In Tom Blake’s book Hawaiian Surfriders 1935, he named a number of
well-known East Coast surfers who, in the beginning of the 1930s started
surfing. Prominent among them were Dudley and Bill Whitman. Later, as members
of the Outrigger Canoe Club, the Whitmans went on to patent the underwater
camera, make movies, and pioneer the sport of slalom water-skiing.
“We knew Tom from about 1932 or ‘3 for the rest of his life,
virtually,” said Dudley . “Last few years I
kind of lost track of him, but we used to exchange correspondence occasionally.”[8]
“I always thought of Tom as a person about 35 years old, or
something like that,” Dudley Whitman stated, philosophically. “And, of course,
he did age as we all do, but he always kept his youthful appearance. The
amazing thing was that, finishing this particular board off, it was outmoded
just before it was finished! So, very shortly after meeting Tom, my brother
Bill built the first hollow board ever in Florida .”[9]
“Well, it’s been documented, I think,” Dudley Whitman said of
the first surfers in Florida ,
“in some of the magazines, Surfer Magazine and so forth. The first
people that came down here with Hawaiian surfboards were John Smith and Babe
Braithwaite from Virginia Beach .
They had an actual Hawaiian redwood board. They looked us up because we were
fooling around, riding belly boards and things like that. They allowed my
brother and myself to ride their boards, and they, incidentally, became
lifetime friends as well.
“So, my brother Bill built his board, and then I told you about
myself building my solid board. So, my brother Bill built the first Hawaiian
surfboard ever built in Florida ,
and I built the second one – not that that matters. And then my brother Bill
built the first hollow ‘Blake board’ that had ever been built in Florida . I still have
that one that I built over sixty-some years ago, and that’s kind of an
interesting story, in that it was, of course, mahogany and all of that. It was
run over by an automobile up in Daytona. Actually, it was patched so good that
when I look at it today I can hardly tell that it was patched. I had to have
another board, of course, and so we built numerous Blake boards. I don’t have
to tell you that the Blake board dominated the scene in Hawaii from about 1935… all through, until
after World War II. There were a few square-tail hollow boards, too, but Tom,
of course, is the father of the pointed tail, cigar-shaped one, and hollow
boards.”[10]
“Well, of course, Tom was physically fit, a pretty handsome
man, and as a person that knew him, he was a little different than a lot of
surfers that you know,” Dudley said of Tom
Blake and his early impressions of him. “Some people might say, or like to
think, that maybe he was a hippie-type or something. No. He was a type of
person of his own kind. He was always immaculately dressed with excellent
clothes, excellent taste, and never far-out... He always, always presented
well; not a rundown-looking, sloppy bum like you and I know some surfers
degenerated to.”[11]
“Miami Beach ,
back in those days, was not developed to much of an extent at all,” Dudley
Whitman reminisced. “It was just starting its development. We had a home on the
ocean… [on] Collins Avenue …
also known as A1A. When I was a kid and born here, there were crocodiles all
over the place. Very, very few people know that, but… we have photographs of
it... Our home was at Thirty-second Street and Collins Avenue .
The closest home to us was about a mile and a half away, and that was the
Firestone Estate. Of course, today, there’s a dozen hotels in between where our
home was. We could hear them [the Firestones], on a Sunday, start up their
Pierce Arrow automobile and come down, pick us up, and take us to Sunday
School. Miami Beach
was just getting going, and the publicity department was running pictures
nationally of bathing beauties in those ‘gorgeous bathing suits’ they had in
those days; which are pretty much a big laugh to look at… Of course, during my
lifetime I saw Miami Beach
slowly build to be the premium resort of the world. Then, in time, [it] had a
big slide in the sixties and seventies, and looked like it was going nowhere. But
now it’s had a reverse [it’s getting prosperous again]. So, I’ve seen the city
built. But, Miami Beach
[when I was young, was a place where]… some of the roads were paved; there were
few hotels and a sprinkling of homes; and virtually everybody knew each other. Today
it’s a huge city, and is redeveloping as a too-popular of a resort – and also,
really, a terminal for Central and South America .”[12]
Dudley Whitman said of the surf spots back then: “We probably
surfed more up in Daytona than in Miami
Beach , especially when Bill and I went to college. We
went to the University
of Florida ,
so every weekend – bam! – we were over in Daytona surfing. We introduced the
sport there, and I think we started a lot of people surfing. Some of our
friends are still surfing there, like Gauldin Reed.”[13]
“I was surfing before the Whitman brothers came up from Miami and joined us in the mid-’30s,” recalled Gauldin Reed,
of the earliest days of surfing Daytona
Beach . “We had a pretty strong group early on. I have
a picture with 25 boards on the beach that we built ourselves. The boards were
hollow and weighed about 40 pounds. We built nose and tail blocks and side strip
bulkheads every foot and then nailed the plywood down on top of it. Of course,
this was providing we could save $3 to buy all the materials.”[14]
“Nobody knew what we were doing,” Dudley
admitted. “We carried our boards on the cars, these hollow Tom Blake boards
that were 12 feet long, and people just didn’t understand it. Daytona was the
focal point in Florida
for surfing in 1936. Every time we surfed we had a crowd watch us, but it didn’t
really take off until after World War II.”[15]
The hollow boards they built were “rounded… off a little bit
more like the modern boards of today. They were put together with wooden pegs
instead of screws like everybody else had.”[16]
The wooden pegs created quite a stir at Waikiki
when they were first seen. “Well, that’s a pretty good story,” Dudley Whitman
declared when asked about his connection with the Outrigger Canoe Club and the
story of the wooden pegs. “I don’t know how long we had known Tom; maybe for a
year or two. Yes, at least that; maybe more. Definitely more. We were going to Hawaii and he [Tom]
wrote a very nice letter to Duke Kahanamoku to
introduce us to the Outrigger Canoe Club. And so, when we went to Hawaii , we saw Duke. Of
course, he stood about six foot four at least, and he looks down at us haole
white boys, and reads the letter and says, ‘Sorry, we don’t have any room at
the Outrigger Canoe Club.’ Well, my brother Bill is a tremendous craftsman and
he’s really great at lofting and stuff of that nature. So, we had built pretty
nice-looking boards… and we were right there at Waikiki .
So, after Duke had shoosed us, why we immediately started to unpack our boards
that were wrapped up in canvas. After they saw our boards, maybe ten or twenty
Hawaiian surfers gathered around. By the time we got them unpacked, there must
have been at least a hundred or a hundred and fifty standing around. They took
us to the Outrigger Canoe Club, gave us the racks of honor! I’ve been a member
of the Outrigger Canoe Club ever since.”[17]
“My brother Bill’s probably been to Hawaii almost every summer of his life; at
least certainly every other summer, and I’ve not been that fortunate. I’ve been
over there about once every six-to-ten years; something like that. But, we had
a lot of experiences with Tom. Incidentally, I have a beautiful – had a
beautiful – little sailboat I had built, and Tom happened to name my boat. And
he sailed with me on it. It’s called the Kahiki… It means, over the
horizon, or in the distance.”[18]
“This one that I built, that we have in the museum,” Dudley
Whitman recalled of the first surfboard he ever built, “The board that I was
telling you about, about 1958 or 1962 I gave it to a doctor friend, or loaned
it to him so he could train to go to Hawaii with us. Of course, we were riding
modern boards like the type you have today; particularly Hobie boards… [Dudley ’s original board that he loaned was] run over with
a car, [so] I built another one. I loaned it to this friend of mine, Dr.
Bradley, so he could condition himself for a surf safari we had in Hawaii . But he’s a practicing
doctor. He didn’t have a chance to become an expert surfer or anything like
that – not that I’m insinuating that I am or was. But, he used it to train on,
and it got kind of beat up. And so I was throwing it away. I had it strapped on
a cart that was over at our yacht club, and was moving it, and a friend of mine
said, ‘What are you going to do with that?’
“I said, ‘Well, I’m throwing it away.’
“He said, ‘You can’t; it’s historic.’
“I said, ‘Oh, yes, I can. It’s a piece of junk.’
“So, he took it to Columbia , South Carolina ,
and stored it in his garage and his attic and his hangar, and he brought it
back just a couple of years ago. It’s quite an experience to take a board that
you built when you were 13, and you’re well into your seventies when you rejuvenate
it.”[19]
Stand-up surfing and body boarding were not the only water
sports the early Florida
surfers got into. “… kind of an interesting story,” Dudley Whitman recalled. “When
water skiing… first got started in this country, they thought it came from the
[French] Riviera .
I had a friend that had gotten a hold of a pair of water skis from the Riviera . After I tried
them on me, I immediately came home and made a water ski... water skiing was
brand new [in Florida ].
People didn’t even know what you were doing. Within a year or so, I had met
Bruce Parker, who was the U. S. National Champion, and very instrumental in
introducing water skiing in the United
States . He was a professional skier,
incidentally. And so one time when we were skiing, he said, ‘Dudley ,
we’re going to have a water show. We want you to be in it.’ And I said okay. I
think I was in college at the time; I’m not sure. Or, I was in high school. And
he said, ‘We want you to do the single ski act.’ And I said okay.
“It happens that the ski that I had built from scratch,
laminating it and everything else, was pretty much like the ones that were
built in Europe , but the only skis that were
made in this country actually weren’t stable. So, if a person did any single
skiing, they probably went for 500 or 800 feet and invariably they’d fall off…
it just wasn’t real satisfactory. Because of that, I practiced up and I never
rode two skis again. So, it took about three, four years to get my friends to
change over. And [one day] Bruce Parker writes me a letter and calls me on the
telephone, both. He says, ‘Dudley , please stop
that single skiing. We don’t need any one-legged skiers.’ Well, that’s slalom
skiing as it is today. And one of our group – a younger brother of one of my
close friends, who’s an expert skier – his brother went up to Cypress Gardens when they were
doing their girls on a pyramid and flags. They saw them perform and from that
day on they started their own ski company, and [water] skiing, of course,
progressed a lot.” [20]
In “Surfer, horticulturist William Whitman dies,” David Smiley
of the Miami Herald wrote: “A pioneering U.S. East Coast surfer (and
horticulturist) has left us. Dudley Whitman’s brother Bill has passed on at age
92.
“The surfboard Bill Whitman built in 1932, the first of its
kind in Florida ,
helped earn him a spot in the East Coast Surfing Hall of Fame. The underwater
camera he invented and patented in 1951 shot footage that ended up in the
Oscar-winning documentary ‘The Sea Around Us.’ And the 600 truckloads of rich,
acidic soil he had dumped in his Bal Harbour
backyard in the 1950s nurtured a world-famous grove of exotic, tropical fruits.
