Milestones in Surf History Part Nine (#49 - #55)

Milestones in Surf History Part Nine (#49 - #55)

by Sam Bleakley

 

#49 : 1931 Tom Blake Patents the Hollow Surfboard : During the 1920s, surfboards weighed between 75 and 150 pounds. Chief Paki’s Hawaiian Olo was considerably heavier than the heaviest Waikiki board of the day, all of which were of solid wood construction. After restoring Chief Paki’s boards for the Bernice Pauahi Bishop Museum, Tom Blake built some replicas. In an article entitled, “Surf-riding – The Royal and Ancient Sport,” published in a 1930 edition of The Pan Pacific, Blake wrote: “I wondered about these boards in the museum, wondered so much that in 1926 I built a duplicate of them as an experiment, my object being to find not a better board, but to find a faster board to use in the annual and popular surfboard paddling races held in Southern California each summer.” Blake took his 16 ft Olo replica and, in his own words, “drilled it full of holes to lighten and dry it out, then plugged them up.” The board weighed 120 pounds. The unveiling of the hollow surfboard in competition was in the paddling race in the first Pacific Coast Surfing Championships at Corona del Mar. Some Californians recalled that day was the first time they had ever seen a surfboard turned. Dragging either foot in the water accomplished this. Paddleboard racing had become as much a passion for Blake as wavering - lighter paddleboards and surfboards his primary design concern. He made a 16 ft chambered-hull paddleboard in 1929 (constructed like an airplane wing), set paddling records, then developed a hollow surfboard far lighter than the average plank popular at the time. Pointed at both ends, a journalist compared it to a cigar-box, and the nickname stuck. The 1931-patented Blake hollow surfboard (used for decades internationally as a lifeguard rescue device) weighed 40 pounds, and opened surfing up to hundreds of people who weren't able to muscle the heavy planks into the water. Blake became one of the first commercial boardbuilders in 1932, with the Ladder Company, the Thomas Rogers Company and the Catalina Equipment Company, introducing a line of Tom Blake Hawaiian Paddleboards.

 

#50 : 1933 San Onofre Surfed for the First Time : Californian Bob Sides was driving through the Rancho Santa Margarita when he spotted waves across the train tracks and down the dirt cliffs from the San Onofre train station. Sides convinced Lorrin ‘Whitey’ Harrison and a few of the crew from Newport Beach's Corona del Mar jetty to make the trip. After a jetty extension shut down the waves at Corona del Mar in 1935, San Onofre became one of California's most popular breaks. Dorian Paskowitz described it as "a meeting place for surfers from San Diego's Tijuana Sloughs to Steamer Lane in Santa Cruz" with weekend campouts filled with "Hawaiian guitar, Tahitian dancing and no small amount of boozing." Santa Monica's Pete Peterson won two of his four Pacific Coast Surf Riding Championships at San Onofre, in 1938 and 1941. The prewar San Onofre surfing scene is featured in Doc Ball's 1946 photo book ‘California Surfriders’, and in ‘Surfing San Onofre to Point Dume: 1936 —1942’, a collection of Don James photos. This San O surf culture picture was taken by Don James in 1938. In ‘Endless Summer’ a 1990 Life magazine feature, Dorian Paskowitz described how, "the cosmic forces of San Onofre made me. In these waves I found a power that took a nice Jewish boy and made him a nobleman." Historically San Onofre was the site of 8,000 year-old Panhe, a California Indian village of the Acjachemen people. Here was the meeting point between Spanish explorers, Catholic missionaries and the Acjachemen Indians, shaping the future of the region. Today in captures a strange fusion of surfing, leisure, military and energy interests. In 1952 San Onofre Surfing Club was formed purely to keep access alive when the Marines took so much of the nearby land in the formation of Camp Pendleton. San Onofre Nuclear Generating Station was built in 1968 and access to all the surf breaks was solidified by the California State Parks system in the early 1970s. The wave is so easy to ride that many learn here and there is a hard core of older locals who simply want a mellow time cruising on the roiling peaks. In the busy, family orientated line-up eight-year-old girls share rides with eighty-year-old grandmothers. Once when I was surfing here a huge explosion went off at Camp Pendleton, and one regular commented: “That’s the sound of freedom for ya!”

