For surfing, the 1930s can be said to have begun with the Pacific CoastSurfing Championships begun in 1928 and Honolulu’s Ala Wai races that ranin 1929 and 1930, both of them backdrops to Tom Blake’s development of thehollow surfboard and paddleboard.

For the world as a whole, however, the decade began in theshadow of “Black Friday,” October 28, 1929, when the New York Stock Exchangecollapsed and the worst worldwide economic crisis of the Twentieth Centuryknocked people on their asses all across the globe.[1]In fact, the 1930s became known as “The Great Depression,” because of theimpact of the financial markets meltdown. All families who lived through itremember it vividly and all families were forever changed because of it. Formany, it resulted in death. For most, The Great Depression meant hardships ofmany kinds.

Surfers, though, did not feel the impact of the financial hardtimes as much as most people. They were not spared by any means, but in morethan a few cases, they even reveled in their “make do” lifestyle.

“Well, as far as surf was concerned,” pioneer Californiasurfer, photographer and dentist DocBall pointed out to me, most surfers weren’t that affected because swellresponded to the natural flow of the planet, not the financial. “Of course, wehad a little trouble getting’ gasoline, but then it was 7-cents a gallon inthose days… that’s the way it was. It [the Great Depression] kept us kindalimited in certain ways, but we had surfin’ to take care of everything. Long asthere’s waves, why, you didn’t have to pay for those. All we had to do was buythe gas to get there.”[2]It certainly didn’t hurt that surfers were mostly young and many not thoroughlyintegrated into the work force.

Although the 1929 stock market crash was sudden, the GreatDepression took a while to build in intensity. But, by 1932, it dominated theAmerican lifestyle. In the United States alone, 1,161 banks failed after thecrash, nearly 20,000 businesses had gone bankrupt, and 21,000 people committedsuicide in that year alone.[3]

It has been estimated that by the start of the decade, therewere over a hundred surfers in Hawai‘i – most all on the south shore of O‘ahu.[4]Less than fifty surfers rode the waters of Southern California, and fewer thanthat in Australia (New South Wales) and New Zealand.

  

TomBlake returned to the United States Mainland in 1932, most likely tooversee the construction of his first production hollow boards made by ThomasRogers. While he was in Santa Monica, he didsome lifeguarding, even working for the Santa Monica City lifeguards for ashort time. “Oh, he came down there,” Santa Monica lifeguard and earlyCalifornia surfer Wally Burton remembered of Tom at Santa Monica Beach, “and heworked at the lifeguard station there. He worked as what we called an ‘as-neededguard.’ But, he wasn’t the most dependable guy when it came to showing up fortime and all. He was an independent sort of a guy.”[5]

Tom made better money at private beaches and swim clubs, soperhaps he was not all that interested in working for a municipality. Tom wasdefinitely not a regimented 9-to-5 man. He would never have gone for themilitary style sworn-in guard atmosphere working for the city. Tom was a freespirit and could not be tied down.

“Well, there’s one thing that’s deeply impressed in my mind,”Wally Burton remembered about Tom Blake. “I worked for the County of Los Angelesbefore they had the Santa Monicalifeguard service. I worked for [the] first L.A.guard system… it was at the mouth of the Santa Monica Canyon, where we hadour first station there… [This dates back to when I was] nineteen. Let’s see. Igot canned from the L.A. Countyguard service because I wasn’t old enough. They deputized you at that time. Youhad to be twenty-one. And I worked for them for a year before they found out Iwasn’t twenty-one. So, there were three of us they let go.”[6]

“So, I worked at that Santa Monica station when I was nineteen years old… I wasnineteen [in] 1929. I remember sitting on the doorsteps of that guard stationthere. And I vividly remember Tom Blake, because as the sun was setting one evening;he was standing there motionless looking out at the ocean. And I betcha hestood there just absolutely motionless, his silhouette etched against thesunset. And when it was all over, he finally walked away. And you could justtell he was just dreaming. He was a dreamer. And I walked up to him after itwas all over and I said, ‘What were you doing there, Tom?’ He said, ‘I was justthinking about what’s beyond that sea, you know.’ Just like that. And he juststood, kind of looked at me for a minute, and he just walked off quietly. Hewasn’t the kind of guy to talk very much… But when he said something, you hadto listen, because it was something that was, you know, sincere from his heart.I was very much impressed with Tom, but I always considered him a dreamer.”[7]

“I liked the guy a lot,” Wally said of Tom. “I admired him anawful lot. I guess he was one of my heroes, really, and I looked up to him. AndI also looked up to PetePeterson. Pete, I think, was a better surfer than anybody ever gave himcredit for. He surfed in the Islands, didthings, you know, when they take these gals [tandem] and put them on hisshoulders? Pete did an outstanding job in surfing and won so many trophies… Idon’t want to take away from Tom, but I think he [Pete] was, actually, a bettersurfer than Tom… Although I admired Tom for a lot of other things – thedreaming aspect of it all and his innovative deals. Pete was equally innovativein a quiet sort of way.”[8]

TommyZahn, Tom’s protégé later on, liked to tell a story about when Tom wasstill lifeguarding at the Santa Monica Beach Club. It had to do with hismentor, who was a bit past his prime as a competitive swimmer by this time, anda quart of ice cream: “Blake was working at the beach club when Al Laws wasstill there,” Tommy recalled the story that had been told to him. “Al wastalking to this one guy and he said, ‘Hey, there’s this great swimmer… [who’s]a lifeguard down at the beach club.’ So, he takes him down there and heintroduces him to Blake. At that time… the beach club used to put out alifeline; a buoy line. It used to run out 300 yards into the water with a buoyon the end. And this guy said, ‘Well, I like the lifeline. I can jump in thereand pull myself out to the end of that line and back faster than you can swimit.’

“Blake didn’t say anything. You know. Al Law says, ‘I bet you,you can’t.’ So, they were making a money bet on the thing and Al asked Blake ifhe’d participate and what he wanted of the piece of the action. And Blakethought around for a while and said, ‘Well, I’ll do it for a quart of icecream.’ [Tommy snickered]. So, they set these two guys off; Blake swimming andthis guy pulling himself hand over hand out to [laughs] the end of thislifeline. You can imagine how that all ended-up, eh? I think Blake was back onthe beach, dry – his hair was dry – before this guy ever got back to the beach.”[9]

By 1932, TomBlake hollow paddleboards and hollow surfboards had been available,commercially, for less than a year. Almost as if he had planned to underscoreits utility in ocean rescue, Tom made what was probably the first hollow boardrescue of a tired swimmer, on July 17, 1932. The Los Angeles Times reported:“Lifeguard Uses Surfboard in Rescuing Pair.

“SANTA MONICA,July 17. – Enter the surfboard rescue! It was affected here late today beforethe astonished gaze of thousands of bathers.

“Healy Kemp and Henry Wise put out from the Santa Monica BeachClub in a skiff. The sea was choppy. Three-quarters of a mile off shore a swellswamped the frail craft and the men found themselves floundering in the water. TomBlake, municipal lifeguard and reputed world’s champion surfboard rider, sawtheir distress signals and struck out for them aboard his Hawaiian surfboard. Hefound them clinging to the capsized skiff, took them upon his board and broughtthem to safety through the breakers. Capt. Roger Cornell, head of the lifeguardcrew, declared it to be the first surfboard rescue of record.”[10]This later supposition was not true. While it may have been the first rescueusing a hollow board, surfboard rescues had taken place in Long Beach nearly two decades earlier, beginningin 1911.[11]

The next day, another newspaper article, “Lifeguard on SurfBoard Saves Two from Drowning, Boat Capsizes Three-Quarters of Mile from Shorewith Two Occupants” reported: “Tom Blake, world’s champion surfboard rider, wastoday receiving the thanks of two victims of a near-disaster who foundthemselves floundering in the water yesterday when their skiff overturned…”[12]

Before paddleboard or surfboard rescues, the rescue dory hadbeen the norm and continued to be well after boards proved more functional. Thedory took a long time to launch and reach victims. It also often took two mento row it. Eventually, the board rescue technique completely changed oceanrescue. It is used even today, although jet skis are now taking the majority ofduty in larger surf areas or where it is easy to launch them.

  

Although many would later refer to it as a contest or race, the1932 Catalina Crossing by Tom Blake, Pete Peterson and Wally Burton was not somuch a race as a test of endurance and a promotion to spotlight Tom’s ThomasRogers production hollow board.[13]“Blake did not consider the Catalina paddle a race,” emphasized his friend andbiographer Gary Lynch. “He said it was a demonstration of the ability of hisnew Rogers[manufactured] paddleboards. To prove how they could perform in long distancerescue work. Also it was to prove the stamina of men who paddled then… Hesaid it was not a race and unfair to call it one. Wally and Pete did Tom afavor, really” by helping him promote his boards.[14]

The Catalina paddle “was my idea,” California surfing pioneer Chauncy Granstromrecalled. Pete [Peterson] and I paddled together quite a bit and [at that time]there were two fishing barges out there [off shore from the beach]. We paddledout to the barges one day and I said, ‘Listen, let’s see who can paddle to the[Channel] Islands.’ So, Gary Halten [alifeguard lieutenant] got a hold of the idea and made a big deal out of it. Westarted training harder [as a result]…”[15]

Out of all the paddling events of his life, the Catalinacrossing was the one that held the most memories for Tom. “My motive was toprove the paddleboard a good rescue device. It [the Catalina paddle] reachedinto unknown territory and was well worth the pain. I trained for it bysecuring a paddleboard to the edge of the Corona del Mar [jetty] and paddlingup to three hours [a day]. The trophy I won was a blue urn; for my ashes.”[16]

Tom’s board for the crossing was a Rogers manufacture; a 14-foot hollow board thatweighed 75 pounds.[17]

Originally, there were four paddlers entered in “a race fromthe California mainland to Catalina Island over a 26-mile course, across open water.” Tom, PetePeterson, Wally Burton, and Chauncy Granstrom were the original entrants. Chauncylater pulled out, leaving the field to just the three. Out of the trio, Tomtrained the hardest for the feat and was first to cross, making the trek in 5hours and 53 minutes. “There’s an average of about 5 miles per hour,” Tomwrote, “with only the hands and arms to propel the hollow surfboard.” Pete andWally came in later, at about 6.5 hours.[18]

The crossing was well publicized in area newspapers. “BlakeTakes Paddle Board Catalina Race; 5 Hrs. 23 Min.” began one article that wenton: “Battling rough and choppy seas most of the thirty-six nautical milesbetween Point Vicente, on the mainland, and Long Point, Catalina Island, TomBlake crossed the channel on a paddle board yesterday in five hours andtwenty-three minutes actual time.

“En route he took thirty-two minutes for rest and refreshments.

“Preston Peterson was second, covering the distance in sixhours and twenty-nine minutes, and Wally Burton third in six hours and fiftyminutes.

“Blake is the Hawaiian paddle board champion and Peterson and Burton are members of the lifeguard crew of the city of Santa Monica.

“The contenders were accompanied by the 40-foot cruiser GloriaH. under command of Capt. O.C. Olsen with timers and a physician aboard. Theywere taken to Avalon, where they were awarded prizes.

“The object of the contest, according to Capt. George Watkinsof the Santa Monicalifeguards, was to show the efficiency of the paddleboard in life-saving work.”[19]

Another newspaper printed: “GUARDS CONQUER CATALINA CHANNEL. Blake,Peterson, Burton Make Trip to Islandon Paddle Boards.” The article continued: “Fighting choppy waves during thelast five miles of the hazardous trip, three Santa Monicalifeguards yesterday bested the 29 mile stretch of open channel between PointVicente and Catalina Island by crossing it onpaddle boards.

“Tom Blake, Hawaiian champion in 1929, and club guard here,made the fastest time in the unique contest, which originally was planned as ademonstration of the use of paddle boards in the open sea. Blake made thecrossing in five hours and 53 minutes.”[20]

Under a sub-heading of “Peterson Second,” the newspaper reportcontinued: “Second place went to Lieut. Preston Peterson, of the municipallifeguard service, who made the crossing in six hours, 31 minutes. Lieut. WallyBurton was third, finishing in 6 hours and 53 minutes.

“The three men were exhausted when dragged from the water byGuards Pat Lister and Bob Butts, who rowed a dory alongside the paddlers theentire distance, quite a feat in itself. The Capt. O.C. Olsen Co. boat, GloriaH., chugged ahead as a convoy.

“The participants reported the crossing uneventful, except forthe last few miles, when they were forced to battle through water made choppyby a brisk wind.”[21]

Under the sub-heading “‘Shot’ for News Reels,” the article wenton to report: “News reels ‘caught them’ when they arrived at Avalon and weregreeted by city officials and prominent yachtsmen of the island colony.

“Dr. J.S. Kelsey Jr., chairman of the lifeguard committee,which authorized the event, and J.H. Blanchard, a member of the committee, wereamong the Santa Monicans aboard the convoy boat.”[22]

“It started out as a test, not a race,” Tom underscored. “Itreally put the [hollow] board across as a rescue device… During the paddle,starting just after midnight, all of us separated. The convoy boat stayed withPete and Wally. I moved on, alone. Finished alone, at Long Point.”[23]Unfortunately for Tom, Pete and Wally, everyone on the escort boat Gloria H.ate whatever food was available on the way to Catalina. By the time the threepaddlers reached the island, there was no food aboard to feed the weary ones. Tomake matters worse, despite their weakened condition, the convoy boat headedback for the mainland right after the finish of the race. Consequently, allthree paddlers got sick to their stomachs (Wally’s second time). Eventually,after getting back to Santa Monicaand being congratulated, Tom could not even find a ride back home and had towalk back.[24]About the value of the crossing as a promotion of the hollow board, “The L.A.County and S.M. guard services,” Tom noted, “installed them soon after.”[25]

Two weeks later, Blake, Peterson and Burton were again recognized for theirachievement – this time at a better organized ceremony. “Guards Rewarded ForWater Feat” was the title of a newspaper article covering their recognition. Sub-titled“Mayor Pins Medals Upon Men Who Paddled to Catalina Island,” it read: “Paddlingone’s way across 29 miles of windswept and tumultuous ocean is no mean feat,Santa Monica city officials and civic leaders believe, so the three lifeguardswho made the dangerous trip on paddle boards last Sunday were awarded medalsyesterday for their ‘courage and accomplishment’ in an impressive ceremony atthe municipal auditorium. Band music, commendation speeches and the cheers ofthe crowd of onlookers made the presentation a colorful affair.”

Under a sub-heading titled “Without Parallel” the article wenton to quote that: “‘It was an accomplishment without parallel in the world ofaquatic sports,’ Dr. J.S. Kelsey, Jr., chairman of the beach commission declared,as he introduced Mayor William H. Carter, who, in turn, introduced therecipients of the medals and lauded their efforts.

“Tom Blake, club guard, who won the paddle board race; Lieut.Preston Peterson of the Santa Monica service, who made the second best time,and Lieut. Wally Burton, who arrived third, stepped up to the mayor, bowedslightly as they received the medals, and then stepped back to the chairs onthe rostrum of the bandstand.”[26]The medals had been decided upon early. Only a day after the crossing, “Gold,silver and bronze medals were ordered struck by the” Santa Monica “citycouncil… for members of the Santa Monica lifeguard service who yesterdayfinished the world’s longest paddle board race by paddling from the mainland toCatalina Island.”[27]

“‘The feat is destined to bring world wide renown to the Santa Monica lifeguardservice,’” Dr. J.S. Kelsey declared. The short article ended by announcing that“Arrangements were made by the [Santa Monica City] council to have the SantaMonica municipal band… play at the celebration…”[28]

A local Santa Monicanewspaper featured two photographs of the winners, one on boards and the otherreceiving awards. “‘To the victors belong the spoils,’ city commissioners andcivic leaders said,” printed the paper, “as they presented three Santa Monicalifeguards with medals and boards for the paddle board crossing of the 29-mileCatalina channel.”[29]In the awards photo, Tom is referred to as “Guard” Blake and is sporting a Santa Monica lifeguard jacket, the same as City of Santa Monica lifeguardCaptain George Watkins, Pete Peterson and Wally Burton.[30]

“Well, I didn’t see it exactly like that,” Burton responded when told Tom did notconsider the Catalina crossing a race but more an endurance test, “because wepaddled constantly there, training for this thing. He along with Pete, myselfand a guy named Chauncy Granstrom. There were four of us [who] were going topaddle over there; not as a race, but to see who could get there first. It wasa competitive thing, really. And Tom was the best of the bunch of us, there wasno doubt about it. He arrived there first. And Pete was second and I came inthird. Chauncy refused to make the trip, so that’s the way that ended up.”[31]

Wally Burton’s criticism of Blake and the Catalina Crossing grewstronger toward the end of his life. At one point, Burton, who went on tobecome a Deputy Chief in the California Highway Patrol, claimed that Tom gotPete’s and Wally’s permission to paddle ahead the last couple of miles. Thisflies directly in the face of what we know about Tom Blake, one of the mostintense swimming competitors of the early Twentieth Century. Burton’sclaim is also contradicted by his own earlier acknowledgement that he, Burton, had gotten seasickduring the paddle. It’s possible he lamented getting sick to his stomach after22 miles out. It was then that Pete, concerned about him, held back to keep aneye on him. Before he died in 2004, Burtonsaid somewhat incomprehensibly, that he felt Blake’s coming in first was “opportunistic,and a little headline grabbing.”[32]

“We were more or less advertising that thing for Rogers,” he had saidearlier, in 2000. “And it was my understanding at the time that we wereactually trying to make the best times, all of us, all three of us. And, of course,Tom made the best time, Pete was second, I was third. There were only three ofus that actually completed the paddle over there, but the time he made waspretty darn good.”[33]

“That’s when Rogers began thatdeal,” Burtoncontinued. “And from my memory, Rogers used tocome down to the guard station there in Santa Monica. George [Watkins] and he would talk about howto make a board for rescue work. And how it ever came into being I don’t claimany knowledge about that accurately, but it seemed to me like he worked withGeorge with this idea about having struts like in the wing of an aircraft, andmaking hollow. And the first ones he built had plugs in the end of them becausethey leaked so bad. Then we’d have to stand them up on end and let the waterpour out of them, after we got through with using the board. And those that wepaddled to the Island [Catalina] were actuallyof that type.”[34]

“Well,” Wally answered about how he physically felt after theCatalina paddle, “I’ll tell you, I was pretty pooped. At one time there [duringthe paddle], I thought, ‘I’m going to duck this whole thing.’ I got sick,seasick really, rolling around on that board. And the chop was such that youlay on your stomach for that length of time, or get on your knees a lot of thetime and paddle. But I forget what the time was… I was sick and so was Tom. I’vegot pictures of Tom and myself on the boat, after we’d come in, there. We’reboth sacked out in bed, and we’re both sick.”[35]

Blake “told me,” Tommy Zahn wrote, “the Palos Verdes toCatalina paddle was arranged so that the seaworthiness of his newly patentedboard could be demonstrated (By the way, they all three paddled the Rogers ‘Model #1’). He wonnumerous races on the coast, but after the AlaWai Canal,there was so much bitterness and hard feeling among the [Waikiki]locals (which persists to this day!) that he backed off. He was trying to makea living on the beach at the Outrigger Beach Services of the Outrigger CanoeClub. Tom… is a very sensitive person; a great competitor, without allthe fury of the manifest ‘killer’ competitor. Tom had too much class for this. Hismethod [was] simple: complete preparation and dedication in every aspect. Inshort, he accomplished what he had set out to do: establish his boards. Heresidualized some financial returns, as well as the satisfaction of thehumanitarian rewards of inventing a piece of lifeguarding equipment that hasrescued thousands.”[36]

The human act of riding ocean waves on floatation devices hasbeen going on for thousands of years. We, in fact, do not know how manythousands of years. It has been reasonably estimated that the act involvingwooden boards could date as far back as 2000 B.C. (4000 B.P.), before thebeginning of the Polynesian migration across the Pacific Ocean.[1]If we count canoe surfing, the act must be far older than that and if weinclude bodysurfing, then we must consider the span of time in terms of tens ofthousands of years.