Throughout his 92 years, the horticulturist scoured the world for tropical
fruits – breadfruit, Kohala longan and a 40-pound jackfruit. All in all,
Whitman is credited with introducing 80 varieties to the United States and donating more than $5 million
to Fairchild
Tropical Botanic
Garden .
“William ‘Bill’ Francis Whitman Jr. died in his home… He was
born June 30, 1914 in Chicago , but as a boy the
family moved to an oceanfront home in Miami
Beach . In 1932, he and his younger brother Dudley
Whitman wanted to surf Hawaiian-style. But there weren’t any surf shops selling
boards anywhere in Florida ,
let alone the East Coast. So, the brothers made their own, according to the
East Coast Surfing Hall of Fame, of which both are members. The elder Whitman
continued to surf well into his 80s.
“‘He was probably one of the greatest underwater men that ever
lived,’ said brother Stanley Whitman. Added brother Dudley: ‘He was more fish
than man.’ An example of the brothers’ 80-plus pound surfboards can be seen in
their private museum at the Whitman-owned Bal
Harbour
Shops.
“On their trips to the Pacific after World War II, the brothers
learned new trades, including spearfishing, which they introduced to the East
Coast and Caribbean , Dudley Whitman said. In
1951, Bill Whitman wanted to show friends back in South Florida a glimpse of
the South Pacific, so he created the first underwater camera and began shooting
film below the surface, Dudley said. Early
films earned the brothers nominations for Academy Awards. They sold some of the
scenes they shot to filmmakers for use in the 1952 documentary ‘The Sea Around Us.’ The film won an Oscar. “We won
the academy award and we weren’t even in the business,” Dudley Whitman said.
“Despite the accolades, Whitman was possibly best known for his
expertise and accomplishments in horticulture. He devoted himself to bringing
back to South Florida many of the exotic fruit
species he found in the South Pacific. He found the sand and marl in his own
backyard unfit to nurture the fragile plant life, so he had 600 truckloads of
rich acidic soil taken from Greynolds Park area and dumped in his Bal Harbour
backyard. He continued to scour the world – from the Amazon to Borneo to the
Australian rain forests – for species he could bring back to United States . His traveling
partner on many of the trips Whitman made late in his life was Steve Brady. By
that time, Brady said, Whitman could hardly walk and used a wheelchair. But
that was no deterrent. “If it involved his passions he would go to the ends of
the earth,” Brady said.
“In 1999, Whitman donated $1 million to Fairchild Tropical Botanic Garden ,
where the Whitman Pavilion was erected in his honor. In 2003, he added $4
million to endow the tropical fruit program. He also helped found the Rare
Fruit Council in 1955, and served as president until 1960. In 2001, Whitman
authored the book, ‘Five Decades with Tropical Fruits: A Personal Journey.’ Whitman’s
accomplishments earned him an honorary doctorate from the University
of Florida ’s College of Agriculture and Life
Sciences in 2004. He earned his bachelor’s in administration from the school in
1939...”[21]
David Karp, of the New York Times wrote in “Bill
Whitman, 92, Is Dead; Scoured the Earth for Rare Fruit,” that “William F.
Whitman Jr., a self-taught horticulturist who became renowned for collecting
rare tropical fruits from around the world and popularizing them in the United
States, died… at his home in Bal Harbour, Fla. He was 92.
“Mr. Whitman, who had suffered strokes and a heart attack, died
in his sleep, his wife, Angela, said. Among rare-fruit devotees, Bill Whitman,
as he was known, was hailed as the only person to have coaxed a mangosteen tree
into bearing fruit outdoors in the continental United States . Native to Southeast Asia , mangosteen is notoriously finicky and
cold-sensitive. That did not deter Mr. Whitman, whose garden is propitiously
situated between Biscayne Bay and the Atlantic Ocean ,
minimizing the danger of catastrophic freezes. (Mangosteen is the most
prominent of the exotic ‘superfruits’ like goji and noni, which are made into
high-priced beverages from imported purées.)
“Mr. Whitman managed to cultivate other fastidiously tropical
species like rambutan and langsat, and he was recognized as the first in the United States
to popularize miracle fruit, a berry that tricks the palate into perceiving sour
tastes as sweet. In pursuit of rare fruit, ‘Bill was a monomaniac,’ said
Stephen S. Brady, his doctor and friend, who traveled with him. ‘He’d hear
about a fruit tree, and pursue it like a pit bull to the ends of the earth.’ Richard
J. Campbell, senior curator of tropical fruit at Fairchild
Tropical Botanic
Garden in Coral Gables , Fla. ,
went on many of these expeditions. ‘When people said, “You can’t grow that in Florida ,” he took that
as a challenge,’ Mr. Campbell said.
“William Francis Whitman Jr. was born in 1914 in Chicago, a son
of William Sr. and Leona Whitman. His father owned a printing company in Chicago and added to his fortune by developing real estate
in Miami . Bill
and his brothers helped pioneer surfing in Florida , and he was inducted into the East
Coast Surfing Hall of Fame in 1998. After serving in the Coast Guard during
World War II, Mr. Whitman, along with his brother Dudley, built and patented an
underwater camera that provided film for several movies, including ‘The Sea
Around Us,’ which won an Academy Award for best documentary in 1952. Mr.
Whitman’s devotion to collecting and propagating rare species and varieties
stemmed from a sailing trip to Tahiti , where
he became enchanted by the fruit. Mr. Whitman was a founder of the Rare Fruit
Council International, based in Miami ,
and was its first president, from 1955 to 1960. Foremost among the fruit he
introduced to Florida
was Kohala longan...”[22]
Jordan Kahn of the Daytona Beach News-Journal wrote a fine
history of the early days of surfing at Daytona and Miami Beaches .
The following is taken from his “Surfing’s Lost Chapter - How did Daytona Beach become Florida ’s 1st surf city,” DAYTONA BEACH
NEWS-JOURNAL, 27 July 2008.
“There is a grainy photograph of surfers posing near the Main
Street Pier [in Daytona Beach ,
circa 1938] that holds clues to a lost chapter of local history... [In the
1930s] Few people in the world had ever seen such a thing as surfing then...
Yet there they are, sepia-toned Florida
surfers wearing wool swimsuits and riding 16-foot wood boards at a time when Studebakers and Model A Fords rolled down the beach...
“From a campsite on the beach a few blocks south of the pier,
three brothers waded through the sea foam, and surfing in this city began. “People
didn’t know what a surfboard was, and for years they didn’t know what we were
doing,” said Dudley Whitman, one of those brothers. The puzzling sight of these
three brothers from Miami Beach
standing above the waves didn’t go unnoticed long so near the Boardwalk. In the
1930s, this was the hub of beach activity. Pep’s Pool and Pat Sheedy’s Handball
Courts were there. The ‘Flying Mile’ race was held on the sand, and boxing
rings were erected on the beach. Within a few years, a chain reaction of
surfing discoveries was spreading. James Nelson of Daytona Beach Shores remembers the
day some 70 years ago when he was at the handball courts and saw something in
the ocean. “Some of the lifeguards were out there fooling around on these
boards.” Nelson, now 91, was fascinated.
He went to talk to them and found out one of the lifeguards made and sold
surfboards. Soon afterward, the young Stetson University law student
bought an 18-foot red board for $25... [23]
“None of the men in that 1938 photo was the first person known
to surf Florida ,
but the details of their boards contain the fingerprints of the man who was. A
fin is visible on one board. And a few bear the telltale dots of nails securing
plywood to a hollow frame. These are the inventions of Tom Blake, the seminal
trailblazer of surfing as not just sport, but lifestyle and craft. While living
in Hawaii ,
Blake put the first fin on a surfboard only [four] years before that photo was
taken...
[Hawaiian] “Duke Kahanamoku... was
famed as much as a surfer as for being an Olympics sensation, setting world
records and winning three gold medals in the 1912 and 1920 games. It was
Kahanamoku who inspired Blake to take up surfing. When Kahanamoku traveled to
swim meets, he saved surfing from disappearing by giving the surf exhibitions
for which he is now renowned as the ‘Johnny Appleseed’ of modern surfing. Kahanamoku
told his biographer that by 1900, western colonization had so completely
stamped out native Hawaiian culture that ‘surfing had totally disappeared
throughout the islands except for a few isolated spots… and even there only a
handful of men took boards into the sea.’ It is surfing’s narrow escape through
this historic bottleneck that gives it a lineage like a family tree. Ancient
Hawaiians are surfing’s roots. Kahanamoku is the trunk. And surfing’s genesis
in Daytona Beach
is only one branch removed.[24]
“Whitman said lifeguards visiting Miami
from Virginia Beach ,
where Kahanamoku had held a surf demo, first showed him and his brothers how to
surf in 1930. Two years after that, the Whitman brothers were at their
oceanfront workshop in Miami Beach
when they saw someone paddling a surfboard. It was Blake, who in his biography,
‘Tom Blake: The Uncommon Journey of a Pioneer Waterman,’ said he was looking
for these Florida
surfers he’d heard about. Blake taught the Whitmans to build his boards that
transformed the sport’s 180-pound planks into 80-pound hulls.
“These brothers’ surfing experiments may have begun in Miami , but they did most of their actual wave riding in Daytona Beach as students at the University
of Florida in Gainesville . “We worked every minute so we
could leave on the weekend and go to Daytona and surf,’ Whitman said. ‘We
actually surfed at Daytona; probably one of the first times was after the 1934
hurricane… We carried our surfboards on a trailer and camped on the beach.’ Blake
could have directly influenced other locals, too. He was a lifeguard in Florida during the early
1930s and toured with the Red Cross promoting the use of surfboards to save people
from drowning.
“And among the surfers in that 1938 photo are Paul Hart, a
lifeguard examiner for the Red Cross, and Donald Gunn and Dick Every, who are
both wearing the wool tank-top uniforms of the day for Daytona Beach
lifeguards. Every even remembers a picture of Blake surfing in Daytona Beach at Harvey Street ... [25]
“I remember seeing Dudley
driving into town in a fancy convertible with surfboards towed behind it,” said
Every, now 85. “My brother and I decided to build boards like them.” Gaulden
Reed said in an interview before his death in November [2007] at 89 that people
started making Blake-style boards in Seabreeze and Mainland high school shop
classes. Bill Wohlhuter, the owner of Port Orange Seafood today, said he built
his board from plans he got from Every’s brother, Don. ‘I once mounted a 1
1/2-horsepower Water Witch outboard on that board,” Wohlhuter said. ‘I steered
the tiller with my foot!’ Many of these men – including the three Whitmans – are
in the photo, preserved by the surfing hall of fame in Cocoa
Beach , the Halifax
Historical Museum
in Daytona Beach and the Whitman family museum
in Miami . The
occasion is said to be the East Coast or Florida
surfing championships.
“By today’s standards though, those boards are closer to boats.
‘They were kind of like a freight train,’ Whitman said. ‘They were very much
faster for paddling, slow to get started of course, but probably faster than
you could paddle a canoe once you got going. And you could catch big waves much
farther out.’ After hurricanes, to make it past the onrush of whitewater, Reed
said he used to throw his board off the pier and dive in. ‘During the hurricane
season, you could catch some pretty good-sized ones, maybe 7- , 8- , 9-foot
waves that were breaking out there beyond the pier,’ Nelson said. ‘You’d have
to really walk the board. You’d catch the wave and you’d have to walk about
four or five feet to keep the nose down and then walk it back and forth to keep
it going.’
“They stuck their hands in the water like oars to prod those
big boards into turns. ‘To be a cool cat and get the girls,’ Nelson said, ‘you
had to lean over with your hand to steer it.’ The real hot dog move was
shooting the pier, surfing through the pilings from one side to the other. ‘I
almost lost a kneecap trying to do it,’ Nelson said. [26]
“When some of Daytona Beach ’s
surfers made their first pilgrimage to the sport’s birthplace, these Florida upstarts would
achieve a degree of stature with the world’s most hallowed surfing club. The
relatively advanced boards the Whitmans are holding in that 1938 photo defied
odds in arriving in Waikiki ... They were
beautifully crafted; one made with mahogany and brass screws. Blake had given
the Whitmans a letter of introduction to the Outrigger Canoe Club,
the first surfing club.
“‘We were just kids and we showed it to Duke,’ Whitman said. ‘But
he didn’t really have time for a couple of haole (Hawaiian slang for mainland
outsiders) boys. So we went ahead and unwrapped our surfboards. People gathered
around to watch us unpack and when the Hawaiians saw our surfboards, they gave
us surf racks of honor.” The Whitmans were made club members and they surfed
next to Kahanamoku. Reed also flew [probably travelled by steamship, as commercial
aviation was still in its infancy] to Hawaii
and met Kahanamoku and Blake. And Every met and surfed alongside Kahanamoku at
Makaha. Sadly, the life these men gave to an embryonic Daytona Beach surf culture nearly vanished.[27]
“A nucleus of roughly 45 Daytona
Beach surfers had developed. As quickly as surfing was
becoming part of life in Daytona Beach ,
World War II and its exodus of young men would all but end it. In the days
leading up to the war, Nelson sold Mainland High School
grad George Doerr ‘a half interest’ in his $25 red wooden surfboard. ‘When
World War II came along,’ Nelson said, ‘(Doerr) went into the Air Force and he
was a fighter pilot and got shot down and was in a German prison camp for a
couple of years.’ Reed said the only person he remembers surfing with during
the war was Brewster Shaw, a famous local beach race driver. And on a coast
suddenly on high alert for German submarines and spies, surfing went from a
bizarre to a suspicious sight. ‘Brewster and I were in front of the Boardwalk
and we came in after dark because the waves were so good, and we were reported
to the police that two men had come in on torpedoes,’ Reed said. They were
surrounded at gunpoint by military police. Reed said another time he was out
past the end of the pier and a patrol boat approached him, machine guns drawn. ‘I’m
saying, “No! No! No! Surfboard! Surfboard! Don’t Fire!” Reed said. “Scared my
mule!”’
“When Every returned home from the war in ‘45, he said, ‘there
was no surfing at all.’ Tony Sasso, a longtime director of the East Coast
Surfing Hall of Fame Museum in Cocoa Beach ,
said it’s been very hard to come by stories about surfing at that time. ‘Right
around 1940 the trail goes dead. It doesn’t start back up again until the
1950s,’ Sasso said. ‘Everything started from scratch again.’ It is as if the
war erased the heritage of Daytona
Beach ’s surfing pioneers as cleanly as footprints
washed by waves from the sand. Only a few photos and people survive to stake Daytona Beach ’s claim as Florida ’s first surf city. ‘I kind of hate
to admit it, being from Cocoa Beach where we call ourselves the East Coast
surfing capitol,’ said Sasso, ‘but the first seeds were planted in the Daytona
Beach area.’[28]
“By 1958, foam and fiberglass surfboards had transformed the
sport. Richard Brown of Daytona Beach
turned 14 and bought his first surfboard that year. He remembers being one of
the very first people at Seabreeze High School
to have one. ‘There were some guys at Mainland,’ he said. ‘But by ‘69,
everybody at Seabreeze had a surfboard, or damn near.’ To those who were
catching this new wave, it felt as if surfing had just been born. But Richard
and his brother Dana, who today own the insurance company Hayward Brown Inc.,
grew up around surfing. And it was some of these early surfing pioneers who
almost literally handed down the sport. Dick Every, who had the first foam
surfboard in town, used to lend it to Richard and Dana. And Oscar Clairholme
made a hollow board they used to play on as kids. ‘In fact, we had it out in
the ocean one day and it sank. We lost it,’ Richard said.
“What has generally been remembered as Florida ’s first generation of surfers was,
in fact, the second. And these Floridians lived the kinds of experiences
romanticized by Hollywood ’s
beach-blanket movies. As a lifeguard, Dana Brown often hung out on the beach in
a palm frond and wood shack in front of the Daytona Plaza Hotel and rented
surfboards. ‘In the summertime,’ Richard said, ‘my brother Dana used to anchor
a sailboat out off of Daytona Plaza .
We had pretty big boards back then, too, and my brother and his friends would
each put a case of beer and a beach bunny on their board and paddle out to the
sailboat for an evening of revelry.’
“... Richard remembers one of the best days of surfing he ever
had was after a hurricane in 1964. ‘I came home from Gainesville because I knew it was going to be
good and I surfed in front of the old Voyager Hotel,” he said. “You couldn’t
lose your board because it would smack into the sea wall. There was no beach...
We’d never seen waves like that; it was so big, 10- or 12-foot waves.’ Richard
even saw what he called ‘the day the style of surfing changed.’ He was in high
school when two road-tripping surfers from California paddled out. They were all
shooting the pier, riding gently rolling outside waves they called ‘humpers.’ Suddenly
the Californians headed in. ‘We figured, “Well hell, they don’t like it. They’re
leaving,”‘ Richard said. And the next thing we see is their heads from the back
of the waves screaming right and left and then they would do a kick out and the
board would come flying back out of the wave. ‘We were just sitting there
dumbfounded. We thought you’d be killed if you tried to surf in the shallow
water in big wave shore pound,’ he said. ‘Then we started doing it.’[29]
“Is it possible that boogie boarders were the first wave riders
in Florida ? There
are numerous accounts of belly boarding, as it was called generations ago,
predating surfing in the state. Dudley Whitman said in 1930 when the group of
lifeguards visiting Miami
taught him to surf, he and his brothers had already been riding belly boards. The
St. Augustine Record archives contain an article about a man named Guy Wolfe
riding the waves in 1914. The article says Wolfe rode on his belly on wood planks
covered in painted canvas that had ‘barrel stays’ for a sled-like nose. And one
of Daytona Beach ’s
first surfers, native Gaulden Reed, who was born in 1919, said in his life both
body surfing and belly boarding had always been among the sights at the beach. ‘Prior
to (surfing), we were really expert body surfers,’ Reed said before his death
[in 2007]. ‘We also built belly boards that were about 4 feet long and 2 feet
wide by putting thin boards together and crossing them with two small boards
and rounding the nose. They were only good for catching a breaking wave and riding
the foam in.’
“How this more basic wave sport made it to Florida before surfing is unknown... The
idea could have been imported by people who had either visited Hawaii or cities in California and the eastern seaboard that had
been exposed to canoe surfing, traditional surfing and body surfing as
demonstrated by Duke Kahanamoku in his travels.[30]
“... [At] the East Coast Surfing Hall of Fame
Museum in Cocoa
Beach and the Halifax Historical Museum in Daytona Beach...
Only two of the 16 people are named... Dudley Whitman and Floyd Graves, but the
names are written in a way that indicates who is who. A total of 28 names of
people surfing in Daytona Beach
during that time were given during interviews for this story. These are the 16
surfers in the 1938 photo. Fourteen of them are now identified; Wilbur Flowers,
Barney Barnhart Jr., Bill Whitman, Stanley Whitman, Dudley Whitman, Don Every,
Earl Blank, Bill Wohlhuter, Paul Hart, Donald Gunn, Floyd Graves, Al Bushman,
James Nelson and Dick Every. An additional 13 surfers of that era were named in
interviews: Gaulden Reed, Welling Brewster Shaw, Oscar Clairholme, George
Doerr, Tom Porter, Buster MacFarland, Nelson Rippey, ‘Nudder’ Wilcox, Charles
Spano, Carlisle ‘Boop’ Odum, Earnest Johnson,
George Boone and George Jeffcoat.
“Plus there are two surfers from the 1938 photos that remain
unidentified. That’s a total of 29 surfers. James Nelson remembers the photo as
taking place after the event and after some of the competitors had already
left. And in the photo, only 16 surfers are shown, but Dudley Whitman is
wearing a No. 24. Dick Every said there were probably about 10 or 15 more
surfers in the area who didn’t come to the event, giving 1938 Daytona Beach a
rough estimate of 40 to 45 surfers. ‘There was nobody from New Smyrna surfing
and I don’t recall anybody from Cocoa
either,’ Every said. Paul ‘Bitsy’ Hart won the contest that day, which in
interviews was sometimes called the Florida Surfing Championships and sometimes
the East Coast Surfing Championships.
“‘(Hart) was in the same fraternity we were in, in Gainesville ,’ Dudley
Whitman said. ‘We used to stay with him. His mother had the drug store on Main Street . He
built his own surfboard.’ Earl Blank, who died in 1993, was, among other
things, a lifeguard and a hobby beekeeper. Bushman and Nelson were law students
at Stetson
University
in DeLand when the photo was taken. Barnhardt remembers Boone and Jeffcoat were
lifeguards in the 1930s. Johnson’s family owned bait-and-tackle stores in the Daytona Beach area. Wilcox
was a boxer and a lifeguard. Spano was a city champ handball player and a head
lifeguard. Clairholme was a builder in the area. Shaw was the father of William
‘Flea’ Shaw, who coached and married the four-time world champion surfer from Flagler
Beach ,
Frieda Zamba Shaw. It’s noteworthy that Pep’s Pool was a public swimming pool
at the Boardwalk near the foot of the Main Streer Pier in the time because the
son of the pool’s owners is in the photo, Barney Barnhardt Jr. ‘The kid on the
far left is a boy named Wilbur Flowers,’ Barnhardt said. ‘We were both 12 years
old then. ‘We weren’t in the contest, but the photographer said, “Hey you’ve got
a board. Get in the picture.” Let me tell you an interesting thing about that
picture. My grandfather lived in Akron , Ohio ,
and he saw that picture in the Akron Beacon Journal because it went out on The
Associated Press wire.”[31]
Back in the beginning years of Floridian surfing, just after it
got underway, Tom Blake returned to
lifeguard at the Roman Pools, located on 23rd Street and the Atlantic Ocean, in Miami .[32]
Over the years spanning the 1920s to the 1950s, he went back and forth between California and Florida
“several times,” he noted.[33]
In Hawaiian Surfboard, he mentioned briefly a trip to
the Bahamas with his
surfboard along; quite probably the first surf safari to the Bahamas : “In a seaplane, (Pan American) trip
from Nassau ,
the English possession, I carried a full-sized hollow surfboard as baggage without
trouble or inconvenience. Had we been forced down and the ship sunk in the Gulf Stream , I could have maintained the two pilots,
steward, three passengers and myself from sinking for many hours, or until help
came.”[34]
Dudley Whitman said they also “surfed the island of Eleuthera ,” at some
point; probably much later.”[35]
Reviews of Tom’s book, published in 1935, reference his
previously working in New York – even New York City . This was,
no doubt, following a stint in Florida .