Surfing on boards – he’e nalu – rose to a high level ofdevelopment in the Hawaiian Islands sometime after Polynesians first settledthe Hawaiian chain beginning around 300 A.D. (2300 B.P.). “Wave sliding” usingboards – along with canoe and body surfing – not only became important parts ofthe lifestyle of all Hawaiians prior to European contact in the later 1700s, butwas also integrally connected with Hawaiian culture.[2]In stark contrast to this “golden age,” surfing fell to an almost ignominiousnear-death during the 1800s – mostly due to European and American cultural,political and religious influences.[3]

During “The Revival” period of surfing at the very beginning ofthe Twentieth Century, surfing’s decline was arrested and set back on a courseof natural evolution. Since that time, surfing has grown vastly in popularityand now is practiced in most every corner of the world. Key figures in thisresurgent interest in surfing include: George Freeth, Alexander Hume Ford, JackLondon, Duke Paoa Kahanamoku, Dad Center, Dudie Miller, “John D” Kaupiko and numerousbeach boys and surfing wahines at Waikiki,on O’ahu, in the first two decades of the 1900s.[4]

A little surprisingly to those of us looking back at it now,surfing’s growth was not explosive following its resurgence, but rather a slowand gradual progression. For this reason, the surfing years between 1912 and1928 are not well known and, predictably not well documented.[5]

We, of course, know the historical context. The 1910s weredominated by events that would lead to the First World War. The war, itself,was vastly different than any other war that had preceded it. “The total numberof casualties, including killed, wounded, and missing, is figured at 37.5million… An outbreak of influenza in the autumn of 1918 compounded the deathtoll as it swept through populations already weakened by the nutritionalprivations of total war.”[6]

In Europe and other nationsthat had been caught up in the global struggle, “Wartime disruption helpedcause a sharp recession in 1920-21… For most nations, prosperity returned onlyin the mid-1920s.” [7]

“The catastrophic toll of the war also resulted in a new,looser code of morality, especially in a growing urban environment. A newgeneration, decimated by war, felt betrayed by their elders and rejected themore austere standards of conduct they had been taught as children.” [8]

To truly appreciate the great surfing decade that the 1930swas, it is important to understand this time leading into it, in the Earthzones where surfers were riding waves in the Hawaiian style: Australia, SouthernCalifornia and – of course – Waikiki.[9]

It is still a common misconception that surfing in Australiabegan in 1914-15, with the visit of Duke Kahanamoku to New South Wales and thesurfing demonstrations he gave at that time. In fact, Australia’s surfing roots go muchfurther back – as far as the late 1800s, before legal rights to swim in theopen sea had even been won.[10]This was because “In Australia,” emphasized the Australian authors of SurfingSubcultures, “the origins of surfing were based on body surfing rather thanon traditional board riding… the early Australian settlers – mainly ofEnglish origin – found no native surfing tradition to encourage or restricteither body or craft-based surfing, as was the case in Hawaii.”[11]

Australian surfing’s Polynesian connection came in the form ofAlick Wickham and Tommy Tana. In the 1890s, Alick Wickham, a native of the Solomon Islands,became an important influence on Australian swimming when he demonstrated a “crawl”stroke that was later exported to the rest of the world as the “Australiancrawl.”[12]

Around the same time another South Sea Islander, Tommy Tana – ayouth employed as a houseboy in the Manly district – was body surfing at thebeach there. Tana hailed from the Pacific islandof Tana, in the New Hebrides, which isnow called by its traditional name of Vanuatu. He amazed onlookers at Manly Beachand inspired others to dive in. His style was studied and copied by Manlyswimmers like Eric Moore, Arthur Lowe and Freddie Williams. Williams soonbecame the first local considered to fully master bodysurfing. Later on,Freddie Williams became a public figure when he made the first publicizedrescue of another swimmer at Manly Beach.[13]

After the turn of the century, Alick Wickham shaped the firstsurfboard in Australia.Hand carved from a large piece of driftwood found on Curl Curl beach, thisboard was so bad it actually sank.[14]Wickham’s knowledge of stand-up surfing using a board was obviously limited andis a testimony of how far surfing had fallen in such Polynesian locales as the Solomon Islandsby the late 1800s.

When more novice swimmers and non-swimmers started oceanbathing off unsupervised beaches, accidents became numerous and soon raised hellwith the public.[15]At Manly Beachalone, there were 16 drownings in the space of 10 years. Local governmentauthorities and regulars at the beaches eventually figured out that the generalpublic would need to be either regulated or monitored. This realization becamethe driving force for the formation of the Australian Surf Life Saving movement.

By 1909, the newly formed Australian Surf Life Saving Associationpublished that there were eleven clubs active in New South Wales. According to the report, nolives had been lost in the previous twelve months while beach patrols had beenoperating. Thereafter, similar reports were made with similar statistics eventhough “surf bathing” and surfing grew at a dramatic rate across the beaches ofAustralia.By 1964, there would be 112 clubs operating in New South Wales alone.[16]

The first Surf Carnival was held on January 25th 1908 at Manly Beach.Six clubs competed and the first surfboat race, with various craft, was won byLittle Coogee (now Clovelly), using their whale boat. Surf Carnivals quicklybecome a popular method of revenue for the Live Saving Clubs. The revenue fromgate receipts were used to purchase gear and improve facilities.[17]Tamarama Carnival, alone, attracted fifteen thousand spectators in February1908.[18]

That same year, Alexander Hume Ford – the man who more thananyone helped publicize surfing at Waikikiduring the first two decades of the Twentieth Century – visited Manly. Hewrote, curiously, that “I wanted to try riding the waves on a surf-board, butit is forbidden.”[19]

Many writers – including myself, once upon a time – havewritten that before Duke Kahanamoku came to Australia and became the first oneto really popularize the sport, there were no surfers riding surfboards. Thehistorical record proves that this is not correct.

While assisting with the 1908 trade agreements between Hawai’i, Australiaand New Zealand,Alexander Hume Ford introduced surfing to Australian Percy Hunter, the head ofthe New South Wales Immigration and Tourism Bureau. Two years later, when Fordvisited Australia again in1910, he noted that there were already several surfboards stashed at Manly Beach.[20]This was a full four and a half years before DukeKahanamoku visited Australiafor the first time and got credited for stoking Australians on stand-upsurfing.

During this time, amongst some surf lifesavers, there was an understandingof what surfboards were. It was noted that “Fred Notting painted a brace ofslabs and named them Honolulu Queen and Fiji Flyer; gay they were to look atbut they were not surfboards.”[21]

In 1912, well-known Australian swimmer, local businessman andpolitician[22]Charles D. Paterson, of Manly Beach, Sydney, broughta solid, heavy redwood board back with him from Hawai’i. He and some local bodysurfers triedto ride it, but with little success. “When he and his mates couldn’t figure outhow to ride it,” Duke biographer Sandra Hall wrote, “his wife used it as anironing board.”[23]

Yet, Patterson and his mates were not the only ones who hadattempted surfboard riding or were surfing prior to Duke’s visit. Early in1912, the Daily Telegraph reported on the second Freshwater Life SavingCarnival held on January 26th. In the account of the day’s events, there ismention of surfboard riding: “A clever exhibition of surf board shooting wasgiven by Mr. Walker, of the Manly Seagulls Surf Club. With his Hawaiian surfboard he drew much applause for his clever feats, coming in on the breakerstanding balanced on his feet or his head.”[24]Whether the board Walkerrode on was a knock-off of Patterson’s, Patterson’s, or an entirely separateboard is unknown.

We do know for sure that following the arrival of C.D. Paterson’sboard at Manly in 1912, a small group – the Walker Brothers, Steve McKelvey,Jack Reynolds, Fred Notting, Basil Kirke, Jack Reynolds, NormanRoberts, Geoff Wyld, Tom Walker, Claude West (then aged 13) and Miss Esma Amor– all attempted surf riding on replica boards. Some of these tried surfingbefore and some after Duke’s visit. Made from Californian redwood by Les Hinds,a local builder from North Steyne, they were 8ft long, 20” wide, 11/2” thick and weighed 35 pounds. Riding the boards waslimited to launching onto broken waves from a standing position and ridingwhite water straight in, either prone or kneeling. Standing rides on the boardfor up to 50 yards/meters were considered outstanding.[25]

In Queensland,by 1913-14, prone boards four to five feet long, one inch thick, and about afoot wide were in use on Coolangatta Beaches.[26]These were made from slabs of cedar or pine and probably used as bodyboards. Charlie Faukner read of DukeKahanamoku’s surf riding and used a board as an aqua planner on the Tweed River,to ride at Greenmount in 1914.[27]Sometime slightly before 1914, at Deewhy, “Long Harry” Taylor “made a boardresembling an old-fashioned church door, but his efforts in the surf were sofutile they became ridiculous.”[28]

So, yes, surfing on wooden boards – or their facsimile – hadalready begun by the time Duke Kahanamoku first visited Australia in 1914-15. Even so, it isundeniable that it was Duke’s shaping his own board and then riding it atFreshwater that really got surfing going in Australia. His riding was widelypublicized and resulted in huge enthusiasm for stand-up surfing in New South Wales. Unfortunately,this stoke was rapidly dampened by the onset of World War I, when many youngAustralians lost their lives on the battlefields of Europe, including Manlycaptain and Olympic swimming champion, Cecil Healy. Surfing, like most otherAustralian recreational activities, was largely put on hold until after 1918.[29]

Duke Kahanamoku’s tandem partner while in Australia, Isabel Letham, continued board ridingat Freshwater up to 1918 when she moved to the USA to work as a professional swimminginstructor.[30]Other prominent boardriders in the Manly area, post-Duke, were Steve Dowling, “Busty”Walker, Geoff Wyld, Ossie Downing, Reg Vaughn (Manly), Tom Walker (Seagulls),Barton Ronald, Billy Hill and Lyal Pidcock.[31]

Circa 1915, seventeen year old Grace Wootton (nee Smith) wasencouraged to try prone boarding – body boarding – at Point Lonsdale, Victoria.Using a board brought to Australiaby “a Mr. Jackson and a Mr. Goldie from Hawaii,”and after some basic instruction, Grace Wootton became a proficient and stokedsurfer. A local carpenter was commissioned to make a board for her, for thefollowing season. This board was solid timber, approximately 6 feet x 16 inchesand a little over 1-inch thick. The cost of 12 shillings included her initials(GW) carved at one end. Photographs of Grace Wootton taken in 1916 show hersurfing and her personally modified woolen swimsuit, purchased from Ball andWelch (Outfitters), Melbourne.[32]

Following Duke’s surfing demonstrations in Australia and New Zealand, many boards were made inOceana based on his handcrafted design.[33]

Circa 1915, Collaroy Surf Life Saving Club member, Alf “Weary”Lee saw Duke Kahanamoku’s Dee Why demonstration and built his own boardaccording to Duke’s design.  Since the board was stored in the club house,it was available for younger club members to have a go of it.[34]

Duke’s most stoked pupil, Claude West, was initially at theFreshwater Club but later moved to Manly. He became Australia’s top boardrider for thenext 10 years. Starting out riding Duke’s original pine board, West really gotinto stand-up surfing and encouraged others, including “Snowy” McAllister ofManly and Adrian Curlewis of Palm Beach. He went on to become a professional lifesaverat Manly Beachfor many years.[35]

In Queensland,two copies of Duke Kahanamoku’s pine board were made for the Greenmount SurfLifesaving Club. The arrival of the two boards prompted further replicas madeand surfed by Sid “Splinter” Chapman, Andy Gibson and a surfer known only asWinders. Prices varied from two shillings and sixpence to seven shillings andsixpence.[36]

In 1919 Louis Whyte, a Geelongbusinessman, and Ian McGillivray visited Hawai‘i and purchased solid redwoodboards from Duke Kahanamoku. The boards were subsequently ridden at Lorne Point, Victoria.[37]

John Ralston, a Sydney solicitorand land developer, introduced surfboards at Palm Beach,Sydney in 1919.[38]With such encouragement, Palm Beachbecame a popular board riding beach, producing several champions and a strongpro-surfboard lobby within the ASLA.[39]

Some of the Surf Life Saving clubs became centers of boardriding, clubhouses becoming storage facilities for boards, in addition to beingplaces where club members could gather and hang out.[40]

With the end of World War I in 1918, military technologicaldevelopments like industrial glues and varnishes were applied to marine craft,including surfboard construction.[41]

In the early years of its establishment, board riding was givenlittle support by the Surf Life Surfing Association. Competitions as part ofcarnivals were judged subjectively. For example, a headstand scored maximumpoints although it had little to do with how well one rode the wave. With agrowing emphasis on rescue techniques, it was paddling skill that became thefocus when it came to surfboard use. Record keeping for surfing events was anafter thought. Often, board events were either not held or not recorded, andsince the ASLA was in its infancy and basically a New South Wales organization, results wereopen to dispute.

Amazingly, it was not until 1946 that the firstofficially-recognized Australian Longboard Championship took place.[42]However, the first credited Australian surfing magazine was published in 1917. Thiswas Manly Surf Club’s The Surf, which first published on December 1,1917. It ran for twenty editions, until April 27, 1918.

In February 1920, Claude West used his board to rescue aswimmer at Manly. The rescuee was the Australian Goveror-General, Sir RonaldMungo Fergerson, who presented his rescuer with his silver dress watch, inappreciation.[43]

A newspaper report of the “Australian Championships” at Manly,March 1920, records the results of a surfboard race:

1. A. McKenzie (North Bondi)

2. Oswald Downing (Manly)

3. A. Moxan (North Bondi)[44]

A similar newspaper report of the Bondi Championships, April1921, records the results of a surfboard race as:

1. A. McKenzie (North Bondi)

2. A. Moxan

Other starters were Oswald Downing  and Claude West (Manly).[45]

By 1921, the Surf Life Saving Association printed their first handbook.It probably formed the basis for subsequent publications later entitled the “Handbookof the Surf Life Saving Association of Australia.”

At the Australian Championships at Manly in 1922, the boardevent results were:

1. Claude West (Manly)

2. A. McKenzie (North Bondi)

3. Oswald Downing (Manly)

West, who had apparently dominated the demonstrations, was soonto retire.[46]

Oswald Downing was an early board builder and a traineearchitect who had drawn up his own surfboard construction plans. These arepossibly the plans printed in the 1923 edition of The Australian Surf LifeSaving Handbook.[47]

In celebration of Collaroy SLSC’s victory in the Alarm ReelRace at the Australian Championships at Manly in 1922, swimmer Ron Harris’family commissioned Buster Quinn (a cabinet maker with Anthony Hordens) to makea surfboard. Quinn made the board from a single piece of Californian Redwood atthe Dingbats’ Camp. Before it was completed, however, Harris’ father died andthe family left Collaroy. Chic Proctor acquired the board in Harris’ absenceand it remains in the clubhouse to this day as the Club’s Life Members HonourBoard.[48]

With growing numbers of surf board riders, the Manly Councilconsidered banning surfboards altogether, in 1923, in the interest of the publicsafety of bodysurfers. This idea was forgotten when one day at the beach, threecity councilors witnessed a rescue of three swimmers in high surf by Claude Westusing his surfboard. Reversing their position, the Council commended the use ofsurfboards as rescue craft.[49]

At the 1924 the Australian Championships at Manly, thesurfboard display was won by Charles Justin “Snowy” McAlister of the Manly SurfClub. As a kid, he had watched Duke ride in 1915. Thereafter, Snowy soon begansurfing on his mother’s pine ironing board. “I used to wag school and rush downto the beach with it,” he recalled. “I got away with it a number of times, butshe eventually found out because I would come home sunburnt.”[50]The pine ironing board was followed by a self-made plywood board and his firstfull size board, a gift from Oswald Downing.[51]

Later, Snowy made his own solid redwood board. “I used to gointo the timber yards in the city and buy a ten by three foot piece of woodabout two  feet thick (sic, inches?),which I had delivered to the cargo wharf beside the Manly ferry.

“I’d lug it home, then carve it, varnish it overnight and tryit out the next morning.

“We were getting murdered in those days.

“The boards had no fins.

“We’d go straight down the face of the wave instead of ridingthe corners as the Duke had done. When we saw him do that we thought he wasjust riding crooked.”[52]

Starting out on an impressive competitive record, SnowyMcAlister won board displays in Sydney in 1923-24 (Manly), 1924-25 (Manly),1925-26 (North Bondi) and 1926-27 (Manly, second Les Ellinson).

His record at Newcastlewas even more outstanding, with wins in 1923-24, 1925-26, 1927-28, 1930-31,1931-32, 1934-35 and 1935-36. All these victories were on solid boards. Hecompeted to 1938 and then made a comeback at the 1956 Olympic Carnival,Torquay.[53]Snowy was the nation’s unofficial national surfboard champion from 1924 to1928. He visited South Africaand England on the way tothe Amsterdam Olympics in 1928, accompanying another Manly Surf Club memberAndrew “Boy” Carlton.[54]Following the introduction of the Blake Hollow board to Australia in 1934, Snowy turned tothe surfski as his preferred wave riding craft.

Another noted surfer of this formative period in Australiansurfing was Adrian Curlewis. Around 1923, Curlewis bought a used 70 pound boardfrom Claude West, so he could surf regularly at Palm Beach. This board was replaced by one ofsimilar design in 1926, a board built by Les V. Hind of North Steyne for five pounds and fifteen shillings, including delivery.[55]Curlewis became a noted surf performer, becoming somewhat of a star thanks aphotograph printed in an Australian magazine in 1936.[56]

Sir Adrian Curlewis was born in 1901. He graduated from Sydney Universityand was called to the Bar in 1927. He served in Malayain World War II and was a prisoner of war from 1942to 1945. He held the Presidency of the Surf Life Saving Association ofAustralia from 1933 to 1974, his position as sole Life Governor of thatAssociation from 1974, and his Presidency of the International Council of SurfLife Saving from 1956 to 1973. Curlewis served as a New South Wales DistrictCourt Judge from 1948 to 1971, retiring at the age of 70.[57]Perhaps because of his early board riding experiences and long association withsurf lifesaving organizations, he was a noted 1960s opponent of the growth ofan independent surf culture centered on wave riding.[58]

At Coolangatta, boardriding continued to expand during the1920s. Basic competitions (using a standing take-off) were organized and ridersincluded Clarrie Englert, Bill Davies, “Bluey” Gray and later, Jack Ajax. Bluey Gray, in fact,wrote to Hawaiian and Californian surfers in an attempt to learn more aboutcurrent developments in the sport. Problems in sourcing suitable redwood saw “Splinter”Chapman, one of the coast’s top riders, use local Bolly gum to build boards.

North of Coolangatta, the first full-sized board was probablyowned by John Russell of the Main Beach Club, circa 1925.[59]

Circa 1925, Sydney rider Anslie “Sprint”Walker surfed at Portsea, Victoria.When he encountered trouble transporting the board between Portsea and home, hesolved the problem by leaving his board at the beach, buried in the sand. Theboard was eventually donated to the Torquay Surf Live Saving Club, but waslater destroyed when the club house burnt down in 1970. Sprint solved thisproblem, too, by building a replica from Canadian redwood with an adze, the wayit had been done originally.[60]

The North Steyne Surf Life Saving Club promoted their 4thannual carnival, scheduled for December 19, 1925 at 2:45 p.m., with a flyerprinted by the Manly Daily Press. The noted “Surf and Beach Attractions”included: “1200 Competitors, 18 Leading Surf Life Saving Clubs Participating -Surf Boat Races, Thrills and Spills, Board Exhibitions, All State Surf SwimmingChampions Competing.”[61]

The Australian Surf Life Saving Association promoted theirannual surf championships, scheduled for February 27, 1926 at 2.30 p.m., with aflyer printed by the Mortons Ltd. Sydney. It emphasized: “Surf Boats, SurfShooting and Surf Board Displays by Real Champions.”[62]

In the late 1920s, Collaroy SLSC member Bert Chequermanufactured surfboards commercially and 15 shillings cheaper than North Steyne builder Les Hind.[63]In the early 1920s, Chequer had been captivated by the likes of board riderssuch as Weary Lee, Chic Proctor and Ron Harris and made his first surfboard at17 using a design similar to Buster Quinn’s. As the years progressed, Chequerrefined Quinn’s design, producing a board which was held in high regard by manyother board riders in the Club. Dick Swift requested he build him a board (theboard is still in the Club house) and with delivery of the board a flood of similarrequests came his way. So, with this development and little work in his father’sbuilding business to keep him busy, Chequer decided to try his hand atcommercial surfboard building – one of the earliest such enterprises in thecountry. The cost of a Chequer board was £5 which included delivery.