Perhaps Tom’s first time working in New York ,
since the time he worked in the carnival at Jones Beach
in 1921, was the summer of 1934. Tom tells it like this: “One time in Florida , I had a job at
the surf club. That was the most exclusive beach club at Miami . The rich come down there from all over
the country. I worked for Richard Ricardi… This rich man named Feldman was at
the club one day and he had a big estate up in New York ; Long Island… He had some kids. He
used to have someone take care of the kids; teach them in the summer, you know.
Steve recommended me. I heard him discussing it with his friend once. He said, ‘That’s
the guy who beat the Hawaiians at their own game.’ Well, I didn’t say anything.
That wasn’t what the Hawaiian’s game was, you know. They’re game was winning!
[laugh] Anyway, Feldman said, ‘Come work for me this summer.’”[36]
Tom travelled to Long Island , New York
and instructed the Feldman children. It is likely that he also did some
lifeguarding in the area, possibly New
York City . He certainly was in touch with the guards
at Jones Beach
and credits “Mullahey of Honolulu and Valley Stream ,
N.Y. ” with making lifeguards at Jones
Beach ,
on the South Shore of Long Island, N.Y., “surfboard minded.” Mullahey “battled
for several years, as a lieutenant in the famous Jones Beach Lifeguard Patrol,
to show them the value of the surfboard in rescue work. So when I came along
with the improved hollow boards they were ready and eager to accept them.”[37]
“I went up there,” Tom continued of his New York summer. “That summer was fantastic
for me… [My costs] were very little and they paid me $500 dollars a month. It
was fantastic. I took care of these kids, taught them to swim, had good luck
with them. Good luck for their parents, too, because they were all individuals
and they were hard to get along with. We did get along… I came out of it with
about $1500 bucks, well fed and everything, and heading for the Islands , again, for some surfing.”[38]
Long Beach
Back in California, in summer 1933, at one of the most popular surf beaches at the time – Long Beach – City Ordinance No. C-1195 went into effect, restricting surfboard riders to certain areas of the beach. If surfers failed to obey, it was possible that they could be fined $500 and put in jail for six months. The June 16th edition of the Press-Telegram gave the lowdown:
“An emergency ordinance, proposed by the Municipal Lifeguards…
[has] become City Ordinance No. C-1195. Henceforth, timorous bathers need not
dive in terror to the bottom of the sea in hope of avoiding being cut in twain
by a speeding Hawaiian surfboard. The surfboard riders either will mind the new
P’s and Q’s or will go to jail.
“Certain lanes of the surf will be reserved for bathing, and
other lanes will be legal highways for riders of the booming wave. The maximum
penalty for offense is a fine of $500, six months in jail, or both.”[39]
At the beginning of the following summer, the Long Beach Press-Telegram declared
that “Surf-Riding” was now a “Popular Sport.”
“For beginners there are always plenty of little crumble waves,
easy to ride on a two-bit surfboard. The experts ignore such ripples and ignore
such surfboards; they ride a ‘comber’ or none at all, and they use either an
Hawaiian board or none at all.
“There are several approved methods of wave riding. The
simplest for the beginner is to repose oneself upon a thin five-foot plank and
to place oneself, plant and all in the path of a wave. With fair luck the wave
then will carry one, plank and all, on a speedy scenic voyage to the beach.
“The second variety of wave riding in the board class is much
more spectacular. It requires strength, courage and skill. Furthermore, the
participant may crack his skull or break his neck, before reaching the safe
degree of expertness. The rider paddles seaward on a surfboard nearly twice his
own length and equal to his own weight. Away out in the breaker line he
about-faces and waits for a ‘big one.’ Pretty soon a toppling wall of green sea
water approaches. The rider paddles; the wall scoops him up, board and all,
almost to the point where board and rider would spill. Precariously he rights
the board and as it is driven shoreward in front of the breaker’s crest he
stands upright, aloof, conqueror of board and breaker. Or else, with a
precipitous and ungraceful leap, he loses balance and disappears in the water.
“Of body surfing, as the lifeguards call it, there are two
varieties. In one, the arms are extended beachward while the rider moves along
in the lather of a wave. This type is juvenile; this type is taboo among the
tanned gentry of many beach seasons. They prefer the second and more
spectacular way of body surfing.
“This latter way is to clamp the arms against the sides, push
the shoulders forward and stick the head down, and to ride the wave face-downward.
The bathers who survive the rigors of learning this are in heavy surf become
expert at ‘taking the drop’ with a crashing breaker and riding part and parcel
with it until it casts itself upon the sand. Occasionally on the swift
shoreward voyage they take a breath by raising the head, with jaw pugnaciously
forward; barracuda-fashion.
“The experts in advanced surf riding have a right to strut on
the beach. They have challenged the ocean’s mightiest breakers and have looked
Old Man Neptune squarely in the eye.”[40]
Two years later, in September 1936, the Long Beach Press-Telegram featured a
surfer by the name of Steve Skinner who assured the newspaper’s reporter that
the “Thrilling Sport of Riding Surf” is “Easy to Master.”
“‘Hold the surf board in a horizontal position, the end against
the middle of your body. Turn a little cornerwise to the breakers, so that you
can see the rolling water over your shoulder. When the wave gets to you make a
swing straight for the shore. Lay the board flat on the water and slip both
hands to the center of the board at full arms length.’
“It’s Stephen ‘Steve’ Skinner speaking, and Steve should know.
He not only rides a surfboard himself, but has taught a thousands others to do
the same. Friendly, smiling and burned a mahogany color by the sun, Steve
spends his spare time between Silver Spray Pier and Rainbow Pier swimming,
riding a surf board, teaching others to ride, chatting with tourists. He is a
one-man Chamber of Commerce, teaching enjoyment of water sports and making
friends for the city.
“‘When I first came to the coast from Wichita , Kansas ,
fourteen years ago I didn’t know how to ride a surf board,’ he recalls. ‘I had
a friend who did. I would ask him how he did it. ‘Just like this,’ he would
say, and he would ride in with the wave and I couldn’t see what he did. I asked
Henry B. Marshall, the umbrella man, how to ride a surfboard. He showed me the
way I now teach others. I went out and rode in. It’s simple when you know
exactly what to do, and riding in the first time is the greatest thrill in your
life. I’ve had tourists come up to me on the beach and say: “I remember you!
You taught me to ride a surfboard six years ago” or “You taught me to ride a
surf board. Now will you teach my wife and children?” I’m always glad to do it.
I’ll go back in the surf any time to teach anyone how to ride a surf board.’”[41]
In 1937, what Long Beach lifeguards and city fathers had feared
might happen finally did, only it was not an injury caused to a bather by a
surfer but rather self-inflicted upon the wave rider. The Press-Telegram reported:
“Woman, Hurt by Surfboard July 5, Dies of Injury: Fatality First of Kind Ever
Recorded in History of Beach.”
“Mrs. Phyllis Hines, 19, whose riding of breakers here July 5
came to an abrupt and painful stop when her own surfboard jabbed her in the
abdomen. She died last night from effects of the blow.
“While the autopsy surgeon’s report was awaited today
lifeguards here said that the young woman’s death was the first surfboard fatality
of which they have heard. ‘Sometimes a bather has received an injury from a
surfboard, usually because he tried to lie too far forward on the board,
forcing it into a nose dive under water,” Lieutenant Henry P. Coleman of the
Municipal Lifeguards said this morning. ‘Usually the injury is only a bruise or
a bump on the head.’ A city ordinance requires surfboard riders to stay away
from the surf immediately in front of lifeguard stations, where the boards
might imperil swimmers.
“Police reports of the accident to Mrs. Hines indicate that a
wave drove her own surfboard against her while she was in the surf with
hundreds of other bathers.”[42]
The following year, the local paper gave a rundown of contest
results from the “Southern California
surfboard relay championship”:
“Surfboard riding, ancient sport of South Sea Islanders, gave a
crowd of several thousand beach visitors a thrilling show here yesterday in Southern California championship events in the Salute to
the States water circus beside Rainbow Pier.
“More than thirty expert surfers competed in the races. They
represented surfing clubs of several beach cities. Their spectacular rides and
frequent spills proved to be the most popular entertainment on the 4 1/2-hour
water circus program. Five husky swimmers of the Manhattan Beach Surfing Club
won the Southern California surfboard relay
championship from the Hermosa Beach Surfing Club. The Venice Paddleboard Club
finished third. Each member of a competing team raced from the beach to a
marker a quarter-mile offshore and returned to the beach riding on a breaker,
passing his surfboard to the next member of his team.” [43]
Following this regional paddleboard contest, Long Beach hosted the first National Surfing
and Paddleboard Championships on Sunday, November 13, 1938. It was the first
countrywide paddleboard title event held in the United States . More than 140 of America ’s
finest surfers competed for the mammoth silver trophy presented to the winning
team and for the gold trophies presented individual winners.
The main event started with a half-mile paddleboard race
through the surf. Women as well as men competed. It was broadcast live over
radio station KFOX while 20,000 people crowded onto Rainbow and Silver Spray
piers and the beach in front of the Pike to view 140 competitors. Pete Peterson and Mary Ann Hawkins of
the Del Mar Surfing Club won in the national paddleboard division.
In conjunction with the paddle boarding event, there was also a
surfing competition scheduled. However, lack of heavy surf postponed the surf
contest until December 11, 1938. Not wanting to disappoint the crowd who had
come to see them perform and the radio audience who were listening, the surfers
held a trial open surfing event, with John Olson of Long Beach winning the
competition, James McGrew of Beverly Hills placing second and Denny Watson of
Venice third.[44]
“Preston Peterson and Miss Mary Ann Hawkins of Del Mar Surfing
Club yesterday were crowned national paddle board champions,” reported the Long Beach Press-Telegram, “in the first annual
national surfing and paddle board contest at Long Beach . Competing were 140 members of twelve
organizations.
“Lack of a heavy surf made necessary a postponement of
competition in the surf riding events and the highly anticipated initial interclub
clash for possession of the Dick Loynes perpetual team trophy until December
11.
“Riding the small waves, John Olson of Long
Beach won the open surfing event with James McGrew of Beverly Hills second and Denny
Watson of Venice third. In the most thrilling event of the day, a five-man team
from the Venice Surfriding Club, nosed out the Manhattan Club at the finish of
a relay event entered also by Long
Beach and the Surfriders.” [45]
40,000 onlookers watched sixty-five surfers compete in team and
individual competitions on that cold December day in 1938. The Santa Ana Band
led the participants, whose boards ranged in length from eleven to eighteen
feet, to the edge of the surf between Rainbow and Silver Spray Piers where the
water temperature was 52 degrees. Newsreel, magazine and newspaper
photographers were also there taking pictures of the event.
The Press-Telegram reported on the following day:
“Forty thousand onlookers yesterday watched one of the most
thrilling aquatic demonstrations ever staged when nature provided thundering
rollers for the third annual Mid-winter Swim coupled with the National Surfing
Champions.
“Postponed from a month ago, the National Surfing Championships
provided the greatest action, with sixty-five surf riders participating. The
Manhattan Surfing Club won the 44-inch silver perpetual team cup. The Venice
Surfing Club placed second, Santa Monica third,
Palos Verdes Surfriders Club fourth, and the Del Mar Club fifth. The open surfing
championship was won by Arthur Horner of Venice ,
with Jim Kerwin of Manhattan Beach coming in
second, and Don Campbell also of Manhattan
Beach third. Medals were given to Chuck Allen, Palos
Verdes, fourth place; Tom Ehlers, Manhattan Beach ,
fifth place; Kenneth Beck, Venice , sixth; Bob
Reinhard and John Lind of Long Beach who placed
seventh and eighth.”[46]
So successful was this first national Surfing and Paddleboard
Championships, a second was held the following year off Rainbow Pier – again
during the winter swell season – on December 3, 1939.
“A three-man team representing the Hermosa Beach Surfing Club
yesterday won the Dick Loynes perpetual trophy emblematic of the national
surfing championship in an event in the fog-shrouded waters off Rainbow Pier.
“Booming out of the fog blanket on the crests of curling
breakers that saturated onlookers, the Hermosa Beach
men nosed out the defending trophy holders of Manhattan Beach by 10 points. Venice Surfing
Club was third and Long Beach ,
fourth. Gene Smith, member of the Hawaiian Surfing Club, which traveled here
from the islands, competed alone against the teams after his two teammates A.C.
Spohler and Jack May withdrew in the face of the unusual weather conditions. He
finished fifth against the heavy odds.
“Individual surfing honors went to Long Beach Surfing Club
members John Olsen who finished first, Alvin Bixler, second, and Bob
Rhienhardt, forth. Gene Smith of Hawaii came in third.” [47]
The second was the last. There would never again be another
national surf contest held in Long
Beach for two reasons: war and the breakwater. World
War II broke out in Europe and it was not long before the Japanese attacked and
the United States
was drawn into the war. The Long Beach breakwater was extended
during the war when the U.S. Navy came to Terminal Island and made it their
home. After the war, the surfers who returned from battle would find that there
were no more waves in Long Beach
to ride. The breakwater had seen to that. But love of surfing still continued,
and shapers such as Ernest Guirey still made Long Beach their home.
San Diego
“There’s a good chance Ralph Noisat caught the first wave in
De Wyze wrote that “… as he wasn’t a man to brag, his
pioneering role might have been lost were it not for his board. He made it
himself when he was a boy, and it was still in the Noisat family home in 1998
when Ralph’s daughter, Margie Chamberlain, was preparing to sell the Mission
Hills residence. Chamberlain realized the heavy wooden board might have
historic value… her father’s maternal grandfather worked on the construction of
the Pioneer Sugar Mill in Lahaina, Maui . Her
father’s mother spent at least part of her childhood there, before moving to
the San Francisco Bay Area, marrying, and having [her father] Ralph in 1896.
From what her father later told her, Chamberlain got the impression he was
close to his grandfather; he may have even visited him in Hawaii , where the older man lived for many
years. ‘My dad knew some of the Hawaiian royal family
members,’ Chamberlain says. ‘He had a lot of the sense of Hawaiian history,
which I can only imagine he got from his grandfather.’ [48]
Although Ralph Noisat’s daughter didn’t know “how her father
came to make the seven-foot-long, square-tailed board, ‘He always talked about
the wood being koa,’ she says. She has the impression he may have surfed on it
in Northern California before 1910, the year he and his mother moved to San Diego . He would have
turned 14 that year. Noisat enrolled as a freshman at San Diego High School and got
involved with track and field and student government; he managed the football
team. He also surfed from 1910 to 1914, he told his daughter years later.” It’s
not known where Ralph surfed, “but he wasn’t riding the waves alone. ‘When he
was telling me these stories of his youth, it always sounded like he had this
little circle of friends,’ his daughter says. Whether his pals borrowed his
board or fashioned copies is another detail that’s been lost.[49]
“Before he reached his 18th birthday in 1914, Noisat enlisted
in the Navy, embarking on a military career that would last 30 years. Chances
are he wasn’t here when one of the most famous surfers in the world arrived. George Freeth, born in
Oahu in 1883, was the son of an Englishman and
a half-Hawaiian woman. A champion swimmer and high diver, Freeth taught himself
the ancient Hawaiian art of riding waves, a skill that by the end of the 19th
Century had almost disappeared from the islands. By 1907 he was so adept he
caught the eye of writer and travel adventurer Jack London, who later described Freeth’s aquatic
prowess in The Cruise of the Snark. London
was among those who provided letters of introduction to the young Hawaiian as
he prepared to sail to California ,
where he hoped to make his fortune promoting surfing and other water sports.[50]
“Less than three weeks after departing Oahu (on July 3, 1907),
Freeth was surfing at Venice Beach .
The spectacle attracted the attention of at least one newspaper reporter and
has since inspired the claim that Freeth was the first person to surf in California . (This seems
unlikely, according to the staff at the Santa Cruz Surfing Museum .
They point to a newspaper article that details how, in 1885, three members of
the royal Hawaiian family who attended a military school in San
Mateo surfed at the mouth of the San
Lorenzo River in Santa Cruz .) Freeth’s
water skills distinguished him from most Americans of that era. Drownings were
so commonplace they were scaring away tourists from resorts in Venice
and Redondo Beach .
To counteract the negative publicity, railroad magnate and Redondo developer
Henry Huntington hired Freeth to show off his surfing skills, and the developer
of Venice
followed suit. Freeth’s performances included standing on his head while riding
the waves. And in the years that followed, he improved water safety off
Southern California, teaching fundamental water-rescue skills to a cadre of
young men who later formed the lifeguard services of Los
Angeles County , Long Beach , and San
Diego . At times Freeth took a more hands-on approach
to lifesaving, most notably when he rescued 11 Japanese fishermen during a
violent winter storm in December 1908. Eighteen months later, the United State
Congress saluted his bravery by giving him a Congressional Gold Medal.
“For all the acclaim, Freeth struggled to make a living. He got
a break in 1915 when the moneyed and well-connected San Diego Rowing Club asked
him to coach the club’s swim team. Freeth took the job, and it seems likely he
would have surfed in San Diego [at that time] at least in the summer months,
when to earn extra money he taught swimming in Coronado. By May 1918, after 13
men died in a single day in rip currents off Ocean Beach ,
that community had secured Freeth’s services as a lifeguard, and as a July 17,
1918, San Diego Union article attests, he couldn’t resist showing off. ‘Four
thousand beachgoers received a surprise and enjoyed a succession of thrills and
healthy laughs yesterday at Ocean Beach
when George Freeth, lifeguard, presented his unannounced surfboard dive,’ the
paper reported. ‘Riding on the crest of the wave in the usual manner, Freeth
suddenly leaped, clearing the board by at least three feet, turned a somersault,
regained his balance on the board again, then completed his stunt with a dive.’
“That was around 1916 or 1917, according to local amateur
surfing historian John Elwell. Elwell says [Duke] Kahanamoku surfed the OB
Pier, and when he did, he asked a teenaged lifeguard named Charlie Wright if he
could store his board in Wright’s beach shack. Elwell, who interviewed Wright a
few years before his death in 1994, says Wright encouraged Kahanamoku to use
the shack but asked if he might try the board. ‘So Charlie surfed the board and
also got the dimensions and later copied it,’ Elwell says. [51]
“Wright, who was something of a showman as well as an
entrepreneur, was putting on surfing demonstrations at special events. The California Surf
Museum has one photograph of Wright
surfing on New Year’s Eve of 1925 next to the Crystal Pier in Pacific Beach ; on his shoulders
he bears a young woman wielding a torch.
“But by the late 1920s, Wright wasn’t using his board for much
besides the occasional exhibition. Emil Sigler says he found it near the Mission Beach
lifeguard station when he went there the day after his arrival in San Diego in 1928. ‘It was
two pieces of thick pine, bolted together. And it had an iron tip,’ recalls
Sigler... He asked whom the board belonged to and then tracked down Wright, who
told him he could use it as much as he wanted. ‘Just put it back where you
found it. Lean it against the seawall,’ Sigler says Wright instructed him.[52]
“Born in San Francisco ,
Sigler had wanted to become a fisherman, and since school didn’t interest him,
he often ditched classes to hang out at the Fleischacker Pool. Some of the pool’s
lifeguards were Hawaiian, and Sigler says one day during an outing to the beach
they gave him a couple of rides on their boards. That triggered his interest in
surfing. Like the Hawaiians’ boards, Wright’s 125-pound behemoth ‘was so heavy,
it was steady, real steady,’ Sigler recalls. ‘It was a lot more steady than the
other boards later on.’ It was so massive, in fact, that a rider couldn’t make
it turn in the water, and the varnish was so worn ‘you had to be careful you
didn’t get any splinters,’ Sigler says. Still, he enjoyed riding the combers
off Queenstown Court
in Mission
Beach . Sigler
says Wright warned him away from surfing at Ocean
Beach , claiming that the outflow from Mission
Bay ,
which at that time streamed under a bridge rather than through the present
channel, could be tricky. ‘You could get knocked out or something, and the tide’ll
take you out,’ he says Wright told him. One day while jogging on the beach,
Sigler noticed another spot that looked promising. At the north end of Pacific
Beach ,
just south of Pacific Beach Point, the waves seemed particularly well formed.