Chequer bought his timber from Hudson’s timber merchants where it was kilndried before delivery. While he preferred cedar, its expense meant that he wasforced to use Californian Redwood. The board was crafted from a single piece ofwood, meaning that Chequer’s small workshop was usually a sea of wood shavings.[64]A board took just two days to build and was totally shaped by hand. Onceshaped, the board was coated with Linseed oil, before two coats of Velspar yachtvarnish was applied. In his initial experimentation with the varnish on his ownboard, the yellow finish it gave off prompted the board to be known as the “YellowPeril.” Boards were usually intricately marked either with a name, the initialsof the owner, or with the Club emblem.[65]

Chequer was soon supplying individuals and clubs up and downthe New South Wales coast and as far away as Phillip Islandin Victoria. Whilethe business was relatively successful, there was a downside for Chequer. Becausehe was a surfboard manufacturer, making money out of what was now regarded as apiece of life saving equipment; the Association claimed he was no longer anamateur by their definition. He was therefore prohibited from surf life savingcompetition between 1932 and 1936.[66]

In the late 1920s, T.A. Brown and A. Williams used a corkwoodboard from Honoluluat Byron Bay NSW.[67]

Eric Mallen purchased a cedar slab that was once the counter ofthe Commerical Bank, and had it shaped into a fouteen foot board by Jack Wilson.Proving to be too unwieldy, the board was later cut down, decorated and named “LeapingLena.” On large days, Eric Mallen would leap off the end of the large jettythat ran out from Main Street to savepaddling.[68]

On Sunday, April 26, 1931, a belt and reel rescue attempt atCollaroy in extreme weed and swell conditions resulted in the death of CollaroySLSC member, George “Jordie” Greenwell. Even though the use of the reel wasquestionable in thick weed and high swell conditions, the inability ofGreenwell to release himself from the belt was the main reason for his demise. Despitedemands on the SLSA’s Gear Committee, the “Ross safety belt” – designed toensure the lifesaver from just such an entanglement – did not become compulsoryfor member clubs until the 1950s. Greenwell was posthumously awarded the MeritiousAward in Silver, the SLSA’s highest honor.[69]

While Greenwell’s drowning resurrected the debate on surfbelts, there were two more immediate and positive developments from the drowning.The first was an intensification of Association trials using waxed line to seeif it would “overcome the difficulty of seaweed.” The other was the Association’sendorsement of the use of surfboards as life saving equipment.  In the Greenwell drowning itself, the surfboardhad proved its usefulness in surf with a high seaweed content.

In the 1920s, surfboards had been used by a number of clubs asrescue apparatus. While the line and reel remained the predominant rescuetechnique, the surfboard rivaled the surf boat for the number of rescuesaccorded to it each season. Such use, however, had been against the wishes ofthe Association and lifesavers like Manly’s Claude West were reprimanded fortheir use.

During the 1929-30 season, the Collaroy Annual Report recordedrescues performed using surfboards, noting two such. The following season, foursurfboard rescues were recorded. The figure was probably much greater, inreality, due to the fact that surfboards were often used to assist tiredswimmers before they got into actual difficulties. While confined almostexclusively to surf club use, surfboards were usually only used by members whowere not on patrol duty.[70]

The data in club annual reports demonstrated to the Associationthat most clubs saw surfboards as useful rescue craft. Within the Association,individuals such as Greg Dellit, Adrian Curlewis and Bert Chequer (who hadjoined the Board of Examiners) began to champion the surfboard. Eventually,interested parties agreed that surfboards should be trialed so their usefulnesscould be gauged. These trials were held in the swimming pool of the TattersalsClub in Sydney.The trials confirmed the usefulness of surfboards as flotation devices inmultiple and lone lifesaver rescues. The fact they mostly went over rather thanthrough sea weed was also noted.[71]

By the start of the 1930s, Southern California’s surfing epicenter was located at Corona del Mar. ButSoCal surfing had begun up the coast first at Venicein 1907, then Redondo and Huntington,spreading out from those beaches.[72]

Surfing’s evolution in the Los Angelesarea can be seen in a reading of the local newspapers of the period, especiallythe ones around Long Beach.  Surfing in Long Beach? It is hard to imagine today, butonce upon a time – before the breakwater was built in the early 1940s andbefore the area’s massive landfill was undertaken – not only did excellent surfbreak upon its shores, but Long Beach was onceconsidered “the Waikiki of the Pacific Coast.”Today, despite the disappearance of the long beach that gave the city its name, some surfers stillremember the old days and for those of us a bit younger, we have the newspaperrecord:

Long Beach Press,April 7, 1910 – “SUGGESTS USE OF SURF BOATS: VISITOR JUST IN FROM HAWAII FAVORS NEW AMUSEMENT FOR LONG BEACH

“W.P. Wheeler of Monroe, Mich., who has arrived in Long Beachto spend the summer after a winter in Hawaii,suggests that some enterprising man with a little money build and put inoperation a lot of surf boats, for which Waikiki beach, Honolulu is famous.

“Mr. Wheeler says that Long Beachis the only beach he has ever seen which can compare with the famous Waikiki, and that the surf rolls here exactly as it doesat that beach.

“‘When I saw those catamarans, or surf boats, operated at Waikiki,’ said Mr. Wheeler, ‘I wondered why the Pacificcoast beach resorts did not take to them. I was told while in Honolulu,by an admirer of Waikiki, that no beach on the Californiacoast was as shallow and long as Waikiki. NowI know that the fellow was not well informed, for the beach here is exactlylike the Hawaiian beach.’”[73]

To my knowledge, the first recorded lifesaving action usingsurfboards in U.S. Mainland waters took place on September 3, 1911:

Daily Telegram, September 4, 1911 – “TWO LIVES SAVED BYSKILLFUL USE OF HAWAIIAN SURFERS

“One of the most novel rescues every pulled off in the surf atLong Beach was accomplished yesterday afternoon on the beach west of MagnoliaAvenue when Paul Rowan of Long Beach and a stranger who slipped away before hisidentity could be discovered, were saved from drowning by Charles Allbright andA.J. Stout.

“The two rescuers were also nearly exhausted and were helped tothe beach during the latter part of their spectacular trip by the hotel life guard,John Leonard, who was unaware of the trouble until he saw the men struggling toreach shore against a strong rip tide.

“Both the rescuers met and became close friends in Honolulu and broughtHawaiian surfboards over with them recently to try them out in the local surf. PaulRowan, who is a strong swimmer, was out beyond the end of the lifelines, whichextend from the beach to a point beyond the breakers. He was swimming about,enjoying the exercise when he heard a cry from a man who was nearer the shore,but just beyond the breakers.

“‘For God’s sake, help me. I have a wife on shore,’ gurgled thestranger, a man of about thirty years of age, as he began to sink.

“Rowan went to his help with a swift overhand stroke and caughthim just as he was sinking a second time in the strong offshore current.

“The stranger immediately grabbed hold of Rowan and held him sothat he had to fight to free his arms. Rowan was also dragged under. It was atthis point that Allbright and Stout, on their surfboards, became aware of thesituation.

“Allbright grabbed Rowan, who was dizzy from his forcedimmersion and placed him on his surfboard. Stout did the same for the stranger.Just then a succession of big breakers came along and the two men, with theirburdens, coasted magnificently inshore against the rip tide.

“The peculiarity of the Hawaiian surfboards was to a largeextent responsible for the effectiveness of the rescue of both the stranger andhis first rescuer, Paul Rowan. The boards are made of the beautifully grainedkoa wood of the Hawaiian Isles and are six feet long. They are three inchesthick and eighteen inches wide.

“Both Allbright and Stout are expert surfboard riders and foryears coasted on the foaming breakers which run in on the beach between DiamondHead and Honolulu.There the mountain high breakers travel at great speeds for a distance ofnearly half a mile. Yesterday they were riding the breakers with the greatestease in front of the Virginia Hoteland a large crowd was watching them as they stood up on the boards and coastedrapidly ashore. The rescues yesterday were probably the first of the kind. Thesuccess of the men with their boards may result in the general use of the sametype at the beach.

“Both Allbright and Stout made light of the incident, and frominformation supplied from other sources it was learned that they frequentlymake similar rescues out in the Hawaiian Islands.”[74]

Long Beach Press, February 26, 1921 – “NOVEL SURF BOARDAND CANOES MADE

“Surf-boating has made such an appeal to visitors to Long Beach during the pastyear that Victor K. Hart, manager of Venetian Square; and T. Bennett Shutt, local buildingcontractor, have completed arrangements to manufacture surf boards and surfcanoes here in quantity. A temporary factory has been opened and twenty of thesurfboards and a dozen canoes are now being built.

“Erection of the flood control jetties has checked the oceancurrents to such an extent that splendid surf-boating is now to be enjoyed onthe west beach. The surfboards under construction here were designed by Hartand Shutt and are said to be lighter and different in shape to the Hawaiianisland boards.”[75]

One of Long Beach’sfirst surfers was Haig (Hal) Prieste, who won an Olympic diving medal at the1920 Olympics. There, he met Duke Kahanamoku and accepted an invitation tovisit him in Hawai‘i, where he took up surfing and became an honorary member ofthe Hui Nalu:

Long Beach Press,May 3, 1921 – “LOCAL BOY TO ENTER BIG MEET IN HAWAII

“Haig Prieste, Long Beach boyand former Poly High student, winner of third place in the Olympic games divingcontests, leaves Friday for San Francisco enroute to the Hawaiian islands, where he will enter the junior national highdiving contest which is to be a feature of a big aquatic carnival to be held inHonolulu. Priestewill be the only swimmer to enter the meet from the mainland, a special requestfor his presence having been made by the swimming officials at Honolulu.

“Following his appearance at Honolulu,Prieste may continue to the Antipodes where hehas been requested to enter a number of contests with the best of the Australianswimmers and divers. Whether he will make this trip or not depends uponcontracts which he has with motion picture concerns. Prieste formerly wasconnected with Mack Sennet and with the Rollin and Gasnier studios doing ‘daredevil’ stunts in comedy productions. He has achieved quite a reputation locallyas a sleight of hand entertainer in addition to his prowess as a high diver.”[76]

Daily Telegram, August 15, 1921 – “HAIG PRIESTE HOMEFROM THREE MONTHS OF HAWAIIAN TOUR: HAS MAMMOTH SURFBOARD GIVEN HIM

“Haig Prieste, Olympic diving champion, returned to Long Beach with a ukulele, an oversize surfboard and aninteresting story of three months in the Hawaiian Islands.He intended to remain three weeks when he left as the only American entrant inthe Hawaiian carnival staged in the latter part of May. The charm of theislands, the determination to master Hawaiian surf board riding – and theukulele – and an opportunity to gather a couple of spare diving championshipskept him several weeks overtime.

“He won the junior national high diving title and thespringboard diving championship of a half dozen islands. He brought with himthe Castle and Cook trophy and several others of lesser significance. He wasthe guest of honor and an honorary member of the Hui Nalu swimming club, theleading aquatic organization of the islands.

“Prieste and Duke Kahanamoku palled around together at Hilo for a time. Priesteastonished the natives when he learned to ride the gigantic surfboards standingon his hands. ‘It’s the greatest sport in the world,’ he said today.

“Prieste says that the expert Hawaiian surfriders are able toride for three-quarters of a mile on their boards. They have grown up with asurfboard in one hand, and by learning the formation of the coral reefs and thevarious currents, they are able to pilot their boards for great distances in azigzag course. The waves bowl them along at a speed of 35 miles per hour. Thereis a great knack in catching the wave at the proper angle, Prieste says. Unlessthe board is pointed diagonally at the correct angle at the correct moment bothboard and rider will be dumped on the coral floor of the ocean. Prieste spentfrom 8 to 10 hours in the water each day.”[77]

Press-Telegram, December 31, 1926 – “BEACH GREATEST

“Board surfing has been growing in popularity year by year. Whilemost of the boards used are short and only for the surf after it has broken,yet there have developed some who have learned to ride the waves while they arestill huge and green without any white water. Some of the beach guards havemastered an art before confined to the surfing beaches of the Hawaiian Islands.

“Even some of the Long Beach girls have become proficient in this excitingwater sport.”[78]

Early Californiatandem surfing:

Press-Telegram, March 18, 1927 – “TWO DARE DEATH

“A special exhibition of fancy riding on surfboards will beperformed by Elmer Peck and Miriam Tizzard at Alamitos Bay. Peck has attained nationalstunts that he has performed in all parts of this country as well as in thewaters off Hawaiiand the South American republics.

“Miss Tizzard is a local girl and though she has only beenunder Mr. Peck’s direction for two weeks he regards her as one of the most aptpupils that he has ever trained. He says that she is perfectly at home on theelusive surfboard. Special stunts in which the two combine will be a feature ofthe program offered.”[79]

Although there were small numbers of “Roaring ‘20s” surfersriding waves at a limited number of breaks from Santa Monica to San Diego,the most popular break was Corona del Mar. This had probably as much to do withthe nightlife at Balboa, north across the channel leading to Newport Harbor,as it was to Corona’sexceptionally nice set-up, surf-wise. The good surf at Corona was all about the south jetty.

Although not originally intended for surfers, the cement jettyat Corona del Mar was a boon for surfriders. The 800-foot long jetty stretchedfrom the rocks at Big Corona all the way to the beach. When the swells wererunning, a surfer could launch from the end of the jetty, ride in next to itfor approximately 800 feet, then climb up a chain ladder, run out on the jettyand do the same thing all over again. Perhaps more importantly, waves jacked upat Coronaunlike they did anywhere else – also due to the jetty.

In 1923, two beacon lights were installed at the jettyentrance. These were written about in a Long Beach Press article, inDecember: “The two beacon lights at the end of the jetty protecting theentrance of Newportharbor are complete and have been turned over to the care of Antar Deraga, headof the Balboa life saving guards… The lights are about thirty feet above theocean level and can be seen by all ships passing on the east side of Catalina.

“The outer beacon light is equipped with a three-fourths footburner and will burn about 160 days. It flashes one second and five secondsdark. It is equipped with a sun valve for economy of operation. The innerbeacon light is equipped with a five-sixteenths-foot burner without sun valve.It should burn 200 days. This beacon flashes every two and a half seconds.

“The government lighthouse service will also supply the keeperhere with a lifeboat for use in rescue work. It will be in charge of Mr.Deraga, who is known as one of the most efficient lifeguards on the coast. Beforecoming here he made an enviable record in Europe and has recently been made amember of the Royal life saving guards of Englandand given a service medal in recognition of heroic service in the English Channel and also for saving the life of anEnglish lady in this harbor last summer.”[80]

Antar Deraga was also one of those who, along with standoutsurfer and Olympic champion Duke Kahanamoku, helped rescue the majority of thecrew of the Thelma when it floundered off Newport Beach in 1925:

“Battling with his surfboard through the heavy seas in which nosmall boat could live, Kahanamoku, was the first to reach the drowning men. Hemade three successive trips to the beach and carried four victims the firsttrip, three the second and one the third. Sheffield,Plummer and Derega were credited with saving four; while other members of therescue party waded into the surf and carried the drowning men to safety…

“The accident occurred at the identical spot near the bell buoywhere, almost to a day a year ago, a similar accident occurred and nine menwere drowned. Two of the bodies were carried out to sea by the undertow andwere never recovered.

“Captain Porter expressed the belief yesterday that at leasteight or ten more would have been drowned had not Kahanamoku and Derega beenready with immediate assistance…

“The Hawaiian swimmer was camped on the beach with a party offilm players and was just going out for his morning swim when the boat waswrecked. The lifeguards were just going on duty.”[81]

There was an established record of difficulty for boats leavingand entering the Newport Channel on a good swell. In 1927, the city of Newport voted 0,000 fora harbor expansion that included changes to the jetties. In 1928, the cityapproved 0,000 for work on both the west and east jetties. It was this laterwork that would forever change surfing at Corona del Mar – especially the surfadjacent to the east jetty – and be lamented by surfers who considered Corona the main surfing beach of Southern California.[82]

Surfing’s first dedicated surf photographer Doc Ball eulogizedthe early surf scene at Corona del Mar, when he later wrote in 1946: “We whoknew it will never forget buzzing the end of that slippery, slimy jetty, justbarely missing the crushing impact as the sea mashed into the concrete. Norwill we forget the squeeze act when 18 to 20 guys all tried to take off on thesame fringing hook. And do you remember the days when you waited near thatclanging bell buoy for the next set to arrive? Corona DelMar’s zero surf was hell on the yachtsmen but – holy cow – what stuff for theKamaainas. Yes! Those were the days.”[83]

During the area’s boom-days of the 1920s, a housing developmentoriginally named Balboa Bay Palisades was created in 1923 and morphed into whatwe now call Corona del Mar. During that decade, the area’s income came mostlyfrom the Rendezvous dance hall, gambling and bootleg liquor. The RendezvousBallroom was the place to be and a major destination for touring big bands ofthe time. On a Saturday night the town bore a resemblance to Bourbon Street, in New Orleans, during MardiGras. A number of businesses were involved in gambling. More on the Rendezvouswhen we get to talking about Gene “Tarzan” Smith.

While Corona del Mar was in its glory days as the center of Southern California surfing, history was made there withthe creation of the Pacific Coast Surfriding Championships. Word of it began onJuly 16, 1928 when a Long BeachPress-Telegram announced: “SURFBOARD CLUB WILL HOLD TITLE MEET ATHARBOR.” The article read: “The Corona Del Mar Surfboard Club, which claims tobe the largest organization of its kind in the world, will hold a championshipsurfboard riding tournament at the Corona Del Mar beach at the entrance to Newport Harbor on Sunday,August 5.

“Some of the most notable surfboard riders in the world are expectedto compete, including the famous swimmer and surfboard rider, Duke Kahanamoku,Hawaiian champion; Tom Blake of Redondo, who won two championships, and HaroldJarvis, long distance swimmer of the Los Angeles Athletic Club. Some of thesurfboard riders are predicting that new world records will be made here duringthe meet. So far fifteen surfboard artists have signed up, including some fromas far away as San Francisco.It is planned to make it an annual event.”[84]

On the day of the contest, August 5, 1928,[85]the Press-Telegram reported: “PLANS COMPLETED FOR SURFBOARD RIDING TILT.”It went on: “Preparations have been completed for the Pacific Coast surfboardriding championship tournament, to be held at Corona Del Mar, the entrance toNewport Harbor today. Part of the entrance to the harbor is said to be onlysurpassed by some Hawaiian beaches for surfboard riding.

“Duke Kahanamoku and other well-known surfboard artists willcompete. Besides surfboard riding the program will include canoe tiltingcontests, paddling races and a life-saving exhibition by surfboard riders. Inaddition to Kahanamoku, other well-known members of the club include Tom Blakeof Redondo, Gerard Vultee and Art Vultee of the Los Angeles Athletic Club,Clyde Swedson of the Hollywood Athletic Club, and others.”[86]

More important than the results of who won what, the big storyof this first-ever surf contest on the U.S. Mainland was the first-everunveiling of the hollow surfboard in competition. Tom Blake brought hisdrilled-hole hollow board innovation and a regular 9-foot 6-inch redwoodsurfboard back with him by boat from Hawai‘i. Armed with his partially hollow oloreplica, Tom subsequently won the first Pacific Coast Surfriding Championships– which he had also helped organize.[87]

Held under direction of Captain Scheffield of the Corona delMar Surfboard Club, the championship’s main event was a paddle race from shoreto the bell buoy, followed by a surf ride in. “500 yards and back; 1^st back to win,” Tom remembered.[88]In later documenting the event for his protégé Tommy Zahn in 1972, Tom wrote: “Situation:about 8 or 10 men, including Gerard Vultee (late co-founder of Lockheed; anaeronautical engineer; designer of aircraft and surfboards). He had the longestboard; 11-feet. I had a 9’6’ broad riding board. I figured he would be 1^stout at the break and therefore should get the first wave in.

“I had this (1^st one only) 15-foot paddle board withme for the paddling race (115 lb.). So I decided to use both boards in thesurfing race. Had them both on the beach as the starting gun went off. Everybodygot a good head start; Vultee in the lead. I slowly proceeded to put the 15’P.B. in the water, then went back to get the 9 ½ job; placed it upon the P.B.and started after the field, now 50 yards out. Slowly caught and passed them at300 yards and arrived at the starting break [the bell buoy] alone with a minuteto spare – discarded the long board and lined up for the 1^st wave. Theywere about 6 or 7 feet high; not large, but strong.