The board was too heavy for Sigler to carry that distance, so he hauled it
aboard a ten-foot wooden dory and rowed north from Mission Beach . He unloaded Wright’s
board at the beach that’s now known as Tourmaline and caught some impressive
rides. He never saw anyone else surf there for years; he thinks he was the
first.
[53]
“Sigler will tell you he was the first serious local surfer,
but Lloyd Baker dismisses that claim with a snort. Sigler ‘surfed a little bit,’
Baker acknowledges, ‘but he was not very agile. Not that he wasn’t strong and
not that he couldn’t have become a better surfer, but he and Don Pritchard and Dempsey Holder [two
other early surfers] were never, ever stylists. They went out and tried, but
when they got up it was like you never thought they were going to last for more
than 20 feet before they fell off or something.’ [54]
“Baker says he and his pal Dorian Paskowitz and a handful of
other teenagers from Point Loma and La Jolla were the first true San Diego surfers, so
obsessed with riding the waves, they developed confidence and elegance though
their boards were primitive. At 85, Baker’s a big man who moves with an easy
grace… He gave up surfing about 1975, when tennis and skiing had become all-consuming.
“Born in San Diego , Baker and
his family moved around California in his
early childhood, but in 1934, when Lloyd was 13, they settled into a house at Portsmouth Court in
Mission
Beach . Dorian Paskowitz lived
a couple of blocks away. In the years that followed, ‘We went to school every
day together,’ Baker says. ‘We swam in the morning before school. We ran
together. We dated together. We did everything together.’ [55]
“School was Point Loma High, which they reached by riding the
streetcar that ran south on Mission
Boulevard and over the bridge to Ocean Beach .
(That bridge was later torn down when the Mission Bay
jetty was created.) ‘On the other side of the bridge, we’d get off and take a
bus up to school.’ In their sophomore year they built paddleboards in the high
school woodshop. Paddleboards had been invented in the late 1920s by a
Wisconsin native named Tom Blake who had found his way to Hawaii
and become fascinated by the ancient Hawaiian boards in Honolulu ’s
Bishop Museum . In an attempt to devise
something that would work like the old planks (as surfboards were called) but
be lighter, he had come up with a design that was essentially a
surfboard-shaped hollow box. Dubbed a cigar box or a kook box, paddleboards
became popular with lifeguards for rescue work, but they could also be used to
ride waves. Baker and Paskowitz copied this design and learned to stand up on the
boards in the surf that sometimes formed at the entrance to Mission Bay .
‘Those boards probably lasted a year, year and a half,’ Baker estimates. [56]
“Besides being unwieldy, the boards ‘were a pain in the ass,
because as soon as they got just a little warped or they got in the sunshine or
whatever, why, they started leaking,’ Baker says. When a fellow named Pete Peterson moved
from Hawaii to San Diego, where he got a job at the Mission Beach Plunge, he
brought with him a couple of square-tailed solid-wood Hawaiian boards, and the
boys studied these with interest. About the same time, they learned about
boards that promised to work better than paddleboards or Hawaiian planks. [57]
In the early-to-mid 1930s, “a Los Angeles-based manufacturer of
prefabricated homes started building surfboards as a sideline. Although the
company used solid redwood at first, it later began importing lightweight balsa
from South America for use in both the
home-building and surfboard-manufacturing businesses. The balsa ‘was beautiful
stuff!’ Baker recalls. ‘They had it all milled, and it was very pretty.’ But a
surfer couldn’t simply order a finished board. He had to request that a block
of wood be manufactured to the shape and dimensions he specified. ‘They’d put
it together in any configuration you want,’ Baker says. ‘You could actually go
through their bins and pick out the pieces you were going to have them glue up.’
Some pieces were harder, some softer; they also varied in weight. ‘You could
pick them out so the board balanced. You’d pick out redwood pieces with pretty
grains of wood.’ If you wanted a “runner” of redwood glued down the middle of
the board to stiffen it or along the sides (the rails) or tip (the nose) to
protect the softer wood, you could order that too. You drove up to L.A. to pick up your
order, then took it home, where with woodworking tools you shaped the simple
geometry into a board that planed over water with power and speed. Or if you
had a friend who was good at shaping, you might press him into service. [58]
“Baker became renowned for his skill at shaping the Pacific
Systems Homes boards. Today he downplays his ability; he says he wasn’t great
compared to subsequent generations of shapers. But for a few years in the late
1930s, he worked on probably 40 or 50 boards. Baker worked on boards for
Paskowitz and for the small gang of Ocean
Beach and La
Jolla boys who had started surfing, as well as others. He did it
for free. ‘We were happy to do the work and pass the board on to somebody that
would use it.’ Because they were lighter, weighing 45 to 65 pounds, the
balsa/redwood boards were more responsive in the water, and with the addition
of a fin (introduced by Tom Blake in 1935), they became more maneuverable. [59]
“Kimball Daun, one of the Ocean Beach
boys, doesn’t remember when or where he met Lloyd Baker, but he says it didn’t
take long to realize they were kindred spirits. Born in a house on Larkspur
Street 83 years ago, Daun remembers wandering over to the water, unsupervised,
when he was six or seven, and teaching himself to swim. Not long after that, he
became friends with another kid named Skeeter Malcolm, who lived a few blocks
away on Voltaire and shared his love of the ocean. By the time they were eight
or nine, they were bodysurfing on ‘the big beach.’ Somehow they heard that Duke
Kahanamoku had surfed the Mission
Bay channel back in the
1920s, and that piqued their interest.
“Their first attempt at following his example involved a
paddleboard owned by an older teenager named Bob Sterling. ‘He would take it out
on the ocean, usually on calm days, and paddle round on it.’ Sterling was willing to lend his board to the
younger duo. Daun says he and Malcolm took it to an area of Ocean Beach
where few swimmers were in the water; they didn’t have to worry about other
surf- or paddleboards, because there weren’t any. They took turns pushing each
other into the shore break, and while the nose would sometimes take a dive and
the board come to an abrupt halt, at other times the board surged forward. Then
whoever was on it would pop up into a crouch, balancing for a couple of seconds
before tumbling off. [60]
“They couldn’t steer at all, but they had fun on Sterling ’s board, Daun says, until the day one of them
caught a good-sized wave and nosed in hard enough to hit the bottom. ‘All of a
sudden, the board was just sunk, which was unusual.’ When they got it onto the
sand, they realized ‘four feet of the plywood bottom of the board had peeled
off and was just hanging under it. We thought, “Oh my God, this is ruined.”‘ Sterling was a hulking
fellow, and they quaked at the thought of his reaction. They loaded the
casualty on a wagon and hauled it to Daun’s house. ‘I said, “Well, we gotta
glue it,” but we didn’t have any glue. So we went on Green Street ,
which was the next block over, and dug the tar out of the cracks in the street.
We put it in a can, melted it, and poured the seam all the way around. We
scraped off the excess and nailed it down with the tar in there. When we got
finished, you could see the black here and there.’ It seemed to hold, though
Daun and Malcolm never pressed their luck by borrowing the board again. [61]
“A bit of larceny enabled them to get a board of their own.
This happened one night when the boys were walking home from the high school. ‘Out
around Coronado
Avenue , someone was building a new
house,’ Daun says. On the building site, they spotted ‘six magnificent redwood
boards that they were using for the window frames. They were about 12 feet
long. No one was around, and in those days no one stole anything.’ Daun and
Malcolm hoisted the boards on their shoulders and headed down the hill for the
home of a friend who had a big basement. He refused to harbor their plunder, so
they continued on to Sunset Cliffs Boulevard. ‘The boards would bounce because
of the distance between us. We were walking along, and a couple of Ocean Beach
cops drove around the corner, and oh my God, I thought we were going to die
right there. I said, “Don’t look, don’t look, don’t look!”’ The police slowed
down but didn’t stop the boys, who reached the safety of the garage adjoining
the café and barbershop on Voltaire operated by Malcolm’s parents. Later, ‘Skeeter
told his dad that my father had bought the wood, and I told my dad that his
father had bought it,’ Daun says. The only problem with this was that ‘when my
dad went down to get a haircut, one of us always had to be in the damn
barbershop to keep the talk away from the surfboard.’ [62]
“Somehow that worked. Three-quarters of an inch thick, the
boards were far too thin to be made into a solid surfboard, so Daun and Malcolm
set about building another box with cross-members. For this they needed screws
and plywood, which cost little – but more than they had. ‘But Skeeter got 20
cents a day for lunch money, which was unheard of for me,’ Daun says. ‘I had my
mom make three sandwiches for me, and I’d take two and give Skeeter one. That
way he could save his lunch money.’ They earned a bit more from chores. ‘We
finally got the board built, and at 11 feet long, it was slow in turning, just
like all big boards. But for a hollow board made at minimal expense, it was
easy to catch waves.’ [63]
“Daun says he and Malcolm (who died in 1993 after a long career
as a teacher, coach, and principal) later graduated to boards fabricated from
the Pacific Systems Homes balsa/redwood blanks and shaped by Lloyd Baker. So
did three other Ocean
Beach friends of theirs.
They all attended Point Loma High. Baker could look out from his
music-appreciation class and assess the surf conditions. If the day looked
good, he would sweep through the building, poking his head into the other boys’
classrooms and catching their attention. They’d get up and leave. Someone
always had an old Model A or some other vehicle they could pile into. ‘The
teachers didn’t like it,’ Daun acknowledges. ‘But that’s how much we were into
surfing.’ Every minute of their waking lives, they were either doing it or
thinking about doing it. [64]
“The weight of the boards limited the choices of where these
first hard-core surfers surfed. ‘See, in those days, those boards were
nose-heavy,’ explains Bill (“Hadji”) Hein, who by the late 1930s had joined the
small band of regulars at Mission
Beach and at 88 continues
to surf today. Because of the boards’ tendency to ‘pearl’ (or plunge beneath
the water), ‘You had to be selective in where you could go. You had to have a
wave at least four to five feet high, and it had to have slope in front of it,
not a curl,’ he says. In San Diego County, the most reliable places to find
those conditions were San Onofre, Windansea (in La Jolla), Pacific Beach Point,
Sunset Cliffs (south of OB), and Imperial Beach. [65]
“Often compared to Waikiki in Hawaii ,
San Onofre began luring Southern California
surfers as early as the 1920s. According to Emil Sigler, the location’s
remoteness encouraged some at the all-male gatherings to swim naked, in a day
when men wore bathing suits that covered them from neck to knee. By the 1930s,
San Onofre was the setting for the Pacific Coast Surfriding
Championships, the first organized surfing contests in the world.