“Vultee arrived first, then the rest; we all had to wait a fewminutes for a set of waves. Vultee and me took after the first one. He got itand took off on the left side, for shore. But, the second wave was a bitbigger. I got it and slid right. Vultee’s wave petered out in the channel; minecarried me all the way in, opposite the jetty and to shore for a win. There wasa movie outfit there; a newsreel deal. I later saw the ride and had a close-up[made]; someone probably still has it.”[89]

Tom used two boards that historic day – a first, in itself. Heused the drilled-hole hollow board for paddling out and a more conventionalboard for riding waves in. Having a board strictly for paddling was unheard ofup to this point. Up to this point, everyone had competed in paddling races onsurfboards. Some Californiaold-timers recalled of that day that it was the first time they had ever seen asurfboard turned. Dragging either the left or the right leg in the wateraccomplished this. His surfboard was 9-feet, 6-inches long, but the paddleboardwas 16 feet and weighed 120 pounds.[90]Blake wrote of his huge drilled-hole olo design paddleboard: “When Iappeared with it for the first time before 10,000 people gathered for a holidayand to watch the races, it was regarded as silly. Handling this heavy boardalone, I got off to a poor start, the rest of the field gaining a thirty-yardlead in the meantime. It really looked bad for the board and my reputation andhundreds openly laughed. But a few minutes later it turned to applause becausethe big board led the way to the finish of the 880-yard course by fully 100yards.”[91]

“Later,” after the main event, “they held a 440 yard boardrace, paddling. I let Vultee lead for most of it, then breezed by him on thenew semi-hollow paddle board. Received a statue of a swimmer and a cup. Stillhave the statuette of a swimmer; the cup is held by some club; don’t know who. Ithas Pete’s [Peterson] name on it for many later winnings.”[92]

Next day, the Long Beach Press-Telegram announced: “LOS ANGELESMAN, TOM BLAKE, WINNER OF EVENTS OF SURFBOARD CLUB.” The article continued: “Theaquatic powers of Tom Blake, bewhiskered athlete of the Los Angeles AthleticClub, enabled him to win over an assemblage of swimmers in the meet heldyesterday afternoon in front of the Starr Bath House on the Corona DelMar beach. Blake took two of the first places, winning easily the surfboard contestand the paddling race. He was awarded silver trophies for his championship.

“Several hundred people lined the beach to witness the contestheld under the auspices of the Corona Del Mar Surfboard Association. The factthat Duke Kahanamoku, famous surfboard rider, could not be present did notdetract from the excitement of the day.

“The Corona Del Mar Surfboard Club has been sponsored byCaptain D.W. Sheffield, manager of the Starr Bathhouse. It is said to be theonly organization of its kind on the Pacific Coast.

“The results of the contest were as follows: Quarter-milesurfboard race, won by Tom Blake, L.A.A.C.; second, Gerard Vultee, Corona Del Mar; thirdDennie Williams, Corona Del Mar.  Paddling race was won by Tom Blake; second,Dennie Williams.”[93]

The first first-place PCSC trophy “was first won by Tom Blakein 1928 at Corona DelMar,” confirmed Doc Ball in his classic collection of early Californiasurfer photos, CaliforniaSurfriders, 1946.[94]Because the original trophy was not much to speak of, Blake had a nicelyembossed trophy cup made in order to pass on to succeeding winners.[95]He donated this trophy “to be the perpetual cup for the above mentioned event. Winnerssince 1928 are inscribed on the back of it.” A good photograph of it appears inDoc’s book. He added that “World War II precluded any possibilities of acontest from 1941 through 1946.”[96]

The Pacific Coast Surfriding Championships became an annualevent, dominated for 4-out-of-9 years by Preston “Pete” Peterson, who reignedas California’srecognized top surfer throughout the 1930s. Other early winners of the trophyincluded Keller Watson (1929), Gardner Lippincott (1934), Lorrin “Whitey”Harrison (1939) and Cliff Tucker (1940).[97]

As for Tom Blake, although he met with competitive success onthe U.S. Mainland, his eyes were mostly on the Islands.“My dream was to introduce, or revive, this type of board in Hawaii where surfboard racing and riding isat its best,” he wrote in his 1935 edition of Hawaiian Surfboard, thefirst book ever published solely about surfing. “This seems to havematerialized…”[98]

Blake – originally a competitive swimmer – rose to prominence inthe emerging world of surfing, following his restoration of traditionalHawaiian surfboards and his creative innovation of those designs into whatbecame known as “the hollow board” – both surfboards and paddleboards.[99]After restoring Chief Paki’s boards for the Bernice Pauahi Bishop Museum,Blake built some replicas for himself. In an article entitled, “Surf-riding –The Royal and Ancient Sport,” published in a 1930 edition of The Pan Pacific,he wrote: “I… wondered about these boards in the museum, wondered so muchthat in 1926 I built a duplicate of them as an experiment, my object being tofind not a better board, but to find a faster board to use in the annual andpopular surfboard paddling races held in Southern California each summer.”[100]

During the 1920s, surfboards weighed between 75 and 150 pounds.Because of the length of the board and the wood it was made of, Paki’s olowas considerably heavier than the heaviest Waikikiboard of the day, all of which were of solid wood construction. On a whim,Blake took his 16 foot olo replica board and, in his own words, “drilledit full of holes to lighten and dry it out, then plugged them up. Result:accidental invention of the first hollow surf-board.”[101]Blake’s “holey” board ended up exactly 15 feet long, 19 inches wide and 4inches thick. Because it was partially hollow, this board weighed only 120pounds.[102]This was the “hollow” board he used in the first Pacific Coast SurfingChampionships at Corona del Mar.

Following his win of the first Pacific Coast SurfingChampionship at Corona del Mar in 1928, Blake took his hollow board back toHawai‘i with him and took on the famous races held at the Ala Wai Canalannually. By this time, he had given up on filled-in drilled holes in favor ofa hollowed-out chamber approach.

“I introduced at Waikiki a newtype of surfboard,” Blake wrote of his hollow board. It was, “new so the paperssaid, and so the beach boys said, but in reality the design was taken from theancient Hawaiian type of board,” his 1926 replicas of them, and “also from theEnglish racing shell. It was called a ‘cigar board,’ because a newspaperreporter thought it was shaped like a giant cigar.”[103]

Of Blake’s hollow olo-inspired design, Dr. D’Eliscu ofthe Honolulu Star-Bulletin wrote that “Theold Hawaiian surfboard has again made its appearance at Waikikibeach modeled after the boards used in the old days. A practice trial was heldyesterday at the War Memorial Pool, and to the surprise of the officials, theboard took several seconds off the Hawaiian record for one hundred yards.”[104]Blake referred to this modern olo design as the racing model; in essencea true paddleboard. He built his surf riding model surfboard, “Okohola,” amonth later, in December 1929.[105]

The hollow paddleboards and surfboards Blake now made, “differedfrom the olo in that they were flat-decked, built of redwood, and hollow,”wrote Finney and Houstonin Surfing, The Sport of Hawaiian Kings, many years later. “They wereexcellent for paddling and also successful in the surf.  Like the olo they were well adapted to theglossy rollers at Waikiki. A man could catch awave far out beyond the break, while the swell was still a gentle,shore-rolling slope, and the board would slide easily along the wave, whetherit grew steep and broke, or barely rose and flattened out again.”[106]

Duke Kahanamoku told his biographer that Blake’s firstexperiments had actually been initially “predicated on the belief that fasterrides would be generated by heavier boards. But the turning problem becamebigger with the size of the board; a prone surfer was compelled to drag onefoot in the water on the inside of the turn, and this only contributed to lossof forward speed. If standing, he had to drag an arm over the side, and withthe same result of diminishing momentum.

“Paddleboards are still with us today, and they are obviouslyhere to stay,” Duke affirmed. “Some fantastic records have been establishedwith them. And the sport of paddleboarding has naturally drawn some outstandingmen to its ranks. It is a long list, a gallant list.”[107]

Recapping its initial evolution, Blake said his first hollowboard “was purely for racing, and I soon followed it with a riding boardsixteen feet long. The new riding board model was a great success [‘Okohola’].”Blake added with some pride that “Duke Kahanamoku built his great 16-foothollow redwood board along about the same time…”[108]

Tom Blake set his first world’s record in paddling at Ala Waiin December 1929. It came after years of discipline and development of skill inracing under stress. He had swum in hundreds of races during the eight yearspreviously and won the first official Californiasurfing contest (the PCSC) just the year before. The Honolulu Star-Bulletinfrom December 2, 1929, reported the event the day after: “BLAKE SETS 100-YARDSURFBOARD PADDLE MARK. Big Crowd On Hand To Take In Sunday Races; OutriggerClub Clean Sweeps In AlaWai Program of 18 Popular Events.” The Honolulu Star-Bulletin went on: 

“Demonstratingthe possibilities of such a surfboard, Tom Blake of ‘cigar surfboard’ fame,yesterday paddled his pet water rider to a new 100-yard Hawaiian record (world’srecord) at the Ala Wai where he negotiated the distance in 35 1-5 seconds,bettering the old mark by five full seconds in an exhibition witnessed by acrowd of 1000.

“The former record was 40 1-5 seconds made last year by EdricCooke. More plumes are added to his [Blake’s] achievement when it is consideredthat he had to paddle through the water against a stiff wind and a tide.

“The ‘cigar surfboard’ just glided through the water without asplash and it was an uncanny sight. Blake was in excellent shape and worked hisarms tirelessly to set the new world record.”[109]

“The exhibition,” continued the Honolulu Star-Bulletin, “wasthe feature to a program of surfboard races staged by the recreation commissionof the city. The events were put on to prepare those interested in surfboardpaddling for the big races to be held during the Christmas holidays.

“The number of automobiles and the large crowds that gatheredon both sides of the canal surprised the officials who helped revive theinterest in an activity which typifies the islands…

“Sixteen paddle events were conducted in two hours and thetimers, judges, clerks and other officials were kept running up and down thebanks following the start then taking the finish…

“The Outrigger Canoe club, under the guidance of George (‘Dad’)Center, romped away with all the honors, as the other organizations did notbelieve that a contest of this kind would be successfully held.

“The appearance of the smoothness of the cigar-shaped board,and the quiet, reserved and impressive showing of its maker and paddler, TomBlake, attracted more than usual interest. Everybody wanted to use that type ofboard and the success and speed of this board showed itself in the number ofraces that were won by the individuals using it.

“Never before in any open races have so many boards beencollected in one place. It required a private truck to haul all the surfboardsfrom the Outrigger and Hui Nalu clubs to AlaWai…”[110]

Perhaps as significant as the wins that day, were resentmentsby some surfers and paddlers toward the hollow board and its creator. The HonoluluStar-Bulletin noted the resistance to this new type of watercraft: “Thequestion was raised by the officials as to a standard board to be required inall future open competition. The feeling was against this proposal. Theofficials felt that no board designed to ride the surf could be barred from anyof the races scheduled.

“The result of Sunday’s special events assures a number of newrecords on Christmas Day, when a special program will be held for surfboardfollowers…”[111]

“This board was really graceful and beautiful to look at,” Tomwrote proudly of his carved chambered paddleboard, “and in performance was sogood that officials of the Annual Surfboard Paddling Championship immediatelyhad a set of nine of them built for use…”[112]

Not everyone enthusiastically embraced hollow paddleboards andhollow surfboards. Later, when hollow boards became the standard at manybeaches, solid boards were still preferred by some surfers. Doc Ball’s CaliforniaSurfriders, featuring photographs taken primarily during the 1930s, shows alarge number of solid boards in use.

Blake’s world record-breaking wins in both the 100-yard andhalf mile paddling events of the Hawaiian Surfboard Paddling Championships actuallyput him into disfavor with some Hawaiians. Resistance to his new designs hit a high point in the December1, 1929 race. There was an initial attempt to disqualify him, some saying thathe was not using a surfboard. Well, they were right on that account. Up untilthe Pacific Coast Surfing Championship the year before, there had been no suchthing as a “paddleboard” specifically used for paddle racing.

Popular local Tommy Keakona, himself a champion of the 1928 AlaWai races, refused to compete against Tom in protest over his use of the hollowpaddleboard.[113]Other “purist” Hawaiian surfers and distance paddlers demanded that onlyconventionally shaped and solid paddleboards be allowed to race. Other paddlerslobbied for the new design, claiming, rightfully, that it “marked the beginningof a new era in surfing and paddling.”[114]

The hollow board’s detractors were not sufficient in number tokeep Blake from competing, that day, nor the other paddlers using hollow boards.Referring to Blake’s board as “The Cigar Water Conqueror,” a HonoluluStar-Bulletin article written by Francois D’Eliscu documented Tom’s winwith this headline: “3000 WATCH SURFERS RACE UPON ALA WAI CANAL. Every Recordin History of Sport is Shattered; Cigar Board Comes Into Its Own.” D’Eliscuwent on to write: “More than 3000 spectators crowded the banks of the Ala Waithis morning to witness the championship surfboard races in which every recordin the history of the sport was shattered.

“Never before was such a contest so keenly fought. Remarkabletimes were made in the 10-event program.

“The cigar-shaped board was supreme. Each paddler showed speed,smoothness and wonderful control in handling the thin, light, fast-movingplanks.

“Tom Blake, originator of the cigar shaped board, staged asurprise unknown to even his coaches when he appeared with a hollow carvedcigar board. In the first event on the program, the half-mile men’s open, Blakewon in 4 minutes 49 seconds, beating the old record by 2 minutes 13 seconds.

“T. Keakona, last year’s title holder, refused to enter theraces, due to the type of board used by Blake.

“The feature event of the morning was the 100-yard openchampionship. Eight men from three of the best surfboard organizations started.Tom Blake, O.C.C.; Sam Kahanamoku, Hui Nalu; and Fred Vasco of the Queen’sSurfers, finished in the order named.

“The race was exciting from the gun. Tom with his powerful,easy, mechanical stroke and perfect balance found Sam a real competitor. Thefinish found Blake just a few inches ahead of the versatile swimmer. The timeof 31 3-5 seconds for this race was better than last year’s 36 1-5 seconds.”[115]

Another Honolulunewspaper article, written by Andrew Mitsukado, also documented Blake’s wins: “EIGHTRECORDS LOWERED IN MEET.  Cigar-shapedBoard Is Big Hit, Tom Blake Is Big Star.” Mitsukado continued: “Eight oldrecords went whirling into oblivion and two new marks were established at thesixth annual Hawaiian championship surf board paddling races, sponsored by theDawkins, Benny Co., yester morn in the Ala Wai before a monstrous crowd whichwas kept on the well-known edge throughout the ten event program.

“The newly devised cigar-shaped surfboards assistedtremendously in creating the new marks.

“Tom Blake of the Outrigger Canoe Club proved to be the bigstar of the meet, winning two individual events – the 100 yards men’s open andthe half-mile open – and paddling anchor on the triumphant Outrigger team inthe three-quarter mile club relay. He used a cigar-shaped board of his owninvention and came through with flying colors.

“All of the races were hard fought and competition was keen,furnishing thrills after thrills for the spectators…”[116]

“The half-mile record of seven minutes and two seconds was cutthat year,” Tom wrote of the 1929 Annual Surfboard Paddling Championship, “tofour minutes and forty-nine seconds and the hundred-yard dash was reduced fromthirty-six and two-fifths seconds to thirty-one and three-fifths seconds. Thismade me the 1930 champion in the senior events and, incidentally, the newrecord holder. But as is true in yacht and other similar racing, I won becauseI had a superior board. This was the first cured or hollowed out [paddle] boardto appear at Waikiki. As the racing rulesallowed unrestricted size and design, I staked my chances on this hollow racerwhose points were proven for now all racing boards are hollow.”[117]

But Blake’s win “was a ‘hollow’ victory,” underscored Tom’sfriend Sam Reid, who also competed in the Championship. Playing on words in asurfing memoir published in a 1955 edition of the Honolulu Star-Bulletin,Reid added that “Blake had hollowed out his 16-foot cigar board to a 60 poundweight, compared with an average 100 to 125 pounds weight of the other 9 boardsin the 100.”[118]

“Oh, yeah!” Santa Monica lifeguard Wally Burton told a little bit aboutwhat was behind the resentment, adding his own take on it. “He was very innovative.Yeah, he had a good, active mind and… when he was over in the Islandsthere, he was winning everything. You know, the Duke was the all-time greatover there, at that time. And he [Tom] went over there and he took everythingaway from the Duke. As a matter of fact, they didn’t like Tom too well over inthe Islands [after his competitive wins],because Duke was the hero.”[119]

“Reverberations of the ‘hollow board’ tiff were heard from oneend of the Ala Wai to the other,” recalled Sam Reid around 1955, “and echoescan still be heard at Waikiki even today – 25 years later. At a meeting of thethree (surfing) clubs, Outrigger, Hui Nalu and Queens, held immediately afterthe disputed races… it was decided that… there would be no limit whatever on(the design) of paddleboards.”[120]It is a sad fact that much resentment over his lightweight designs remainedafter Tom’s Ala Wai wins. Because of the 1929/1930 Ala Wai controversies, Tomonly entered the race one more time, the following year.[121]Impressively, Tom’s half-mile record of 4:49:00 stood until 1955. It was brokenby George Downing, who covered the course in 4:36:00 on a 20-foot hollow balsaboard. Blake’s board had been a 16-foot hollow redwood.[122]Other long-standing records held by Tom include the world’srecord for the 1/2 mile open and 100 yard dash in paddleboard racing. They wereheld for twenty-five years.[123]

When Tom competed in the Ala Wai contest in early 1931, the HonoluluStar-Bulletin published word of his participation, some of the history ofthe race and a little about surfing’s history in Hawai’i: “Announce List ofOfficials to Handle 1931 Surfboard Races,” headlined the article written byFrancois D’Eliscu. “Any Type of Board Can Be Used This Year; Races Will Be Heldat the AlaWai on January 4; New Kind of Board Will Be Introduced.

“The seventh annual surfboard paddling Hawaiian championshipsto be held Sunday morning, January 4, 1931, on the Ala Wai canal, promises tobe the most interesting event ever held for the paddlers of Oahu…All of the titleholders of last year are entered and the ruling permitting anykind of board in the various races means new records…

“Tom Blake, who startled the community with his cigar-shapedhollow board and smashed all existing records, is reported to have another newtype board that is faster and lighter than the one he won with so easily lastyear.”[124]

Under the subheading of “‘Sport of Kings,’” D’Eliscu continued:“Surfboard racing in Hawaii is known as the ‘sportof kings’ on account of its association with the history and tradition ofold-time Hawaiiwhen the chiefs competed on large heavy boards.

“Many of these relics are on exhibition in the museum and it ishere where Tom Blake spent many an hour studying the shape, weights and speedof the boards, which prompted him to build his cigar-shaped board…

“Committees and officials have been selected to conduct themeet. The group in charge of the events are: Honorary chairman, ‘Dad’ Center;sponsors, C.G. Benny and H.L. Reppeto; Gay Harris of the Outrigger Canoe Club;Charles Amalu from Queen Surfers, and David Kahanamoku, representing the HuiNalu swimming club.

“The officials in charge of the meet are as follows: RefereeDuke P. Kahanamoku; clerk of course, David Kahanamoku; starter, G.D. Crozier;timers, Dad Center,A.H. Myhre, R.N. Benny, C.A.Slaght, R.J. Thomas and William Hollinger.

“Judges, Dr. Francois D’Eliscu, T.C. Gibson, Henry Sheldon andV. Ligda; recorder, H.L. Reppeto, and Gay Harris will be in charge of theequipment…

“Cecil Benny, who has been responsible for the continuation ofthe surfboard races and competitions, deserves a great deal of publiccommendation for his interest in keeping the Hawaiian sport alive.”[125]

Blake’s superior designs were not the only factor in hissuccess. He was also a tremendous swimmer, paddler and overall competitor. Twodecades later, his protégé Tommy Zahn paddled the Ala Wai, for practice, withHot Curl surfer Wally Froiseth’s protégé George Downing. At first he thoughthis watch was off because he could not achieve Blake’s times on an evolvedpaddleboard with superior training.[126]

During this period, Tom was coming out with a new board everyyear. He was driven to refine his designs, and by the end of the 1930s, bothhis surfboards and paddleboards were very different from what he had startedout with a decade before. As far as the controversies at Ala Wai wereconcerned, Tom learned that good intentions do not always breed good feelings. Becauseof his competitive wins, he later said that he became a version of “The UglyAmerican.” Specifically, Tom recalled, “I discovered too late that beating thelocals at their own game, in front of their families, could sour relations withmy Hawaiian friends.”[127]

When he had first come to Hawai’i, he was accepted at the beach,welcomed by the Kahanamoku’s and the beach boys, and “treated… like a king.” Evenso, he couldn’t shake the fact that he was an outsider and consequently “… theypaid no attention to you,” recalled Tom. “You roamed around there, nobody knewyou, and it’s a wonderful way to live, when you keep a low profile. Like,nobody’s shootin’ at you, you know? That went on for years, and it’s just like,I got interested in their sports, surfing and paddling, and managed to build alittle better board than they had, and beat them in their contests. And thenthey began to look at you. There’s something we don’t like, and that was theend of the real good days.”[128]

It may have been the end of the “real good days” for Tom in theIslands, but he still had many good Hawaiiandays to come. He would continue his love affair with the Hawaiian Islands – specifically O’ahu – for another 25 years.