These were not cutthroat affairs, according to Jane Schmauss, the director of
the California Surf
Museum in Oceanside . ‘Those guys didn’t care a feather
or a fig about who was the best surfer,’ she says. But they were curious about
each other’s boards and techniques, and the San Onofre gatherings provided an
opportunity to compare notes. ‘We had campfires and luaus,’ Hein recalls. ‘It was
the Hawaiian Islands spirit.’ San Onofre was
too far away for everyday surfing. So was Imperial Beach for all but the few
guys who lived there, and most of the time the IB surf wasn’t great anyway,
Baker says. But in the winter, when the surf came up at Tijuana Sloughs, ‘Then
Dempsey [Holder] would call, and we’d go down.’ It might happen only three
times a year, Baker says, ‘usually for three to four days. Then there wouldn’t
be any other surf for a month or so. And the beach surf [in Imperial
Beach ] wasn’t any different than the beach surf at Mission Beach or anywhere else’ – unpropitious
for boards that might weigh 70 pounds or more. [66]
“The waves off Sunset Cliffs were excellent year-round,
although access to them wasn’t easy. A fellow could make the long paddle south
from Ocean Beach or approach from the cliff top or
the Theosophical Society. ‘We used to take our surfboards and just leave ‘em in
the brush [and] carry them down the little trail and surf there day in, day
out,’ Baker says. [67]
“At Windansea, the reef causes the swell to break abruptly,
creating powerful waves that often have a tubular shape. But no one rode
Windansea until 1937. One day a young glider pilot named Woody Brown, riding a
homemade hollow board, and a handful of other young men from La Jolla ‘found
great surf at Bird Rock and Pacific Beach Point, where we rode 20-foot waves,
taking off right on the edge of the kelp,’ Brown recalled in a 2000 Surfer’s
Journal article. He and his buddies then ventured out at Windansea. After that,
Ocean and Mission
Beach surfers began
joining them, at least on occasion. [68]
“Most, however, considered PB Point ‘the absolute best for us,’
according to Kimball Daun. ‘You always had a long right slide. When the surf
was really big, you could actually ride all the way over to Tourmaline.’ As at
Sunset Cliffs, access to the water off the headland wasn’t easy. ‘You had to
drive up La
Jolla Boulevard and jump the curb,’
Hadji Hein recalls. Japanese-American farmers were growing fruits and
vegetables on the bluff, and the surfers would drive through an opening in
their fence and down a mud road leading south to a canyon. They’d park their
jalopies there and walk the rest of the way to the beach. ‘There were beautiful
oleander trees all along there,’ Hein says. The surfers would pick the
blossoms, bring them home to their girlfriends, and they would make leis. ‘That
was the spirit we had in those days. We’d play Hawaiian music and all that sort
of thing.’
[69]
“One other way at least a few people reached Tourmaline Beach
was via a City of San Diego
lifeguard truck. By 1935, Emil Sigler had overcome the handicap of being blind
in his right eye (the result of an early childhood accident) to come in second
on the city’s lifeguard-screening exam. He wound up working at the Mission Beach
lifeguard station, which had an old Model A. Sigler says he would often rise
early and load up a couple of the local kids like Baker and Paskowitz with
their boards. He would drive north along the sand, going under Crystal Pier, to
Tourmaline Beach . The group would surf, then return
in time for Sigler to start his work shift by 9:30 a.m.
“An encounter on that truck resulted in the Ocean Beach
boys getting their nickname. As Kimball Daun recalls it, Sigler had driven up
to Crystal Pier and stopped to chat with Daun, Malcolm, and a couple of their OB cohorts. Finally Sigler started the engine to drive back
to the lifeguard station. ‘Well, Skeeter and I were going to have to walk down
to Old Mission Beach ,’
about a mile south of the pier. ‘So we jumped on the back of the truck. It had
handles to hold on to. When we did that, the truck bottomed out.’ Emil Sigler
chastised them, ‘So we jumped off and Emil worked the thing out of the sand,
then we’d jump on again. Pretty soon it was ‘You goddamned vandals!’ He picked
up big rocks and started flinging them at us! That was the first time we were
called the Vandals.’ The name stuck. [70]
“Were the Vandals the first San Diego surf club? They weren’t an
organization. The Mission
Beach surfers formed the
first formal association of local wave riders around 1938, with the support of
a city councilman named Fred Simpson. Lloyd Baker was the first president, and
the group held meetings in a little room on the north end of the bathhouse that
was located at the Mission
Beach seawall, near Queenstown Court . But
the club ‘dropped into oblivion when the war came along,’ says Hein, who was
one of the first members. ‘Everybody had to go into the service, and it just
went kaput.’
[71]
Aloha Shirts
One enduring “invention” that came out of the mid-1930s was what we now call the “Aloha Shirt.” As land based attire, it would help define the beach lifestyle that continues today.
The Aloha Shirt was initially thought up in the early 1930s by
Chinese merchant Ellery Chun of King-Smith Clothiers and Dry Goods, a store in Waikiki . “Chun began sewing brightly colored shirts for
tourists out of old kimono fabrics he had leftover in stock,” describes the
Wikipedia. “The Honolulu Advertiser newspaper was quick to coin the term Aloha
shirt to describe Chun’s fashionable creation. Chun trademarked the name. The
first advertisement in the Honolulu Advertiser for Chun’s Aloha shirt was
published on June 28, 1935. Local residents, especially
surfers, and tourists descended on Chun’s store and bought every shirt he had. Within
years, major designer labels sprung up all over Hawaii and began manufacturing and selling
Aloha shirts en masse.” Retail chains in Hawai‘i and on the U.S. Mainland even
produced single aloha shirt designs for employee uniforms.[72]
The same year that “Aloha Shirt” became a registered trademark,
a surfer named Nat Norfleet Sr. and his partner George Brangier opened an Aloha
shirt company called Kahala. “We began like nearly everybody else in the
business, not with a pair of shoestrings but with one shoestring between the
two of us,” Norfleet Sr. said. “Red McQueen had brought back from the 1932
Olympics in Japan
some shirts made out of silk kimono cloth. We copied them to produce our first
aloha shirts. They were absolutely horrible, but Elmer Lee had a stand in front
of the old Outrigger Canoe Club where he sold coconut milk and pineapple juice,
and he sold our horrible shirts.”[73]
“The shirts were purchased by local residents, beach boys, surfers
and tourists. The first advertisement placed in the Honolulu Advertiser using
the words “Aloha Shirt” was on June 28, 1935. With the birth of Rayon in the
mid 1920’s, the dazzlingly colored and tropically decorated Hawaiian-Print
Aloha shirt became a staple souvenir of cruise ship tourists. Early shirt
labels bore names like Musa Shiya, Watamulls, Kamehameha, Kahala, Surfriders,
Alfred Shaheen, Duke Kahanamoku, etc. The 1940’s and 1950’s furnish us with a
memorable list of personalities depicted wearing Hawaiian-Print Aloha Shirts.
Elvis Presley, the undisputed king of rock and roll had many Hawaiian Shirts.
Here is an off-the-top-of-my-head, recollection, list of famous people, motion
picture and television personalities, politicians and sports celebrities that
have been photographed and featured wearing Hawaiian-Print Aloha shirts. Harry
S. Truman, our 33rd President loved to wear Aloha Shirts. He was on the cover
of Life Magazine in 1951 wearing one. Montgomery Cliff and Frank Sinatra were
featured in the memorable motion picture From here to Eternity in
Hawaiian-Print Aloha shirts.[74]
Beach Boys of Waikiki
Where there’s Aloha Shirts, there are Beach Boys. In trying to come up with a list of the Waikiki Beach Boys of the 1930s, I have relied on an email that came to me from Karen Cotter, assisted by her sister Emily Fradkin. An aunt of the two sisters was Emily Campbell Kauha Davis (1896-1987). A school teacher at 20, Emily sailed away to
“Anyway,” wrote Karen Cotter, “from amongst my aunt’s books I
acquired two old poetry books by Don Blanding, published in 1923 and 1925 respectively,
and in the back of one, written in pencil, is a list of ‘Beach Boys of Waikiki’
in my aunt’s hand which I thought you might find of interest...”
The listing – by no means complete, but still the largest list
of 1930s Waikiki Beach Boys I have seen anywhere – is as follows, in the order
it was written:
·
Pua Kealoha
·
Davd Kahanamoku
·
Louis Kahanamoku
·
Sergent Kahanamoku
·
William Kahanamoku (whom Emily referred
elsewhere as ‘Billy’)
·
Sam Kahanamoku
·
John Napahu
·
John D. Kaupiko (who was married to Emily’s best
friend, Helen)
·
John Kauha
·
Hiram Anahu
·
William Keawemaha (nicknamed ‘Tough Bill’)
·
‘Steamboat’ Keawemaha
·
Paul Tsang
·
John Liu
·
Chick Daniel
·
Jeremiah Lima
·
Joseph Guerrero
·
Tony Guererrero
·
George Harris
·
Ilima
·
Abe Umiamaka
·
Louis Rutherford
·
Enay MacKinney[75]
“For many years,” Emily’s niece Karen wrote, “my aunt wrote a
newsy column in the Honolulu Advertiser in the ‘30s and ‘40s called ‘Beachwalk
Girl.’ She often sent my mother columns which she thought my mother would enjoy
– not all the columns for sure as I believe they were a daily item – perhaps
only weekly, but we have a fat scrapbook full of the daily happenings in the
neighborhood. My aunt lived on Seaside
Avenue and Kuhio so was in the middle of the
action!
“... perhaps the list will be of some use in your ongoing
research. Thank you, Karen and Emily.”[76]
The Surf Ski
One of the few surf-related innovations and inventions of the 1930s that cannot be attributed to Tom Blake is the invention of the surf ski, normally credited to Dr. G.A. “Saxon” Crackanthrope, a stalwart of the Manly Club, N.S.W.,
The original design was 8 foot x 28 inches x 6 inches thick
with 12 inches of tail lift, solid cedar planks and a double bladed paddle and
footstraps.[77]
Other claims to the invention of the surf ski include: Bill
Langford at Maroubra, pre-World War II; a 1934
design recalled by Denis Green of oil impregnated canvas stretched over a
timber frame, again at Maroubra;[78]
a type of ski used by two brothers at Port Macquarie N.S.W. on their oyster
leases, and occasionally in the surf around 1930;[79]
and a “first appearance on Newcastle beaches during the twenties, and came to
Deewhy about 1932;”[80]
as well as 1933, Jack Toyer of Cronulla.
Despite the competing claims, it was Saxon Crackanthrope who
was the one to register and received the patent for the surf ski.[81]
The Surf-o-Plane
Another form of surf craft invented in
On a side note, an article entitled “Making Money at the Beach,”
published in Popular Mechanics, July 1934, Volume 62 No. 1, pages 115 –
117, gave plans and specifications for making a solid wood “Bellyboard.”[83]
We now leave a general look at the mid-1930s and focus, again,
on the surfers of the time…
[1]
Warshaw, Matt. The History of Surfing, ©2010, published by Chronicle
Books LLC, San Francisco ,
p. 67. Matt’s estimation of the numbers surfing may be overblown.