Despite the bad feelings surrounding Tom Blake’s wins at theHawaiian Surfboard Championships 1929-31, other surfboard shapers beganexperimenting with the chambered hollow board concept. “Imagination of design,”Sam Reid remembered, “ran riot.”[129]

Duke Kahanamoku gave Tom high credit and respect for hiscontributions. “Blond Tom Blake… was a haole who accepted thechallenge,” related Duke to his biographer Joseph Brennan in their 1968 book Worldof Surfing, “and proved to be one of the finest board men to walk thebeach. Daring and imaginative he always was. He, like myself, was driven withthe urge to experiment.” Addressing Blake’s hollow racing paddleboard, Dukeacknowledged that, “He was the one who first built and introduced thepaddleboard – a big hollow surfing craft that was simple to paddle and pickedup waves easily but was difficult to turn. It had straight rails, a semi-pointedtail, and laminated wood for the deck. For its purpose it was tops.”[130]

Duke’s shaping of a hollow made Tom unabashedly proud. He laterwrote: “Duke Kahanamoku built his great 16-foot hollow redwood board alongabout the same time. He is an excellent craftsman and shapes the lines andbalance of his boards with the eye; he detects its irregularities by touch ofthe hand.

“I feel, however,” Blake added in deference to the Father ofModern Surfing, “that Duke has some appreciation of the old museum boards andfrom his wide experience in surfriding and his constructive turn of mind wouldhave eventually duplicated them, regardless of precedent.”[131]

Duke’s Blake-inspired design, shaped around 1930, was a 16footer, made of koa wood, weighed 114 pounds, and was designed after theancient Hawaiian olo board, as Blake’s had been.[132]“With his rare expertise and outstanding strength,” Joseph Brennan wrote, “Dukehandled it well in booming surfs. He used to defend his giant board and kidfellow surfers with, ‘Don’t sweat the small stuff. Reason? Because it’s smallstuff.’”[133]

After Tom’s win at the Ala Wai, some surfboard and paddleboardbuilders who had not gone hollow began “using alternating strips of laminatedpine or redwood, instead of one or several planks of the same wood,” historiansFinney and Houston noted, obviously influenced by Blake’s direction to lessenthe weight. “These striped boards combined the strength of pine with the lightweight of redwood and were believed to be more functional as well as moreattractive. About this time lightweight balsa boards were… tried, but weredismissed as too light and fragile for practical use.”[134]

The 10 foot redwood plank that Duke and the early Waikikisurfers had ridden since shortly after the beginning of the century had been “invogue until 1924,” Duke recalled, “when Lorrin Thurston, one of Hawaii’s mostenthusiastic surf riders, appeared with a twelve-foot board. To Thurston alsogoes the credit of introducing the balsa wood board in 1926. It was really arevival of the wili wili boards used by the old Hawaiian chiefs except fordesign. The ten to twelve-foot boards were used exclusively until 1929 when Ibuilt [after Tom Blake] a successful sixteen-foot board, which is handled quitethe same as the old Hawaiian boards, and I feel sure will put surf riding onmuch the same scale as it was before the white man came.”[135]

In the progression of the hollow boards’ evolution, Step One (1928)had been the almost accidental use of drilled holes filled in to make tiny airpockets. Step Two (1929) saw the implementation of full hollow chambers. Step Threecame in 1932 with Blake’s use of the transversely braced hollow hull. By usingribs for strength, much as in an airplane wing, Tom brought the weight of thehollow boards down even further. It is not definitively known for sure, but itis probable that Tom’s friendship with aviator Gerard Vultee influenced him inthis further development of the hollow board. At any rate, the result of thisdesign was a strong 40-to-70 pound board, depending on length.[136]

A final refinement to the Blake hollow board would not occuruntil the end of the decade, when the board rails began to be rounded. Initially,Tom’s hollows were built with 90-degree flat-sided rails. Whitewater wouldcatch these and easily knock a board right out from under a rider, sending himor her sideways. With the rounded rail, which was an original component to thetraditional Hawaiian boards, water could move over and under the board withmuch less resistance.[137]

After 1932, the Blake hollow surfboard and paddleboard spreadworldwide – from as far away as Great Britainand Brazil and even Hong Kong. Although it would be years after Blake’s deaththat true dynamic hollow surfboards could outperform against solid woodenboards and even foam and fiberglass boards, it did not take long for the hollowpaddleboard to become an essential rescue device in oceans, rivers, and lakes. Asevidence of this, in the later half of the 1930s, the hollow paddle rescueboard was adopted by the Pacific Coast Lifesaving Corps and used by theAmerican Red Cross National Aquatic Schools for instruction. Today, the rescuepaddleboard can be found on almost any ocean beach protected by lifeguards.[138]As for the hollow surfboard, it is significant to note that today, many of themore advanced epoxy boards are of hollow construction. While using technologyundreamed of by Blake, they are nevertheless take-offs on his original hollowboard concept.

In his late 20s by the mid-1930s, Ron Drummond was born in Los Angeles, raised in Hollywoodand, as a kid, summer vacationed at Hermosa Beach. During summers, in the 1920s, Ron learned tobodysurf and then board surf. He was particularly into canoes and bought hisfirst one around 1921, at the age of 14. On a dare from his brother, he draggedhis canoe out into the surf only to have the canoe broken in two by a goodsized wave. Undaunted, a tall (6-foot, 6-inches) Ron “Canoe” Drummond would goon to become known up and down the Southern Californiacoastline, 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 wasfourteen years old,” Ron told surf historian Gary Lynch in an interview eightyears before his passing at the age of 89. “I remember my brother, Tommy. He’solder; year and a half older than I am. He says, ‘Aw, you’re dumb to try to goout in the ocean in a canoe.’ First time I brought a canoe down… we used tospend our summers at Hermosa Beach,and I brought the canoe down there. The next morning we went down to go out inthe ocean in it, and the waves about six feet high, thick and curling. And Isays, ‘I don’t want to take it out through that.’ And he says, ‘Oh, youchicken!’ So, I couldn’t take that, so we went out… Sure enough, one brokeand right into the canoe. Broke the gunnels in several places, burst the hindend 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 medetermined that I was going to learn to enjoy canoeing on the ocean. So, Ithink I’m the only one in the world, probably, that enjoys a Canadian-typecanoe surfing and doing various stunts out in the ocean. It’s meant a lot in mylife, canoeing. I’ve really enjoyed it. I remember, I said to Tom Blake, ‘Ithink I’ll quit canoeing and take up my surfboard again. I need to practice onsurfing.’ ‘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 attendingUCLA in the mid-1920s, specializing in discus and the shot put. Throughout hislife 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,” Ronrecalled of that era’s most noted Southern Californian surfer. “His fatherowned the bathhouse at Crystal Pier in Santa Monica;Ocean Park, I guess it was… I remember onetime when I was in high school, I was down there body surfing. I was outcatching the biggest ones, I guess they were about six feet high, somethinglike that. All of a sudden I looked way out at sea and I saw this huge bigswell coming. My Gosh! What is this?! I figured it was going to break on me, soI started swimming out so I could get out before it’d break. I was swimming outas fast as I could, and I was just in exactly the right place to catch it. So Isaid, ‘Well, here goes nothing!’ And I rode this one. It was an earthquakewave, and I rode it and I skidded right up on the beach amongst all the beachumbrellas 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 wasabout ten o’clock in the morning… About three o’clock that afternoon anotherone 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. Ithought that was rather interesting.”[4]

“Then, the first – second – date I had with Doris [Ron’s futurewife], it was right after the Long Beach earthquake, about 1930. I had to go down to Terminal Island, where I had been guarding forawhile, to get a surfboard I’d left down there. So, we drove down there. Wedrove all around and looked at all the buildings. The front of the big officebuildings right down in the street, just piles of rubble and that sort ofthing, from this earthquake. Then we went to the Long Beach Plunge for a swimand then we went from the Plunge out to the beach, and I looked out there. Isaw waves coming in that were – crest of the waves were even with the deck ofthe pier! I don’t know, that’s about probably 30-35 feet high, I suppose. I’mnot sure. But anyway, you know, a fellow’s got to show off in front of hisgirl, so I went out there, waited for one of the biggest ones, and came in onit. Went right straight down and then the long chute down this way, and thenall this white water. Finally got out ahead of it so I could breathe, and Irode it and skidded up on the beach and nonchalantly walked up and sat downbeside Doris. About a dozen people came overto 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 alifeguard,” at the Los Angelesbeaches, Drummond recalled. “Let’s see, I guess it was before that. I met thelifeguards down there, I guess, before I was a lifeguard. And one of them had asurfboard, was rather thick… and was belled right up at the end, like that… AndI tried it, and you’d come down on a breaking wave, it would hit and come rightup. It wouldn’t pearl. In other words, that was the first surfboard I everrode, one like that.”[6]

“I’ve always wanted to be an adventurer, you know,” Roncontinued. “My father was an explorer… he’d been all over interior China, thePhilippine Islands and all the out-of-the-way islands, and had skirmishes withheadhunters, 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 hisexpedition – wanted to give him a Christian burial. So, Dad let them go in.They sneaked into the enemy camp – these headhunters’ camp [at night] – andthey had their heads on poles and they were dancing around a big fire; realjubilant that they’d got these heads. So, the bodies were off in the dark… myfather’s carriers got the bodies and my father took a picture of them carryingthese bodies later the next day, stretched up, you know, like they put a deeron a pole: one end on one fellow’s shoulder and one on the other… they wereholding their noses… hot climate… [the dead bodies] were putrid.”[7]

“But anyway, all I was going to say is, I wanted to be anadventurer, too. So, that’s why [when] I was studying mechanical engineering atUCLA… I just figured, well, [mechanical engineering] really doesn’t interestme… So, I heard that Eastern Canadian Mining Company was sending canoeexpeditions out to unexplored areas to get the geology of it, so if they everfound anything that was favorable for the deposition of minerals, why, they’dsend probably 40-50 prospectors in there. So, I saw the manager of this companywhen he came out to Los Angeles.I heard he came out every year on business. He’s a nice fellow. He sort of pattedme on the back. He said, ‘Well, son, we only hire graduate mining engineers andgeologists.’ So, that let me down. Anyway, the next time he came out I went tosee him again. He said, ‘You’re really interested, aren’t you? You’re reallyenthusiastic.’ So I said, ‘Yes, sir!’ So he said, ‘Well, I’ll tell you what youdo. You spend a year studying the subjects that I tell you to, and then we’llgive you a try on one of our expeditions.’ So, I studied mineralogy and geologyand pre-Cambrian shield and blowpipe analysis and all that sort of thing that’dmake me of some use to them, and then I got on with them.

“The result was, my career partner, Jack Barrington, had beenthe first white man on five rivers of northern Canada, and mapped them. We namedthem and our names [along with the names of the rivers]… are on the Canadiangovernment maps now… I named one in Northern Manitoba, BarringtonLake, Barrington River…I found a needle hammered out of native copper, up inland from the northwestcorner of the Hudson Bay, so I named it the Copper Needle River. That’s in bigletters now on the Canadian maps, the Copper Needle River. I felt real proudof that.”[8]

  

In 1931, Ron was the first one to publish a primer onbodysurfing, entitled The Art of WaveRiding.[9]At 26 pages and a print run of 500 copies, the small book is one of the firstbooks ever published about surfing. “One feels sorry for those who have notlearned to enjoy surf swimming,” Ron wrote in his intro. “To spend a day in thesand developing a ‘beautiful tan’ is pleasant; but the real pleasure of a tripto the beach is derived from playing in the breakers.” Elsewhere in the book,Drummond defined “glide waves” and “sand busters” and step-by-step bodysurfinginstructions. Understandably, this booklet has become a prize amongstcollectors.[10]

“I started to tell you why I’m deaf,” Ron kept on track withGary Lynch. “I got hit by lightning and it knocked me about 15 feet flat on myback, 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 rightnext to you, why, it ruined the nerves in my ear, so I’ve never been able tohear 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 wasalready into his 30’s, age-wise, at war’s start. “I was unloading pillboxes andtanks and things like that from a ship, and the boom came up over that ship. Ithad a sealed deck, and then slings came down. I was just reaching for a slingto hook up a pillbox, and my hand was about six inches, I guess, from thesling. If I’d had it six inches farther – if I’d had a hold of that sling – itwould 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 biggerand bigger surf to paddle his canoe into. During and after the war, he joined aselect group of Southern California’s best watermen to ride California’s then-known biggest waves at theTijuana Sloughs.

“Back in the early ‘40s I surfed the Sloughs when it was huge,”Lorrin ‘Whitey’ Harrison told Serge Dedina in1994. “It was all you could do to get out. Really big. We were way the hellout. Canoe Drummond came down.”[12]

“We paddled out and the surf was probably about 20 feet high orso,” Ron remembered. “I looked out about a mile where some tremendously bigwaves were breaking. I asked if anybody wanted to go out there with me, butnobody did. So, I went in my canoe and paddled out there. I set my sights inthe U.S. and in Mexico, andfigured out where I wanted to be. One of the biggest sets came through and Icaught 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 justbarely made it out. If that wave would have collapsed on me, it would havekilled me.”[13]

Ron went into a little more detail with Gary Lynch, probablytalking about the same wave: “Did I ever tell you about the big wave I caughtin a canoe down in the Tijuana Slough? … Boy, that was a whopper. That wasabout forty feet high, I guess. I was right inside the curl. Boy, I thought Iwas never going to make it… That was [another] one of my close calls… I guess.

“Dempsey [Holder] was the chief lifeguard down there…” On theday when Tommy Zahn and Peter Cole came out, after Dempsey had called them toget down to Imperial Beach pronto, Tommy and Peter paddled out, were amazed atthe size of the waves and further amazed to find Drummond already out there… “outthere where the big waves were breaking, ‘cause Dempsey talked to me later andhe said I’m the only one that had ever ridden those big waves. They were about20 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 thatbig outside. None of the fellows would go out there with me. They’re scared ofthem. They can see they are just booming over thick like that… you could run afreight train through the curl.”[14]

Canoe Drummond is generally recognized with having ridden his canoein surf as big as 15-feet. He and his Canadian style canoe were featured in a1967 issue of Surfer magazine. He also appeared in two surf movies: BigWednesday (the Severson flick, 1961) and Pacific Vibrations (1970). Hecontinued to swim, canoe and bodysurf into his mid-80s. In 1990, he appeared ina Nike ad featuring senior surfers that ran nationally within the U.S. He passedon 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

By the mid-1930s, “the surf world remained for the most parttri-cornered – practiced in Australia, Hawaii, and California by less thanthree thousand people total,” wrote surf writer Matt Warshaw in The Historyof Surfing, “— and each region was separated from the others by layers ofcultural and geographic insulation… Over the previous thirty-five years, maybea dozen surfers had circulated between Californiaand Hawaii.Even fewer went from Australiato Hawaii, or vice versa, and surf travelbetween California and Australia didn’t exist.Occasionally a bit of surf news, in a magazine article or newsreel short, wentinternational… Beyond that, not much crossed over from one surf region to thenext.”[1]

Waikiki became the place of pilgrimage for California’s mostinfluential surfers and it would remain so for the next several decades. InSouthern California and Australia,surf clubs – both formal and informal – were focal points of the surfinglifestyle. Driving that lifestyle was the popularity of Tom Blake’s hollowboard internationally, along with the continued spread of stand-up surfingitself.

Often overlooked in most discussions on the spread of surfingduring the first several decades of the Twentieth Century, is the contributionand importance of the body board, what longago Hawaiians used to call the kioe. Even before the 1930s, there werepeople 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 likelybeach-goers who enjoyed the salt water and riding waves flat on their stomachsduring summer vacations. Rather than dismiss these riders, it is important tocredit these body boarders. Much of surf lore, today, assumes that surfing wasbegun by the advent of stand-up surfers in these areas. The photographic proofdocuments quite the opposite. In some areas, body boarders preceeded stand-upsurfers by only a few years; in other places, by as much as one or two decades.

  

Beyond wooden body boards, the development of United StatesEast Coast surfing was spearheaded by Tom Blake’s invention of the hollowboard. By the mid-1930s, his influence stretched from Oahu to SouthernCalifornia clear to Florida– where Blake worked for periods of time and got to know other ocean loversonly to turn them onto surfing his hollow boards. Before the decade was over,Blake’s water craft designs could be found all along the East Coast, New South Wales, New Zealand, Great Britain,South Africa, Brazil and Peru. Eventually, Blake’scontributions hit every corner of the globe.

Of his influence in Florida,Tom recalled: “Floridawas virgin territory as far as I was concerned. Someone had brought a board andleft it behind and I got fooling around on it in 1922. Later on I went back, inthe early 1930s, trying to spread the idea of surfing and rescue boards. Therewere no surfers at all then, for years. The surf was pretty good and I enjoyedriding it. Slowly in the mid-1930s it started catching on. But it didn’t catchon for rescue work for a long time.”[2]

Dudley and Bill Whitman, two of Florida’sfirst known native surfers, began on belly boards at Miami Beach around 1932. Around 1933-34, theWhitmans were exposed to “the famous Tom Blake hollow board,” which was “fairly wellaccepted at that time,” recalled Dudley Whitman. “Of course, eventually itbecame the most popular board in Hawaii…”[3] While touring in Florida in the early 1930s, Tom “came up tosee my brother and me because he understood we were riding Hawaiian surfboards.He became one of our lifelong friends.”[4]

By the 1930s, Mainland USAsurfing was no longer confined to California.Following importation of Hawaiian body boards, Duke Kahanamoku’sdemonstrations of the sport in New Jersey and New York, and Tom’s presence in the state, surfing gotunderway in Florida.The first Floridasurfers hit the waves around 1932. These were Gauldin Reed, Dudley and BillWhitman.[5]“My brother Bill,” recalled Dudley, “who is five years older than me, and Istarted surfing in Miami Beach in about 1932 on belly boards. My brother’squite a craftsman and we made some belly boards that were quite beautiful. JohnSmith and Babe Braithwaite of Virginia Beach came to Miami Beach with the typical, 10-foot redwoodHawaiian surfboard about that time. My brother and I, being belly boarders,were totally amazed. So, my brother built the first Hawaiian surfboard that wasever built in Florida.It was 10 feet long, and made out of sugar pine. A year later, I followed… Iwas only about 13 years old at that time.”[6]In Tom Blake’s book Hawaiian Surfriders 1935, he named a number ofwell-known East Coast surfers who, in the beginning of the 1930s startedsurfing. Prominent among them were Dudley and Bill Whitman. Later, as membersof the Outrigger Canoe Club, the Whitmans went on to patent the underwatercamera, make movies, and pioneer the sport of slalom water-skiing.

Dudley vividly rememberedmeeting Tom Blake for thefirst time: “I was about thirteen years old, something like that. My brotherBill had built an exact copy of a Hawaiian surfboard. A few months later, Iwent to work to build one for myself. We had a very nice shop that happened tobe right on the Atlantic Ocean. I was justfinishing up the surfboard… and, well, it was eleven, eleven and a half feetlong, and it was laminated out of three or four pieces. It was a solid board,and it was like the traditional Hawaiian-type boards. It was carved, you know,using draw knives and all that kind of stuff; and a plane that was close to 36inches long; huge wood plane. The shavings are about knee-deep in the shop, andI’ve got it almost shaped, which is a pretty big job out of solid wood; notlike shaping foam or balsa or anything like that. I looked out the window, andhere goes this chap paddling by on a surfboard like I’d never seen before. Itwas a Tom Blake-patented surfboard and it was Tom himself. He was coming up tolook for us, because he heard that we were surfing and we were the only ones insouth Floridasurfing. And so, from that time on, we had an acquaintanceship, and we becamelifetime friends.”[7]

“We knew Tom from about 1932 or ‘3 for the rest of his life,virtually,” said Dudley. “Last few years Ikind 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, orsomething like that,” Dudley Whitman stated, philosophically. “And, of course,he did age as we all do, but he always kept his youthful appearance. Theamazing thing was that, finishing this particular board off, it was outmodedjust before it was finished! So, very shortly after meeting Tom, my brotherBill built the first hollow board ever in Florida.”[9]

“Well, it’s been documented, I think,” Dudley Whitman said ofthe first surfers in Florida,“in some of the magazines, Surfer Magazine and so forth. The firstpeople that came down here with Hawaiian surfboards were John Smith and BabeBraithwaite from Virginia Beach.They had an actual Hawaiian redwood board. They looked us up because we werefooling around, riding belly boards and things like that. They allowed mybrother and myself to ride their boards, and they, incidentally, becamelifetime friends as well.

“So, my brother Bill built his board, and then I told you aboutmyself building my solid board. So, my brother Bill built the first Hawaiiansurfboard ever built in Florida,and I built the second one – not that that matters. And then my brother Billbuilt the first hollow ‘Blake board’ that had ever been built in Florida. I still havethat one that I built over sixty-some years ago, and that’s kind of aninteresting story, in that it was, of course, mahogany and all of that. It wasrun over by an automobile up in Daytona. Actually, it was patched so good thatwhen I look at it today I can hardly tell that it was patched. I had to haveanother board, of course, and so we built numerous Blake boards. I don’t haveto tell you that the Blake board dominated the scene in Hawaii from about 1935… all through, untilafter 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 hollowboards.”[10]

“Well, of course, Tom was physically fit, a pretty handsomeman, and as a person that knew him, he was a little different than a lot ofsurfers that you know,” Dudley said of TomBlake and his early impressions of him. “Some people might say, or like tothink, that maybe he was a hippie-type or something. No. He was a type ofperson of his own kind. He was always immaculately dressed with excellentclothes, excellent taste, and never far-out… He always, always presentedwell; not a rundown-looking, sloppy bum like you and I know some surfersdegenerated to.”[11]

“Miami Beach,back in those days, was not developed to much of an extent at all,” DudleyWhitman reminisced. “It was just starting its development. We had a home on theocean… [on] Collins Avenue…also known as A1A. When I was a kid and born here, there were crocodiles allover the place. Very, very few people know that, but… we have photographs ofit… 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 theFirestone Estate. Of course, today, there’s a dozen hotels in between where ourhome was. We could hear them [the Firestones], on a Sunday, start up theirPierce Arrow automobile and come down, pick us up, and take us to SundaySchool. Miami Beachwas just getting going, and the publicity department was running picturesnationally of bathing beauties in those ‘gorgeous bathing suits’ they had inthose days; which are pretty much a big laugh to look at… Of course, during mylifetime I saw Miami Beachslowly build to be the premium resort of the world. Then, in time, [it] had abig slide in the sixties and seventies, and looked like it was going nowhere. Butnow it’s had a reverse [it’s getting prosperous again]. So, I’ve seen the citybuilt. But, Miami Beach[when I was young, was a place where]… some of the roads were paved; there werefew hotels and a sprinkling of homes; and virtually everybody knew each other. Todayit’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 probablysurfed more up in Daytona than in Miami Beach, especially when Bill and I went to college. Wewent to the University of Florida,so every weekend – bam! – we were over in Daytona surfing. We introduced thesport there, and I think we started a lot of people surfing. Some of ourfriends 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 havea picture with 25 boards on the beach that we built ourselves. The boards werehollow and weighed about 40 pounds. We built nose and tail blocks and side stripbulkheads every foot and then nailed the plywood down on top of it. Of course,this was providing we could save to buy all the materials.”[14]

“Nobody knew what we were doing,” Dudleyadmitted. “We carried our boards on the cars, these hollow Tom Blake boardsthat were 12 feet long, and people just didn’t understand it. Daytona was thefocal point in Floridafor surfing in 1936. Every time we surfed we had a crowd watch us, but it didn’treally take off until after World War II.”[15]

The hollow boards they built were “rounded… off a little bitmore like the modern boards of today. They were put together with wooden pegsinstead of screws like everybody else had.”[16]The wooden pegs created quite a stir at Waikikiwhen they were first seen. “Well, that’s a pretty good story,” Dudley Whitmandeclared when asked about his connection with the Outrigger Canoe Club and thestory of the wooden pegs. “I don’t know how long we had known Tom; maybe for ayear 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 tointroduce us to the Outrigger Canoe Club. And so, when we went to Hawaii, we saw Duke. Ofcourse, he stood about six foot four at least, and he looks down at us haolewhite boys, and reads the letter and says, ‘Sorry, we don’t have any room atthe Outrigger Canoe Club.’ Well, my brother Bill is a tremendous craftsman andhe’s really great at lofting and stuff of that nature. So, we had built prettynice-looking boards… and we were right there at Waikiki.So, after Duke had shoosed us, why we immediately started to unpack our boardsthat were wrapped up in canvas. After they saw our boards, maybe ten or twentyHawaiian surfers gathered around. By the time we got them unpacked, there musthave been at least a hundred or a hundred and fifty standing around. They tookus to the Outrigger Canoe Club, gave us the racks of honor! I’ve been a memberof the Outrigger Canoe Club ever since.”[17]

“My brother Bill’s probably been to Hawaii almost every summer of his life; atleast certainly every other summer, and I’ve not been that fortunate. I’ve beenover there about once every six-to-ten years; something like that. But, we hada lot of experiences with Tom. Incidentally, I have a beautiful – had abeautiful – little sailboat I had built, and Tom happened to name my boat. Andhe sailed with me on it. It’s called the Kahiki… It means, over thehorizon, or in the distance.”[18]

“This one that I built, that we have in the museum,” DudleyWhitman recalled of the first surfboard he ever built, “The board that I wastelling you about, about 1958 or 1962 I gave it to a doctor friend, or loanedit to him so he could train to go to Hawaii with us. Of course, we were ridingmodern boards like the type you have today; particularly Hobie boards… [Dudley’s original board that he loaned was] run over witha 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 practicingdoctor. He didn’t have a chance to become an expert surfer or anything likethat – 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 ona cart that was over at our yacht club, and was moving it, and a friend of minesaid, ‘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 itback just a couple of years ago. It’s quite an experience to take a board thatyou built when you were 13, and you’re well into your seventies when you rejuvenateit.”[19]

Stand-up surfing and body boarding were not the only watersports the early Floridasurfers got into. “… kind of an interesting story,” Dudley Whitman recalled. “Whenwater 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 triedthem on me, I immediately came home and made a water ski… water skiing wasbrand new [in Florida].People didn’t even know what you were doing. Within a year or so, I had metBruce Parker, who was the U. S. National Champion, and very instrumental inintroducing 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. Ithink I was in college at the time; I’m not sure. Or, I was in high school. Andhe 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 werebuilt in Europe, but the only skis that weremade in this country actually weren’t stable. So, if a person did any singleskiing, 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 neverrode two skis again. So, it took about three, four years to get my friends tochange over. And [one day] Bruce Parker writes me a letter and calls me on thetelephone, both. He says, ‘Dudley, please stopthat single skiing. We don’t need any one-legged skiers.’ Well, that’s slalomskiing as it is today. And one of our group – a younger brother of one of myclose friends, who’s an expert skier – his brother went up to Cypress Gardens when they weredoing their girls on a pyramid and flags. They saw them perform and from thatday on they started their own ski company, and [water] skiing, of course,progressed a lot.” [20]

Dudley’s brother Bill passedon at age 92, in 2007. Obituaries marking his passage also reveal how much he,too, was an influence on Floridian water sports.

In “Surfer, horticulturist William Whitman dies,” David Smileyof the Miami Herald wrote: “A pioneering U.S. East Coast surfer (andhorticulturist) has left us. Dudley Whitman’s brother Bill has passed on at age92.

“The surfboard Bill Whitman built in 1932, the first of itskind in Florida,helped earn him a spot in the East Coast Surfing Hall of Fame. The underwatercamera he invented and patented in 1951 shot footage that ended up in theOscar-winning documentary ‘The Sea Around Us.’ And the 600 truckloads of rich,acidic soil he had dumped in his Bal Harbourbackyard in the 1950s nurtured a world-famous grove of exotic, tropical fruits.Throughout his 92 years, the horticulturist scoured the world for tropicalfruits – 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 millionto Fairchild Tropical Botanic Garden.

“William ‘Bill’ Francis Whitman Jr. died in his home… He wasborn June 30, 1914 in Chicago, but as a boy thefamily moved to an oceanfront home in Miami Beach. In 1932, he and his younger brother DudleyWhitman wanted to surf Hawaiian-style. But there weren’t any surf shops sellingboards anywhere in Florida,let alone the East Coast. So, the brothers made their own, according to theEast Coast Surfing Hall of Fame, of which both are members. The elder Whitmancontinued to surf well into his 80s.

“‘He was probably one of the greatest underwater men that everlived,’ said brother Stanley Whitman. Added brother Dudley: ‘He was more fishthan man.’ An example of the brothers’ 80-plus pound surfboards can be seen intheir private museum at the Whitman-owned Bal HarbourShops.

“On their trips to the Pacific after World War II, the brotherslearned new trades, including spearfishing, which they introduced to the EastCoast and Caribbean, Dudley Whitman said. In1951, Bill Whitman wanted to show friends back in South Florida a glimpse ofthe South Pacific, so he created the first underwater camera and began shootingfilm below the surface, Dudley said. Earlyfilms earned the brothers nominations for Academy Awards. They sold some of thescenes they shot to filmmakers for use in the 1952 documentary ‘The Sea Around Us.’ The film won an Oscar. “We wonthe academy award and we weren’t even in the business,” Dudley Whitman said.

“Despite the accolades, Whitman was possibly best known for hisexpertise and accomplishments in horticulture. He devoted himself to bringingback to South Florida many of the exotic fruitspecies he found in the South Pacific. He found the sand and marl in his ownbackyard unfit to nurture the fragile plant life, so he had 600 truckloads ofrich acidic soil taken from Greynolds Park area and dumped in his Bal Harbourbackyard. He continued to scour the world – from the Amazon to Borneo to theAustralian rain forests – for species he could bring back to United States. His travelingpartner on many of the trips Whitman made late in his life was Steve Brady. Bythat time, Brady said, Whitman could hardly walk and used a wheelchair. Butthat was no deterrent. “If it involved his passions he would go to the ends ofthe earth,” Brady said.

“In 1999, Whitman donated million to Fairchild Tropical Botanic Garden,where the Whitman Pavilion was erected in his honor. In 2003, he added million to endow the tropical fruit program. He also helped found the RareFruit Council in 1955, and served as president until 1960. In 2001, Whitmanauthored the book, ‘Five Decades with Tropical Fruits: A Personal Journey.’ Whitman’saccomplishments earned him an honorary doctorate from the Universityof Florida’s College of Agriculture and LifeSciences in 2004. He earned his bachelor’s in administration from the school in1939…”[21]

David Karp, of the New York Times wrote in “BillWhitman, 92, Is Dead; Scoured the Earth for Rare Fruit,” that “William F.Whitman Jr., a self-taught horticulturist who became renowned for collectingrare tropical fruits from around the world and popularizing them in the UnitedStates, died… at his home in Bal Harbour, Fla. He was 92.

“Mr. Whitman, who had suffered strokes and a heart attack, diedin 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 treeinto bearing fruit outdoors in the continental United States. Native to Southeast Asia, mangosteen is notoriously finicky andcold-sensitive. That did not deter Mr. Whitman, whose garden is propitiouslysituated between Biscayne Bay and the Atlantic Ocean,minimizing the danger of catastrophic freezes. (Mangosteen is the mostprominent of the exotic ‘superfruits’ like goji and noni, which are made intohigh-priced beverages from imported purées.)

“Mr. Whitman managed to cultivate other fastidiously tropicalspecies like rambutan and langsat, and he was recognized as the first in the United Statesto popularize miracle fruit, a berry that tricks the palate into perceiving sourtastes as sweet. In pursuit of rare fruit, ‘Bill was a monomaniac,’ saidStephen S. Brady, his doctor and friend, who traveled with him. ‘He’d hearabout a fruit tree, and pursue it like a pit bull to the ends of the earth.’ RichardJ. Campbell, senior curator of tropical fruit at FairchildTropical Botanic Garden in Coral Gables, Fla.,went on many of these expeditions. ‘When people said, “You can’t grow that in Florida,” he took thatas a challenge,’ Mr. Campbell said.

“William Francis Whitman Jr. was born in 1914 in Chicago, a sonof William Sr. and Leona Whitman. His father owned a printing company in Chicago and added to his fortune by developing real estatein Miami. Billand his brothers helped pioneer surfing in Florida, and he was inducted into the EastCoast Surfing Hall of Fame in 1998. After serving in the Coast Guard duringWorld War II, Mr. Whitman, along with his brother Dudley, built and patented anunderwater camera that provided film for several movies, including ‘The SeaAround Us,’ which won an Academy Award for best documentary in 1952. Mr.Whitman’s devotion to collecting and propagating rare species and varietiesstemmed from a sailing trip to Tahiti, wherehe became enchanted by the fruit. Mr. Whitman was a founder of the Rare FruitCouncil International, based in Miami,and was its first president, from 1955 to 1960. Foremost among the fruit heintroduced to Floridawas Kohala longan…”[22]

Jordan Kahn of the Daytona Beach News-Journal wrote a finehistory 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 BEACHNEWS-JOURNAL, 27 July 2008.

“There is a grainy photograph of surfers posing near the MainStreet Pier [in Daytona Beach,circa 1938] that holds clues to a lost chapter of local history… [In the1930s] Few people in the world had ever seen such a thing as surfing then…Yet there they are, sepia-toned Floridasurfers 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. “Peopledidn’t know what a surfboard was, and for years they didn’t know what we weredoing,” said Dudley Whitman, one of those brothers. The puzzling sight of thesethree brothers from Miami Beachstanding above the waves didn’t go unnoticed long so near the Boardwalk. In the1930s, this was the hub of beach activity. Pep’s Pool and Pat Sheedy’s HandballCourts were there. The ‘Flying Mile’ race was held on the sand, and boxingrings were erected on the beach. Within a few years, a chain reaction ofsurfing discoveries was spreading. James Nelson of Daytona Beach Shores remembers theday some 70 years ago when he was at the handball courts and saw something inthe ocean. “Some of the lifeguards were out there fooling around on theseboards.”  Nelson, now 91, was fascinated.He went to talk to them and found out one of the lifeguards made and soldsurfboards. Soon afterward, the young Stetson University law studentbought an 18-foot red board for … [23]

“None of the men in that 1938 photo was the first person knownto surf Florida,but the details of their boards contain the fingerprints of the man who was. Afin is visible on one board. And a few bear the telltale dots of nails securingplywood to a hollow frame. These are the inventions of Tom Blake, the seminaltrailblazer of surfing as not just sport, but lifestyle and craft. While livingin Hawaii,Blake put the first fin on a surfboard only [four] years before that photo wastaken…

[Hawaiian] “Duke Kahanamoku… wasfamed as much as a surfer as for being an Olympics sensation, setting worldrecords and winning three gold medals in the 1912 and 1920 games. It wasKahanamoku who inspired Blake to take up surfing. When Kahanamoku traveled toswim meets, he saved surfing from disappearing by giving the surf exhibitionsfor which he is now renowned as the ‘Johnny Appleseed’ of modern surfing. Kahanamokutold his biographer that by 1900, western colonization had so completelystamped out native Hawaiian culture that ‘surfing had totally disappearedthroughout the islands except for a few isolated spots… and even there only ahandful of men took boards into the sea.’ It is surfing’s narrow escape throughthis historic bottleneck that gives it a lineage like a family tree. AncientHawaiians are surfing’s roots. Kahanamoku is the trunk. And surfing’s genesisin Daytona Beachis only one branch removed.[24]

“Whitman said lifeguards visiting Miamifrom Virginia Beach,where Kahanamoku had held a surf demo, first showed him and his brothers how tosurf in 1930. Two years after that, the Whitman brothers were at theiroceanfront workshop in Miami Beachwhen 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 lookingfor these Floridasurfers he’d heard about. Blake taught the Whitmans to build his boards thattransformed 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 Universityof Florida in Gainesville. “We worked every minute so wecould leave on the weekend and go to Daytona and surf,’ Whitman said. ‘Weactually surfed at Daytona; probably one of the first times was after the 1934hurricane… We carried our surfboards on a trailer and camped on the beach.’ Blakecould have directly influenced other locals, too. He was a lifeguard in Florida during the early1930s and toured with the Red Cross promoting the use of surfboards to save peoplefrom drowning.

“And among the surfers in that 1938 photo are Paul Hart, alifeguard examiner for the Red Cross, and Donald Gunn and Dick Every, who areboth wearing the wool tank-top uniforms of the day for Daytona Beachlifeguards. Every even remembers a picture of Blake surfing in Daytona Beach at Harvey Street… [25]

“I remember seeing Dudleydriving into town in a fancy convertible with surfboards towed behind it,” saidEvery, now 85. “My brother and I decided to build boards like them.” GauldenReed said in an interview before his death in November [2007] at 89 that peoplestarted making Blake-style boards in Seabreeze and Mainland high school shopclasses. Bill Wohlhuter, the owner of Port Orange Seafood today, said he builthis board from plans he got from Every’s brother, Don. ‘I once mounted a 11/2-horsepower Water Witch outboard on that board,” Wohlhuter said. ‘I steeredthe tiller with my foot!’ Many of these men – including the three Whitmans – arein the photo, preserved by the surfing hall of fame in CocoaBeach, the HalifaxHistorical Museumin Daytona Beach and the Whitman family museumin Miami. Theoccasion is said to be the East Coast or Floridasurfing 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 muchfaster for paddling, slow to get started of course, but probably faster thanyou could paddle a canoe once you got going. And you could catch big waves muchfarther out.’ After hurricanes, to make it past the onrush of whitewater, Reedsaid he used to throw his board off the pier and dive in. ‘During the hurricaneseason, you could catch some pretty good-sized ones, maybe 7- , 8- , 9-footwaves that were breaking out there beyond the pier,’ Nelson said. ‘You’d haveto really walk the board. You’d catch the wave and you’d have to walk aboutfour or five feet to keep the nose down and then walk it back and forth to keepit going.’

“They stuck their hands in the water like oars to prod thosebig boards into turns. ‘To be a cool cat and get the girls,’ Nelson said, ‘youhad to lean over with your hand to steer it.’ The real hot dog move wasshooting the pier, surfing through the pilings from one side to the other. ‘Ialmost lost a kneecap trying to do it,’ Nelson said. [26]

“When some of Daytona Beach’ssurfers made their first pilgrimage to the sport’s birthplace, these Florida upstarts wouldachieve a degree of stature with the world’s most hallowed surfing club. Therelatively advanced boards the Whitmans are holding in that 1938 photo defiedodds in arriving in Waikiki… They werebeautifully crafted; one made with mahogany and brass screws. Blake had giventhe 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. ‘Buthe didn’t really have time for a couple of haole (Hawaiian slang for mainlandoutsiders) boys. So we went ahead and unwrapped our surfboards. People gatheredaround to watch us unpack and when the Hawaiians saw our surfboards, they gaveus surf racks of honor.” The Whitmans were made club members and they surfednext to Kahanamoku. Reed also flew [probably travelled by steamship, as commercialaviation was still in its infancy] to Hawaiiand met Kahanamoku and Blake. And Every met and surfed alongside Kahanamoku atMakaha. 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 wasbecoming part of life in Daytona Beach,World War II and its exodus of young men would all but end it. In the daysleading up to the war, Nelson sold Mainland High Schoolgrad George Doerr ‘a half interest’ in his red wooden surfboard. ‘WhenWorld War II came along,’ Nelson said, ‘(Doerr) went into the Air Force and hewas a fighter pilot and got shot down and was in a German prison camp for acouple of years.’ Reed said the only person he remembers surfing with duringthe war was Brewster Shaw, a famous local beach race driver. And on a coastsuddenly on high alert for German submarines and spies, surfing went from abizarre to a suspicious sight. ‘Brewster and I were in front of the Boardwalkand we came in after dark because the waves were so good, and we were reportedto the police that two men had come in on torpedoes,’ Reed said. They weresurrounded at gunpoint by military police. Reed said another time he was outpast the end of the pier and a patrol boat approached him, machine guns drawn. ‘I’msaying, “No! No! No! Surfboard! Surfboard! Don’t Fire!” Reed said. “Scared mymule!”’