[2]
Lynch, Gault-Williams, et. al. TOM BLAKE: Journey of a Pioneer Waterman,
©2001.
[3]
Vansant, Amy. “Dudley Whitman: A Visit with Florida ’s First Surfer,” Surfer
magazine, Vol. 35, No. 4, p. 84.
[4]
Vansant, 1994, p. 84.
[5]
Vansant, Amy, 1994, p. 84.
[6]
Vansant, 1994, p. 84. Dudley Whitman quoted. Dudley
was born March 20, 1920.
[7]
Lynch, Gary . Interview
with Dudley Whitman, May 10, 2000.
[8]
Lynch, Gary . Interview
with Dudley Whitman, May 10, 2000; most likely 1933 or ‘34.
[9]
Lynch, Gary . Interview
with Dudley Whitman, May 10, 2000.
[10]
Lynch, Gary . Interview
with Dudley Whitman, May 10, 2000.
[11]
Lynch, Gary . Interview
with Dudley Whitman, May 10, 2000.
[12]
Lynch, Gary . Interview
with Dudley Whitman, May 10, 2000.
[13]
Vansant, 1994, p. 85. Dudley Whitman quoted.
[14]
Vansant, Amy. “Goofing Off In God’s Waiting Room,” or “Gauldin Reed: A Link to Florida ’s Surfing Past,”
Surfer, Volume 36, No. 6, June 1995, p. 96. Gauldin Reed quoted.
[15]
Vansant, 1994, p. 85. Dudley Whitman quoted.
[16]
Vansant, 1994, p. 85. Dudley Whitman quoted.
[17]
Lynch, Gary . Interview
with Dudley Whitman, May 10, 2000.
[18]
Lynch, Gary . Interview
with Dudley Whitman, May 10, 2000.
[19]
Lynch, Gary . Interview
with Dudley Whitman, May 10, 2000.
[20]
Lynch, Gary .
Interview with Dudley Whitman, May 10, 2000.
[21]
Smiley, David. “Surfer, horticulturist William Whitman dies,” Miami Herald ,
June 1, 2007. See also The Whitmans at the First East Coast Surfing
Championships, Daytona ,
Florida , 1938, at:
http://legendarysurfers.com/blog/uploaded_images/1938-Daytona-782502.jpg
[22]
Karp, David. “Bill Whitman, 92, Is Dead; Scoured the Earth for Rare Fruit,” New
York Times, June 4, 2007 with Correction Appended.
[23]
Kahn , Jordan . “Surfing’s Lost
Chapter - How did Daytona Beach become Florida ’s 1st surf city,”
Daytona Beach News-Journal, 27 July 2008.
[24]
Kahn , Jordan . “Surfing’s Lost
Chapter - How did Daytona Beach become Florida ’s 1st surf city,”
Daytona Beach News-Journal, 27 July 2008.
[25]
Kahn , Jordan . “Surfing’s Lost
Chapter - How did Daytona Beach become Florida ’s 1st surf city,”
Daytona Beach News-Journal, 27 July 2008.
[26]
Kahn, Daytona Beach
News-Journal, 27 July 2008.
[27]
Kahn, Daytona Beach
News-Journal, 27 July 2008.
[28]
Kahn, Daytona Beach
News-Journal, 27 July 2008.
[29]
Kahn, Daytona Beach
News-Journal, 27 July 2008.
[30]
Kahn, Daytona Beach
News-Journal, 27 July 2008.
[31]
Kahn , Jordan .
“Surfing’s Lost Chapter - How did Daytona Beach
become Florida ’s
1st surf city,” Daytona Beach News-Journal, 27 July 2008.
[32]
“Roman Pools Are the Only Pools in This Area Devoted Exclusively to Water
Sports.” See handbill, February 18, 1934. Tom had worked here before.
[33]
Lynch, Gary . Interview
with Thomas Edward Blake, July 25, 1988, Washburn , Wisconsin .
See also handbill advertising a swim show with the most “National
Champions Ever At One Pool in America ,” including Tom
Blake, “Champion of the Hawaiian Surf Board,” Sunday, February 18, 1934.
[34]
Blake, Tom. Hawaiian Surfboard, 1935.
[35]
Lynch, Gary . Interview
with Dudley Whitman, May 10, 2000.
[37]
Blake, 1935, 1983, p. 69.
[39]
Long Beach Press-Telegram,
“Surfboard Riders Must Watch Areas,” June 16, 1933.
[40] Long Beach
Press-Telegram, “Surf-Riding Now Popular Sport,” May 14, 1934.
[41] Long Beach
Press-Telegram, “Thrilling Sport of Riding Surf Easy to Master,”
September 13. 1936.
[42] Long Beach
Press-Telegram, “Woman, Hurt by Surfboard July 5, Dies of Injury:
Fatality First of Kind Ever Recorded in History of Beach,” July 14, 1937.
[43] Long Beach
Press-Telegram, “States’ Celebrants Take to Surfboards, August 8, 1938.
[44] Long Beach Press-Telegram, “Dozen Clubs in Surf
Contests,” November 14, 1938.
[45] Long Beach Press-Telegram, “Dozen Clubs in Surf
Contests,” November 14, 1938.
[46] Long Beach Press-Telegram, “Surfriders Watched
By Big Crowd,” December 12, 1938.
[47] Long Beach Press-Telegram, “Surf Event Is Won
By Hermosians,” December 4, 1939. This was the contest Tarzan had originally
won entry to but had been initially denied. It would appear that he managed to
be sent, after all, along with A.C. Spohler and Jack May. See chapter on
Tarzan.
[48]
De Wyze, Jeannette. “90 Years of Curl,” San
Diego Reader, December 14, 2006. This piece
is excellent in many ways, but fraught with numerous historical inaccuracies
which have been removed whenever known.
[49]
De Wyze, Jeannette. “90 Years of Curl,” San Diego Reader,
December 14, 2006.
[50]
See Verge, Arthur C. “George Freeth: King of the Surfers and California ’s Forgotten
Hero,” ©2001, http://files.legendarysurfers.com/surf/legends/ls05_freeth_verge2001.html
[51]
De Wyze, Jeannette. “90 Years of Curl,” San
Diego Reader, December 14, 2006. John
Elwell quoted.
[52]
De Wyze, Jeannette. “90 Years of Curl,” San
Diego Reader, December 14, 2006. Emil
Sigler quoted.
[53]
De Wyze, Jeannette. “90 Years of Curl,” San
Diego Reader, December 14, 2006. Emil
Sigler quoted.
[54]
De Wyze, Jeannette. “90 Years of Curl,” San
Diego Reader, December 14, 2006. Lloyd
Baker quoted. Although Dempsey was never a surf stylist, true, this is a bit of
an amazing statement by Lloyd Baker. Dempsey Holder was the Imperial
Beach lifeguard who lead the charge on the Tijuana Sloughs – in the
1930s and 1940s, California ’s
only recognized big wave spot. See Gault-Williams, “Riders of the
Tijuana Sloughs” at http://files.legendarysurfers.com/surf/legends/ls15_sloughs.shtml
[55]
De Wyze, Jeannette. “90 Years of Curl,” San
Diego Reader, December 14, 2006. Lloyd
Baker quoted.
[56]
De Wyze, Jeannette. “90 Years of Curl,” San
Diego Reader, December 14, 2006. Lloyd
Baker quoted.
[57]
De Wyze, Jeannette. “90 Years of Curl,” San
Diego Reader, December 14, 2006. Lloyd
Baker quoted.
[58]
De Wyze, Jeannette. “90 Years of Curl,” San
Diego Reader, December 14, 2006. Lloyd
Baker quoted.
[59]
De Wyze, Jeannette. “90 Years of Curl,” San
Diego Reader, December 14, 2006. Lloyd
Baker quoted.
[60]
De Wyze, Jeannette. “90 Years of Curl,” San
Diego Reader, December 14, 2006. Kimball
Daun quoted.
[61]
De Wyze, Jeannette. “90 Years of Curl,” San
Diego Reader, December 14, 2006. Kimball
Daun quoted.
[62]
De Wyze, Jeannette. “90 Years of Curl,” San
Diego Reader, December 14, 2006. Kimball
Daun quoted.
[63]
De Wyze, Jeannette. “90 Years of Curl,” San
Diego Reader, December 14, 2006. Kimball
Daun quoted.
[64]
De Wyze, Jeannette. “90 Years of Curl,” San
Diego Reader, December 14, 2006. Kimball
Daun quoted.
[65]
De Wyze, Jeannette. “90 Years of Curl,” San
Diego Reader, December 14, 2006. Bill “Hadji”
Hein quoted.
[66]
De Wyze, Jeannette. “90 Years of Curl,” San
Diego Reader, December 14, 2006. Jane
Schmauss, Hadji Hein and Lloyd Baker quoted.
[67]
De Wyze, Jeannette. “90 Years of Curl,” San
Diego Reader, December 14, 2006. Lloyd
Baker quoted.
[68]
De Wyze, Jeannette. “90 Years of Curl,” San
Diego Reader, December 14, 2006. Woody
Brown referenced, from the Surfer’s Journal article of 2000.
[69]
De Wyze, Jeannette. “90 Years of Curl,” San
Diego Reader, December 14, 2006. Kimball
Daun and Hadji Hein quoted.
[70]
De Wyze, Jeannette. “90 Years of Curl,” San
Diego Reader, December 14, 2006. Kimball
Daun quoted.
[71]
De Wyze, Jeannette. “90 Years of Curl,” San
Diego Reader, December 14, 2006. Hadji Hein
quoted.
[74]
A Brief History of the
Hawaiian Aloha Shirt by Mickey Steinborn at www.mauishirts.com. See
also History of
Hawaiian Shirts from www.alohafunwear.com
[75]
See comment by DeSoto Brown.
[76]
Email from Karen Cotter, 2010.
[77]
Maxwell, 1949, p. 245; Bloomfield, p. 69; Harris, p. 56. The footstraps
addition, at this early stage, is questionable.
[78]
Galton, p. 43.
[79]
Wells, p. 160.
[80]
Thomas, E.J. The Drowning Don’t Die – Fifty Years of Vigilance and Service
by the Deewhy Surf Life-Daving Club, 1912-1962, ©1962, p. 31. Published by
the Deewhy Surf Life Saving Club. Printed by the Manly Daily Pty Ltd. Hard
cover, 54 pages, 33 two-tone photographs, executive officers 1912-1962.
[81]
Wells, p. 155.
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