“When Every returned home from the war in ‘45, he said, ‘therewas no surfing at all.’ Tony Sasso, a longtime director of the East CoastSurfing Hall of Fame Museum in Cocoa Beach,said it’s been very hard to come by stories about surfing at that time. ‘Rightaround 1940 the trail goes dead. It doesn’t start back up again until the1950s,’ Sasso said. ‘Everything started from scratch again.’ It is as if thewar erased the heritage of Daytona Beach’s surfing pioneers as cleanly as footprintswashed 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 hateto admit it, being from Cocoa Beach where we call ourselves the East Coastsurfing capitol,’ said Sasso, ‘but the first seeds were planted in the DaytonaBeach area.’[28]

“By 1958, foam and fiberglass surfboards had transformed thesport. Richard Brown of Daytona Beachturned 14 and bought his first surfboard that year. He remembers being one ofthe very first people at Seabreeze High Schoolto 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 werecatching this new wave, it felt as if surfing had just been born. But Richardand 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 whoalmost literally handed down the sport. Dick Every, who had the first foamsurfboard in town, used to lend it to Richard and Dana. And Oscar Clairholmemade a hollow board they used to play on as kids. ‘In fact, we had it out inthe 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 experiencesromanticized by Hollywood’sbeach-blanket movies. As a lifeguard, Dana Brown often hung out on the beach ina palm frond and wood shack in front of the Daytona Plaza Hotel and rentedsurfboards. ‘In the summertime,’ Richard said, ‘my brother Dana used to anchora sailboat out off of Daytona Plaza.We had pretty big boards back then, too, and my brother and his friends wouldeach put a case of beer and a beach bunny on their board and paddle out to thesailboat for an evening of revelry.’

“… Richard remembers one of the best days of surfing he everhad was after a hurricane in 1964. ‘I came home from Gainesville because I knew it was going to begood and I surfed in front of the old Voyager Hotel,” he said. “You couldn’tlose 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.’ Richardeven saw what he called ‘the day the style of surfing changed.’ He was in highschool when two road-tripping surfers from California paddled out. They were allshooting the pier, riding gently rolling outside waves they called ‘humpers.’ Suddenlythe Californians headed in. ‘We figured, “Well hell, they don’t like it. They’releaving,”‘ Richard said. And the next thing we see is their heads from the backof the waves screaming right and left and then they would do a kick out and theboard would come flying back out of the wave. ‘We were just sitting theredumbfounded. We thought you’d be killed if you tried to surf in the shallowwater in big wave shore pound,’ he said. ‘Then we started doing it.’[29]

“Is it possible that boogie boarders were the first wave ridersin Florida? Thereare numerous accounts of belly boarding, as it was called generations ago,predating surfing in the state. Dudley Whitman said in 1930 when the group oflifeguards visiting Miamitaught him to surf, he and his brothers had already been riding belly boards. TheSt. Augustine Record archives contain an article about a man named Guy Wolferiding the waves in 1914. The article says Wolfe rode on his belly on wood plankscovered in painted canvas that had ‘barrel stays’ for a sled-like nose. And oneof Daytona Beach’sfirst surfers, native Gaulden Reed, who was born in 1919, said in his life bothbody surfing and belly boarding had always been among the sights at the beach. ‘Priorto (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 feetwide by putting thin boards together and crossing them with two small boardsand rounding the nose. They were only good for catching a breaking wave and ridingthe foam in.’

“How this more basic wave sport made it to Florida before surfing is unknown… Theidea could have been imported by people who had either visited Hawaii or cities in California and the eastern seaboard that hadbeen exposed to canoe surfing, traditional surfing and body surfing asdemonstrated by Duke Kahanamoku in his travels.[30]

“… [At] the East Coast Surfing Hall of FameMuseum in CocoaBeach and the Halifax Historical Museum in Daytona Beach…Only two of the 16 people are named… Dudley Whitman and Floyd Graves, but thenames are written in a way that indicates who is who. A total of 28 names ofpeople surfing in Daytona Beachduring that time were given during interviews for this story. These are the 16surfers 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 ininterviews: Gaulden Reed, Welling Brewster Shaw, Oscar Clairholme, GeorgeDoerr, Tom Porter, Buster MacFarland, Nelson Rippey, ‘Nudder’ Wilcox, CharlesSpano, Carlisle ‘Boop’ Odum, Earnest Johnson,George Boone and George Jeffcoat.

“Plus there are two surfers from the 1938 photos that remainunidentified. That’s a total of 29 surfers. James Nelson remembers the photo astaking place after the event and after some of the competitors had alreadyleft. And in the photo, only 16 surfers are shown, but Dudley Whitman iswearing a No. 24. Dick Every said there were probably about 10 or 15 moresurfers in the area who didn’t come to the event, giving 1938 Daytona Beach arough estimate of 40 to 45 surfers. ‘There was nobody from New Smyrna surfingand I don’t recall anybody from Cocoaeither,’ Every said. Paul ‘Bitsy’ Hart won the contest that day, which ininterviews was sometimes called the Florida Surfing Championships and sometimesthe East Coast Surfing Championships.

“‘(Hart) was in the same fraternity we were in, in Gainesville,’ DudleyWhitman said. ‘We used to stay with him. His mother had the drug store on Main Street. Hebuilt his own surfboard.’ Earl Blank, who died in 1993, was, among otherthings, a lifeguard and a hobby beekeeper. Bushman and Nelson were law studentsat Stetson Universityin DeLand when the photo was taken. Barnhardt remembers Boone and Jeffcoat werelifeguards in the 1930s. Johnson’s family owned bait-and-tackle stores in the Daytona Beach area. Wilcoxwas a boxer and a lifeguard. Spano was a city champ handball player and a headlifeguard. 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 poolat the Boardwalk near the foot of the Main Streer Pier in the time because theson of the pool’s owners is in the photo, Barney Barnhardt Jr. ‘The kid on thefar left is a boy named Wilbur Flowers,’ Barnhardt said. ‘We were both 12 yearsold then. ‘We weren’t in the contest, but the photographer said, “Hey you’ve gota board. Get in the picture.” Let me tell you an interesting thing about thatpicture. My grandfather lived in Akron, Ohio,and he saw that picture in the Akron Beacon Journal because it went out on TheAssociated Press wire.”[31]

Back in the beginning years of Floridian surfing, just after itgot underway, Tom Blake returned tolifeguard 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 tothe Bahamas with hissurfboard along; quite probably the first surf safari to the Bahamas: “In a seaplane, (Pan American) tripfrom Nassau,the English possession, I carried a full-sized hollow surfboard as baggage withouttrouble 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 helpcame.”[34]Dudley Whitman said they also “surfed the island of Eleuthera,” at somepoint; probably much later.”[35]

Reviews of Tom’s book, published in 1935, reference hispreviously 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 Beachin 1921, was the summer of 1934. Tom tells it like this: “One time in Florida, I had a job atthe surf club. That was the most exclusive beach club at Miami. The rich come down there from all overthe country. I worked for Richard Ricardi… This rich man named Feldman was atthe club one day and he had a big estate up in New York; Long Island… He had some kids. Heused 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’sthe 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 Yorkand instructed the Feldman children. It is likely that he also did somelifeguarding in the area, possibly New York City. He certainly was in touch with the guardsat Jones Beachand 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 “battledfor 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 alongwith 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 fantasticfor me… [My costs] were very little and they paid me 0 dollars a month. Itwas fantastic. I took care of these kids, taught them to swim, had good luckwith them. Good luck for their parents, too, because they were all individualsand they were hard to get along with. We did get along… I came out of it withabout 00 bucks, well fed and everything, and heading for the Islands, again, for some surfing.”[38]

  

Back in California, in summer 1933, at one of the most popularsurf beaches at the time – Long Beach – CityOrdinance No. C-1195 went into effect, restricting surfboard riders to certain areasof the beach. If surfers failed to obey, it was possible that they could befined 0 and put in jail for six months. The June 16^th edition ofthe Press-Telegram gave the lowdown:

“An emergency ordinance, proposed by the Municipal Lifeguards…[has] become City Ordinance No. C-1195. Henceforth, timorous bathers need notdive in terror to the bottom of the sea in hope of avoiding being cut in twainby a speeding Hawaiian surfboard. The surfboard riders either will mind the newP’s and Q’s or will go to jail.

“Certain lanes of the surf will be reserved for bathing, andother lanes will be legal highways for riders of the booming wave. The maximumpenalty for offense is a fine of 0, six months in jail, or both.”[39]

At the beginning of the following summer, the Long Beach Press-Telegram declaredthat “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 ignoresuch surfboards; they ride a ‘comber’ or none at all, and they use either anHawaiian board or none at all.

“There are several approved methods of wave riding. Thesimplest for the beginner is to repose oneself upon a thin five-foot plank andto place oneself, plant and all in the path of a wave. With fair luck the wavethen 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 muchmore spectacular. It requires strength, courage and skill. Furthermore, theparticipant may crack his skull or break his neck, before reaching the safedegree of expertness. The rider paddles seaward on a surfboard nearly twice hisown length and equal to his own weight. Away out in the breaker line heabout-faces and waits for a ‘big one.’ Pretty soon a toppling wall of green seawater approaches. The rider paddles; the wall scoops him up, board and all,almost to the point where board and rider would spill. Precariously he rightsthe board and as it is driven shoreward in front of the breaker’s crest hestands upright, aloof, conqueror of board and breaker. Or else, with aprecipitous and ungraceful leap, he loses balance and disappears in the water.

“Of body surfing, as the lifeguards call it, there are twovarieties. In one, the arms are extended beachward while the rider moves alongin the lather of a wave. This type is juvenile; this type is taboo among thetanned gentry of many beach seasons. They prefer the second and morespectacular way of body surfing.

“This latter way is to clamp the arms against the sides, pushthe 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 becomeexpert at ‘taking the drop’ with a crashing breaker and riding part and parcelwith it until it casts itself upon the sand. Occasionally on the swiftshoreward voyage they take a breath by raising the head, with jaw pugnaciouslyforward; barracuda-fashion.

“The experts in advanced surf riding have a right to strut onthe beach. They have challenged the ocean’s mightiest breakers and have lookedOld Man Neptune squarely in the eye.”[40]

Two years later, in September 1936, the Long Beach Press-Telegram featured asurfer by the name of Steve Skinner who assured the newspaper’s reporter thatthe “Thrilling Sport of Riding Surf” is “Easy to Master.”

“‘Hold the surf board in a horizontal position, the end againstthe middle of your body. Turn a little cornerwise to the breakers, so that youcan see the rolling water over your shoulder. When the wave gets to you make aswing straight for the shore. Lay the board flat on the water and slip bothhands 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 dothe same. Friendly, smiling and burned a mahogany color by the sun, Stevespends his spare time between Silver Spray Pier and Rainbow Pier swimming,riding a surf board, teaching others to ride, chatting with tourists. He is aone-man Chamber of Commerce, teaching enjoyment of water sports and makingfriends 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 hada friend who did. I would ask him how he did it. ‘Just like this,’ he wouldsay, and he would ride in with the wave and I couldn’t see what he did. I askedHenry B. Marshall, the umbrella man, how to ride a surfboard. He showed me theway I now teach others. I went out and rode in. It’s simple when you knowexactly what to do, and riding in the first time is the greatest thrill in yourlife. 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 asurf 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 fearedmight happen finally did, only it was not an injury caused to a bather by asurfer 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 EverRecorded in History of Beach.”

“Mrs. Phyllis Hines, 19, whose riding of breakers here July 5came to an abrupt and painful stop when her own surfboard jabbed her in theabdomen. She died last night from effects of the blow.

“While the autopsy surgeon’s report was awaited todaylifeguards here said that the young woman’s death was the first surfboard fatalityof which they have heard. ‘Sometimes a bather has received an injury from asurfboard, 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 theMunicipal Lifeguards said this morning. ‘Usually the injury is only a bruise ora bump on the head.’ A city ordinance requires surfboard riders to stay awayfrom the surf immediately in front of lifeguard stations, where the boardsmight imperil swimmers.

“Police reports of the accident to Mrs. Hines indicate that awave drove her own surfboard against her while she was in the surf withhundreds of other bathers.”[42]

The following year, the local paper gave a rundown of contestresults from the “Southern Californiasurfboard relay championship”:

“Surfboard riding, ancient sport of South Sea Islanders, gave acrowd of several thousand beach visitors a thrilling show here yesterday in Southern California championship events in the Salute tothe States water circus beside Rainbow Pier.

“More than thirty expert surfers competed in the races. Theyrepresented surfing clubs of several beach cities. Their spectacular rides andfrequent spills proved to be the most popular entertainment on the 4 1/2-hourwater circus program. Five husky swimmers of the Manhattan Beach Surfing Clubwon the Southern California surfboard relaychampionship from the Hermosa Beach Surfing Club. The Venice Paddleboard Clubfinished third. Each member of a competing team raced from the beach to amarker 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 Surfingand Paddleboard Championships on Sunday, November 13, 1938. It was the firstcountrywide paddleboard title event held in the United States. More than 140 of America’sfinest surfers competed for the mammoth silver trophy presented to the winningteam and for the gold trophies presented individual winners.

The main event started with a half-mile paddleboard racethrough the surf. Women as well as men competed. It was broadcast live overradio station KFOX while 20,000 people crowded onto Rainbow and Silver Spraypiers and the beach in front of the Pike to view 140 competitors. Pete Peterson and Mary Ann Hawkins ofthe Del Mar Surfing Club won in the national paddleboard division.

In conjunction with the paddle boarding event, there was also asurfing competition scheduled. However, lack of heavy surf postponed the surfcontest until December 11, 1938. Not wanting to disappoint the crowd who hadcome to see them perform and the radio audience who were listening, the surfersheld a trial open surfing event, with John Olson of Long Beach winning thecompetition, James McGrew of Beverly Hills placing second and Denny Watson ofVenice third.[44]

“Preston Peterson and Miss Mary Ann Hawkins of Del Mar SurfingClub yesterday were crowned national paddle board champions,” reported the Long Beach Press-Telegram, “in the first annualnational surfing and paddle board contest at Long Beach. Competing were 140 members of twelveorganizations.

“Lack of a heavy surf made necessary a postponement ofcompetition in the surf riding events and the highly anticipated initial interclubclash for possession of the Dick Loynes perpetual team trophy until December11.

“Riding the small waves, John Olson of Long Beach won the open surfing event with James McGrew of Beverly Hills second and DennyWatson of Venice third. In the most thrilling event of the day, a five-man teamfrom the Venice Surfriding Club, nosed out the Manhattan Club at the finish ofa relay event entered also by Long Beach and the Surfriders.” [45]

40,000 onlookers watched sixty-five surfers compete in team andindividual competitions on that cold December day in 1938. The Santa Ana Bandled the participants, whose boards ranged in length from eleven to eighteenfeet, to the edge of the surf between Rainbow and Silver Spray Piers where thewater temperature was 52 degrees. Newsreel, magazine and newspaperphotographers were also there taking pictures of the event.

The Press-Telegram reported on the following day:

“Forty thousand onlookers yesterday watched one of the mostthrilling aquatic demonstrations ever staged when nature provided thunderingrollers for the third annual Mid-winter Swim coupled with the National SurfingChampions.

“Postponed from a month ago, the National Surfing Championshipsprovided the greatest action, with sixty-five surf riders participating. TheManhattan Surfing Club won the 44-inch silver perpetual team cup. The VeniceSurfing Club placed second, Santa Monica third,Palos Verdes Surfriders Club fourth, and the Del Mar Club fifth. The open surfingchampionship was won by Arthur Horner of Venice,with Jim Kerwin of Manhattan Beach coming insecond, and Don Campbell also of Manhattan Beach third. Medals were given to Chuck Allen, PalosVerdes, fourth place; Tom Ehlers, Manhattan Beach,fifth place; Kenneth Beck, Venice, sixth; BobReinhard and John Lind of Long Beach who placedseventh and eighth.”[46]

So successful was this first national Surfing and PaddleboardChampionships, a second was held the following year off Rainbow Pier – againduring the winter swell season – on December 3, 1939.

“A three-man team representing the Hermosa Beach Surfing Clubyesterday won the Dick Loynes perpetual trophy emblematic of the nationalsurfing championship in an event in the fog-shrouded waters off Rainbow Pier.

“Booming out of the fog blanket on the crests of curlingbreakers that saturated onlookers, the Hermosa Beachmen nosed out the defending trophy holders of Manhattan Beach by 10 points. Venice SurfingClub was third and Long Beach,fourth. Gene Smith, member of the Hawaiian Surfing Club, which traveled herefrom 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. Hefinished fifth against the heavy odds.

“Individual surfing honors went to Long Beach Surfing Clubmembers John Olsen who finished first, Alvin Bixler, second, and BobRhienhardt, forth. Gene Smith of Hawaii came in third.” [47]

The second was the last. There would never again be anothernational surf contest held in Long Beach for two reasons: war and the breakwater. WorldWar II broke out in Europe and it was not long before the Japanese attacked andthe United Stateswas drawn into the war. The Long Beach breakwater was extendedduring the war when the U.S. Navy came to Terminal Island and made it theirhome. After the war, the surfers who returned from battle would find that therewere no more waves in Long Beachto 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.

  

“There’s a good chance Ralph Noisat caught the first wave in San Diego,” wrote Jeannette De Wyze in a retrospective on San Diego surfers,published in the San Diego Reader in 2006. Noisat’s surfing in the SandDiego area preceded George Freeth’s by several years at least.

De Wyze wrote that “… as he wasn’t a man to brag, hispioneering role might have been lost were it not for his board. He made ithimself when he was a boy, and it was still in the Noisat family home in 1998when Ralph’s daughter, Margie Chamberlain, was preparing to sell the MissionHills residence. Chamberlain realized the heavy wooden board might havehistoric value… her father’s maternal grandfather worked on the construction ofthe Pioneer Sugar Mill in Lahaina, Maui. Herfather’s mother spent at least part of her childhood there, before moving tothe San Francisco Bay Area, marrying, and having [her father] Ralph in 1896.From what her father later told her, Chamberlain got the impression he wasclose to his grandfather; he may have even visited him in Hawaii, where the older man lived for manyyears. ‘My dad knew some of the Hawaiian royal familymembers,’ 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 fathercame to make the seven-foot-long, square-tailed board, ‘He always talked aboutthe wood being koa,’ she says. She has the impression he may have surfed on itin Northern California before 1910, the year he and his mother moved to San Diego. He would haveturned 14 that year. Noisat enrolled as a freshman at San Diego High School and gotinvolved with track and field and student government; he managed the footballteam. He also surfed from 1910 to 1914, he told his daughter years later.” It’snot known where Ralph surfed, “but he wasn’t riding the waves alone. ‘When hewas telling me these stories of his youth, it always sounded like he had thislittle circle of friends,’ his daughter says. Whether his pals borrowed hisboard or fashioned copies is another detail that’s been lost.[49]

“Before he reached his 18th birthday in 1914, Noisat enlistedin the Navy, embarking on a military career that would last 30 years. Chancesare he wasn’t here when one of the most famous surfers in the world arrived. George Freeth, born inOahu in 1883, was the son of an Englishman anda half-Hawaiian woman. A champion swimmer and high diver, Freeth taught himselfthe ancient Hawaiian art of riding waves, a skill that by the end of the 19thCentury had almost disappeared from the islands. By 1907 he was so adept hecaught the eye of writer and travel adventurer Jack London, who later described Freeth’s aquaticprowess in The Cruise of the Snark. Londonwas among those who provided letters of introduction to the young Hawaiian ashe 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 andhas since inspired the claim that Freeth was the first person to surf in California. (This seemsunlikely, according to the staff at the Santa Cruz Surfing Museum.They point to a newspaper article that details how, in 1885, three members ofthe royal Hawaiian family who attended a military school in San Mateo surfed at the mouth of the San Lorenzo River in Santa Cruz.) Freeth’swater skills distinguished him from most Americans of that era. Drownings wereso commonplace they were scaring away tourists from resorts in Veniceand Redondo Beach.To counteract the negative publicity, railroad magnate and Redondo developerHenry Huntington hired Freeth to show off his surfing skills, and the developerof Venicefollowed suit. Freeth’s performances included standing on his head while ridingthe waves. And in the years that followed, he improved water safety offSouthern California, teaching fundamental water-rescue skills to a cadre ofyoung men who later formed the lifeguard services of Los Angeles County, Long Beach, and San Diego. At times Freeth took a more hands-on approachto lifesaving, most notably when he rescued 11 Japanese fishermen during aviolent winter storm in December 1908. Eighteen months later, the United StateCongress saluted his bravery by giving him a Congressional Gold Medal.

“For all the acclaim, Freeth struggled to make a living. He gota break in 1915 when the moneyed and well-connected San Diego Rowing Club askedhim to coach the club’s swim team. Freeth took the job, and it seems likely hewould 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 13men 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. ‘Fourthousand beachgoers received a surprise and enjoyed a succession of thrills andhealthy laughs yesterday at Ocean Beachwhen George Freeth, lifeguard, presented his unannounced surfboard dive,’ thepaper reported. ‘Riding on the crest of the wave in the usual manner, Freethsuddenly 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 amateursurfing historian John Elwell. Elwell says [Duke] Kahanamoku surfed the OBPier, and when he did, he asked a teenaged lifeguard named Charlie Wright if hecould store his board in Wright’s beach shack. Elwell, who interviewed Wright afew years before his death in 1994, says Wright encouraged Kahanamoku to usethe shack but asked if he might try the board. ‘So Charlie surfed the board andalso got the dimensions and later copied it,’ Elwell says. [51]

“Wright, who was something of a showman as well as anentrepreneur, was putting on surfing demonstrations at special events. The California SurfMuseum has one photograph of Wrightsurfing on New Year’s Eve of 1925 next to the Crystal Pier in Pacific Beach; on his shouldershe bears a young woman wielding a torch.

“But by the late 1920s, Wright wasn’t using his board for muchbesides the occasional exhibition. Emil Sigler says he found it near the Mission Beachlifeguard station when he went there the day after his arrival in San Diego in 1928. ‘It wastwo pieces of thick pine, bolted together. And it had an iron tip,’ recallsSigler… He asked whom the board belonged to and then tracked down Wright, whotold him he could use it as much as he wanted. ‘Just put it back where youfound 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’slifeguards were Hawaiian, and Sigler says one day during an outing to the beachthey gave him a couple of rides on their boards. That triggered his interest insurfing. 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 theother boards later on.’ It was so massive, in fact, that a rider couldn’t makeit turn in the water, and the varnish was so worn ‘you had to be careful youdidn’t get any splinters,’ Sigler says. Still, he enjoyed riding the combersoff Queenstown Courtin Mission Beach. Siglersays Wright warned him away from surfing at OceanBeach, claiming that the outflow from Mission Bay,which at that time streamed under a bridge rather than through the presentchannel, could be tricky. ‘You could get knocked out or something, and the tide’lltake 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 itaboard a ten-foot wooden dory and rowed north from Mission Beach. He unloaded Wright’sboard at the beach that’s now known as Tourmaline and caught some impressiverides. He never saw anyone else surf there for years; he thinks he was thefirst.[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 andnot that he couldn’t have become a better surfer, but he and Don Pritchard and Dempsey Holder [twoother early surfers] were never, ever stylists. They went out and tried, butwhen they got up it was like you never thought they were going to last for morethan 20 feet before they fell off or something.’ [54]

“Baker says he and his pal Dorian Paskowitz and a handful ofother teenagers from Point Loma and La Jolla were the first true San Diego surfers, soobsessed with riding the waves, they developed confidence and elegance thoughtheir boards were primitive. At 85, Baker’s a big man who moves with an easygrace… He gave up surfing about 1975, when tennis and skiing had become all-consuming.

“Born in San Diego, Baker andhis family moved around California in hisearly childhood, but in 1934, when Lloyd was 13, they settled into a house at Portsmouth Court inMission Beach. Dorian Paskowitz liveda couple of blocks away. In the years that followed, ‘We went to school everyday together,’ Baker says. ‘We swam in the morning before school. We rantogether. We dated together. We did everything together.’ [55]

“School was Point Loma High, which they reached by riding thestreetcar that ran south on Mission Boulevard and over the bridge to Ocean Beach.(That bridge was later torn down when the Mission Bayjetty was created.) ‘On the other side of the bridge, we’d get off and take abus up to school.’ In their sophomore year they built paddleboards in the highschool woodshop. Paddleboards had been invented in the late 1920s by aWisconsin native named Tom Blake who had found his way to Hawaiiand become fascinated by the ancient Hawaiian boards in Honolulu’sBishop Museum. In an attempt to devisesomething that would work like the old planks (as surfboards were called) butbe lighter, he had come up with a design that was essentially asurfboard-shaped hollow box. Dubbed a cigar box or a kook box, paddleboardsbecame popular with lifeguards for rescue work, but they could also be used toride waves. Baker and Paskowitz copied this design and learned to stand up on theboards 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 orwhatever, why, they started leaking,’ Baker says. When a fellow named Pete Peterson movedfrom Hawaii to San Diego, where he got a job at the Mission Beach Plunge, hebrought with him a couple of square-tailed solid-wood Hawaiian boards, and theboys studied these with interest. About the same time, they learned aboutboards that promised to work better than paddleboards or Hawaiian planks. [57]

In the early-to-mid 1930s, “a Los Angeles-based manufacturer ofprefabricated homes started building surfboards as a sideline. Although thecompany used solid redwood at first, it later began importing lightweight balsafrom South America for use in both thehome-building and surfboard-manufacturing businesses. The balsa ‘was beautifulstuff!’ Baker recalls. ‘They had it all milled, and it was very pretty.’ But asurfer couldn’t simply order a finished board. He had to request that a blockof wood be manufactured to the shape and dimensions he specified. ‘They’d putit together in any configuration you want,’ Baker says. ‘You could actually gothrough 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 couldpick them out so the board balanced. You’d pick out redwood pieces with prettygrains of wood.’ If you wanted a “runner” of redwood glued down the middle ofthe board to stiffen it or along the sides (the rails) or tip (the nose) toprotect the softer wood, you could order that too. You drove up to L.A. to pick up yourorder, then took it home, where with woodworking tools you shaped the simplegeometry into a board that planed over water with power and speed. Or if youhad a friend who was good at shaping, you might press him into service. [58]

“Baker became renowned for his skill at shaping the PacificSystems Homes boards. Today he downplays his ability; he says he wasn’t greatcompared to subsequent generations of shapers. But for a few years in the late1930s, he worked on probably 40 or 50 boards. Baker worked on boards forPaskowitz and for the small gang of OceanBeach and La Jolla boys who had started surfing, as well as others. He did itfor free. ‘We were happy to do the work and pass the board on to somebody thatwould use it.’ Because they were lighter, weighing 45 to 65 pounds, thebalsa/redwood boards were more responsive in the water, and with the additionof a fin (introduced by Tom Blake in 1935), they became more maneuverable. [59]

“Kimball Daun, one of the Ocean Beachboys, doesn’t remember when or where he met Lloyd Baker, but he says it didn’ttake long to realize they were kindred spirits. Born in a house on LarkspurStreet 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, hebecame friends with another kid named Skeeter Malcolm, who lived a few blocksaway on Voltaire and shared his love of the ocean. By the time they were eightor nine, they were bodysurfing on ‘the big beach.’ Somehow they heard that DukeKahanamoku had surfed the Mission Bay channel back in the1920s, and that piqued their interest.

“Their first attempt at following his example involved apaddleboard owned by an older teenager named Bob Sterling. ‘He would take it outon the ocean, usually on calm days, and paddle round on it.’ Sterling was willing to lend his board to theyounger duo. Daun says he and Malcolm took it to an area of Ocean Beachwhere few swimmers were in the water; they didn’t have to worry about othersurf- or paddleboards, because there weren’t any. They took turns pushing eachother into the shore break, and while the nose would sometimes take a dive andthe board come to an abrupt halt, at other times the board surged forward. Thenwhoever was on it would pop up into a crouch, balancing for a couple of secondsbefore tumbling off. [60]

“They couldn’t steer at all, but they had fun on Sterling’s board, Daun says, until the day one of themcaught a good-sized wave and nosed in hard enough to hit the bottom. ‘All of asudden, the board was just sunk, which was unusual.’ When they got it onto thesand, they realized ‘four feet of the plywood bottom of the board had peeledoff and was just hanging under it. We thought, “Oh my God, this is ruined.”‘ Sterling was a hulkingfellow, and they quaked at the thought of his reaction. They loaded thecasualty on a wagon and hauled it to Daun’s house. ‘I said, “Well, we gottaglue 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. Wescraped off the excess and nailed it down with the tar in there. When we gotfinished, you could see the black here and there.’ It seemed to hold, thoughDaun 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. ‘Outaround Coronado Avenue, someone was building a newhouse,’ Daun says. On the building site, they spotted ‘six magnificent redwoodboards that they were using for the window frames. They were about 12 feetlong. No one was around, and in those days no one stole anything.’ Daun andMalcolm hoisted the boards on their shoulders and headed down the hill for thehome of a friend who had a big basement. He refused to harbor their plunder, sothey continued on to Sunset Cliffs Boulevard. ‘The boards would bounce becauseof the distance between us. We were walking along, and a couple of Ocean Beachcops drove around the corner, and oh my God, I thought we were going to dieright there. I said, “Don’t look, don’t look, don’t look!”’ The police sloweddown but didn’t stop the boys, who reached the safety of the garage adjoiningthe café and barbershop on Voltaire operated by Malcolm’s parents. Later, ‘Skeetertold his dad that my father had bought the wood, and I told my dad that hisfather had bought it,’ Daun says. The only problem with this was that ‘when mydad went down to get a haircut, one of us always had to be in the damnbarbershop to keep the talk away from the surfboard.’ [62]

“Somehow that worked. Three-quarters of an inch thick, theboards were far too thin to be made into a solid surfboard, so Daun and Malcolmset about building another box with cross-members. For this they needed screwsand plywood, which cost little – but more than they had. ‘But Skeeter got 20cents a day for lunch money, which was unheard of for me,’ Daun says. ‘I had mymom make three sandwiches for me, and I’d take two and give Skeeter one. Thatway he could save his lunch money.’ They earned a bit more from chores. ‘Wefinally got the board built, and at 11 feet long, it was slow in turning, justlike all big boards. But for a hollow board made at minimal expense, it waseasy to catch waves.’ [63]

“Daun says he and Malcolm (who died in 1993 after a long careeras a teacher, coach, and principal) later graduated to boards fabricated fromthe Pacific Systems Homes balsa/redwood blanks and shaped by Lloyd Baker. Sodid three other Ocean Beach friends of theirs.They all attended Point Loma High. Baker could look out from hismusic-appreciation class and assess the surf conditions. If the day lookedgood, he would sweep through the building, poking his head into the other boys’classrooms and catching their attention. They’d get up and leave. Someonealways had an old Model A or some other vehicle they could pile into. ‘Theteachers didn’t like it,’ Daun acknowledges. ‘But that’s how much we were intosurfing.’ Every minute of their waking lives, they were either doing it orthinking about doing it. [64]

“The weight of the boards limited the choices of where thesefirst hard-core surfers surfed. ‘See, in those days, those boards werenose-heavy,’ explains Bill (“Hadji”) Hein, who by the late 1930s had joined thesmall band of regulars at Mission Beach and at 88 continuesto surf today. Because of the boards’ tendency to ‘pearl’ (or plunge beneaththe water), ‘You had to be selective in where you could go. You had to have awave 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 findthose 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 Californiasurfers as early as the 1920s. According to Emil Sigler, the location’sremoteness encouraged some at the all-male gatherings to swim naked, in a daywhen men wore bathing suits that covered them from neck to knee. By the 1930s,San Onofre was the setting for the Pacific Coast SurfridingChampionships, the first organized surfing contests in the world.These were not cutthroat affairs, according to Jane Schmauss, the director ofthe California SurfMuseum in Oceanside. ‘Those guys didn’t care a featheror a fig about who was the best surfer,’ she says. But they were curious abouteach other’s boards and techniques, and the San Onofre gatherings provided anopportunity to compare notes. ‘We had campfires and luaus,’ Hein recalls. ‘It wasthe Hawaiian Islands spirit.’ San Onofre wastoo far away for everyday surfing. So was Imperial Beach for all but the fewguys 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, ‘ThenDempsey [Holder] would call, and we’d go down.’ It might happen only threetimes a year, Baker says, ‘usually for three to four days. Then there wouldn’tbe 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’ – unpropitiousfor 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 southfrom Ocean Beach or approach from the cliff top orthe Theosophical Society. ‘We used to take our surfboards and just leave ‘em inthe brush [and] carry them down the little trail and surf there day in, dayout,’ 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 rodeWindansea until 1937. One day a young glider pilot named Woody Brown, riding ahomemade hollow board, and a handful of other young men from La Jolla ‘foundgreat 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’sJournal article. He and his buddies then ventured out at Windansea. After that,Ocean and Mission Beach surfers beganjoining 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 surfwas really big, you could actually ride all the way over to Tourmaline.’ As atSunset Cliffs, access to the water off the headland wasn’t easy. ‘You had todrive up La Jolla Boulevard and jump the curb,’Hadji Hein recalls. Japanese-American farmers were growing fruits andvegetables on the bluff, and the surfers would drive through an opening intheir fence and down a mud road leading south to a canyon. They’d park theirjalopies there and walk the rest of the way to the beach. ‘There were beautifuloleander trees all along there,’ Hein says. The surfers would pick theblossoms, bring them home to their girlfriends, and they would make leis. ‘Thatwas the spirit we had in those days. We’d play Hawaiian music and all that sortof thing.’[69]

“One other way at least a few people reached Tourmaline Beachwas via a City of San Diegolifeguard truck. By 1935, Emil Sigler had overcome the handicap of being blindin his right eye (the result of an early childhood accident) to come in secondon the city’s lifeguard-screening exam. He wound up working at the Mission Beachlifeguard station, which had an old Model A. Sigler says he would often riseearly and load up a couple of the local kids like Baker and Paskowitz withtheir boards. He would drive north along the sand, going under Crystal Pier, toTourmaline Beach. The group would surf, then returnin time for Sigler to start his work shift by 9:30 a.m.

“An encounter on that truck resulted in the Ocean Beachboys getting their nickname. As Kimball Daun recalls it, Sigler had driven upto Crystal Pier and stopped to chat with Daun, Malcolm, and a couple of their OB cohorts. Finally Sigler started the engine to drive backto the lifeguard station. ‘Well, Skeeter and I were going to have to walk downto Old Mission Beach,’about a mile south of the pier. ‘So we jumped on the back of the truck. It hadhandles to hold on to. When we did that, the truck bottomed out.’ Emil Siglerchastised 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 pickedup big rocks and started flinging them at us! That was the first time we werecalled the Vandals.’ The name stuck. [70]

“Were the Vandals the first San Diego surf club? They weren’t anorganization. The Mission Beach surfers formed thefirst formal association of local wave riders around 1938, with the support ofa city councilman named Fred Simpson. Lloyd Baker was the first president, andthe group held meetings in a little room on the north end of the bathhouse thatwas located at the Mission Beach seawall, near Queenstown Court. Butthe club ‘dropped into oblivion when the war came along,’ says Hein, who wasone of the first members. ‘Everybody had to go into the service, and it justwent kaput.’[71]

One enduring “invention” that came out of the mid-1930s waswhat we now call the “Aloha Shirt.” As land based attire, it would help definethe beach lifestyle that continues today.

The Aloha Shirt was initially thought up in the early 1930s byChinese merchant Ellery Chun of King-Smith Clothiers and Dry Goods, a store in Waikiki. “Chun began sewing brightly colored shirts fortourists out of old kimono fabrics he had leftover in stock,” describes theWikipedia. “The Honolulu Advertiser newspaper was quick to coin the term Alohashirt to describe Chun’s fashionable creation. Chun trademarked the name. Thefirst advertisement in the Honolulu Advertiser for Chun’s Aloha shirt waspublished on June 28, 1935. Local residents, especiallysurfers, and tourists descended on Chun’s store and bought every shirt he had. Withinyears, major designer labels sprung up all over Hawaii and began manufacturing and sellingAloha shirts en masse.” Retail chains in Hawai‘i and on the U.S. Mainland evenproduced 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 Alohashirt company called Kahala. “We began like nearly everybody else in thebusiness, not with a pair of shoestrings but with one shoestring between thetwo of us,” Norfleet Sr. said. “Red McQueen had brought back from the 1932Olympics in Japansome shirts made out of silk kimono cloth. We copied them to produce our firstaloha shirts. They were absolutely horrible, but Elmer Lee had a stand in frontof 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, surfersand tourists. The first advertisement placed in the Honolulu Advertiser usingthe words “Aloha Shirt” was on June 28, 1935. With the birth of Rayon in themid 1920’s, the dazzlingly colored and tropically decorated Hawaiian-PrintAloha shirt became a staple souvenir of cruise ship tourists. Early shirtlabels bore names like Musa Shiya, Watamulls, Kamehameha, Kahala, Surfriders,Alfred Shaheen, Duke Kahanamoku, etc. The 1940’s and 1950’s furnish us with amemorable 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, motionpicture and television personalities, politicians and sports celebrities thathave been photographed and featured wearing Hawaiian-Print Aloha shirts. HarryS. Truman, our 33rd President loved to wear Aloha Shirts. He was on the coverof Life Magazine in 1951 wearing one. Montgomery Cliff and Frank Sinatra werefeatured in the memorable motion picture From here to Eternity inHawaiian-Print Aloha shirts.[74]

  

Where there’s Aloha Shirts, there are Beach Boys. In trying tocome up with a list of the Waikiki Beach Boys of the 1930s, I have relied on anemail 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 schoolteacher at 20, Emily sailed away to Honoluluat age 22 to the horror of her parents. She settled in with delight, taughtschool, and soon after met and married Waikiki beach boy and later captain ofthe Waikiki lifeguards, John Kauha. After overa decade together, Emily lost John Kauha to cancer in 1939.

“Anyway,” wrote Karen Cotter, “from amongst my aunt’s books Iacquired 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 listof 1930s Waikiki Beach Boys I have seen anywhere – is as follows, in the orderit was written:

·        Pua Kealoha

·        Davd Kahanamoku

·        Louis Kahanamoku

·        Sergent Kahanamoku

·        William Kahanamoku (whom Emily referredelsewhere as ‘Billy’)

·        Sam Kahanamoku

·        John Napahu

·        John D. Kaupiko (who was married to Emily’s bestfriend, 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 anewsy column in the Honolulu Advertiser in the ‘30s and ‘40s called ‘BeachwalkGirl.’ 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 – perhapsonly weekly, but we have a fat scrapbook full of the daily happenings in theneighborhood. My aunt lived on Seaside Avenue and Kuhio so was in the middle of theaction!

“… perhaps the list will be of some use in your ongoingresearch. Thank you, Karen and Emily.”[76]

One of the few surf-related innovations and inventions of the1930s 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 ManlyClub, N.S.W., Australia,circa 1930. Dissatisfaction with his ability to ride a surfboard and thepossible influence of surf canoes led to Crakanthorpe’s development of the surfski.

The original design was 8 foot x 28 inches x 6 inches thickwith 12 inches of tail lift, solid cedar planks and a double bladed paddle andfootstraps.[77]

Other claims to the invention of the surf ski include: BillLangford at Maroubra, pre-World War II; a 1934design recalled by Denis Green of oil impregnated canvas stretched over atimber frame, again at Maroubra;[78]a type of ski used by two brothers at Port Macquarie N.S.W. on their oysterleases, and occasionally in the surf around 1930;[79]and a “first appearance on Newcastle beaches during the twenties, and came toDeewhy about 1932;”[80]as well as 1933, Jack Toyer of Cronulla.

Despite the competing claims, it was Saxon Crackanthrope whowas the one to register and received the patent for the surf ski.[81]

Another form of surf craft invented in Australia in the 1930s was theinflatable “Surf-o-Plane.” It was invented by a Sydney doctor in 1933, Dr Ernest Smithers ofBronte, N.S.W., who worked for eight years to develop it. A prone craft made ofan inflated molded rubber, it was an immediate success. Apart from the ease ofpaddling and wave catching due to the buoyancy, danger to the rider and otherbathers was minimal. For this reason they were accepted in general bodysurfingareas, whereas wooden prone boards were limited to designated boardridingzones. [82]

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…