 

#51 : 1934 The UK’s First ‘How to Surf’ Book Published : 'The Art of Surf-Riding on the Cornish Coast' was written by Ronald Spencer Funnell. He was born in 1894 in Totnes, Devon. In 1914, Ronald joined the Argyllshire Battalion of the Territorial Force. But less than three months later, he was discharged due to heart problems. His condition inspired him to seek vast quantities of fresh sea air and take up bellyboarding. Ronald declared his profession in 1914 as Commercial Traveller and in 1918 married Phyllis Maud Cock from Newquay. They had four children. In 1934 he wrote and published ‘The Art of Surf-Riding’, an instructional pamphlet that describes the virtues and dangers of bellyboarding, exploring how the activity was taking off in UK (said to have been inspired by Australian soldiers during the First World War). The following year he wrote and published (through his self-owned Cornish Bookshop company) ‘Newquay and Cornwall’, which includes a how-to and where-to surf guide, urging people to buy his previous book ‘The Art of Surf Riding’, with an advert stating that if you buy a 'Crest Surfriding Board’ you’ll get a copy of the book. In 1953, Ronald republished ‘The Art of Surf-Riding’ as ‘The Art of Surf-Riding on the Cornish Coast’ (pictured here) with A. Wheaton and Co. Ltd in a soft cover edition of 36 pages with 9 black and white photographs. Ronald stated that the 'Crest Surfriding Board’ was no longer available but celebrated how he sourced the finest wood from Gabon, West Africa to have his bellyboards made. Ronald Spencer Funnell's spirit lives on in every prone ride and rinse to shoreline, salt-spray rising.

#52 : 1935/41 Mary Ann Hawkins : One of the great champions of early 20th C Californian surfing and paddleboarding was Mary Ann Hawkins from Costa Mesa. Between 1935 and 1941 she won nearly every women's surfing and paddleboarding event she entered, including the Pacific Coast Women's Surfboard Championships from 1938 to 1940. Surf journalist Jeff Duclos described her as "grace personified in the water." Hawkins was an ultra talented swimmer, inspiring her family to move to the coast in 1934 so she could train in the ocean. This "kind of backfired," said Mary Ann, "because I fell so in love with surfing and bodysurfing I never really did my best in swimming from that time on." Mary Ann studied the moves of Tarzan Smith and Whitey Harrison, and inspired a new generation of California surfers and paddlers, including Robin Grigg, Vicki Flaxman, Aggie Bane and Dottie Hawkins Ault. At the 1939 Duke Kahanamoku Swim Meet in Honolulu, Mary Ann broke the Hawaiian record for the 220 meter freestyle and surfed with Duke at Waikiki. She stunt doubled for Hollywood stars Dorothy Lamour, Shirley Jones and Lana Turner, and on ABC-TV's 'You Asked For It', held her breath underwater for two minutes and 15 seconds, setting a world record. She moved to Hawaii in 1956, set up a swim school and by 1973 estimated that she had taught more than 10,000 people how to swim. Mary Ann had two children, but sadly her son Rusty drowned while working in Alaska. Mary Ann died in 1993, of cancer, at age 73, but will remain an icon in women’s surfing worldwide.

#53 : 1935 Surf Wax Applied : Early 20th C surfers often coated their boards with a thin layer of sand-infused varnish – great for traction, but like skateboard grip-tape for your knees, chest, feet, arms and thighs. OUCH! In 1935, teenager Alfred Gallant, from Palos Verdes, decided to rub liquid floor wax on his board. His mum suggested trying paraffin wax instead (used at the time to seal jam jars for storage). The traction was a hit. Paraffin was used by surfers everywhere for more than 25 years. In 1964, Jack's Surfboards in Huntington Beach began selling Surf Wax (repackaged paraffin wax), made in Redondo. Australia's Ampol Petroleum, sponsors of the 1964 World Surfing Championships, did the same. In 1965 Surf Wax came out with a colour-code : blue wax for cold water, red for warm, and purple for hot. In 1967, Mike Doyle and Rusty Miller founded Waxmate, which consisted of paraffin softened by motor oil (making it easier to rub onto the board), bayberry scent, and purple dye. In 1972 John Dahl created the Wax Research company in Encinitas, and began producing an orange-tinged wax. At the same time in Carpinteria, UC Santa Barbara graduate Rick Herzog (also known as ‘Mr. Zog’) founded Sex Wax, pouring his heavily scented product into tuna cans to produce the first round bars of wax. "We like to have a little moment with our board before we go out," Herzog once said, "and waxing our boards gives it to us." By the early '80s, Wax Research and Sex Wax (now competing with many brands, including Australia's Mrs. Palmer's) were each producing over a million bars of wax a year. More than 10 million bars of surf wax were produced worldwide in 2010. Thankfully organic and eco waxes are on the rise, but paraffin is still the main ingredient in most wax brands, with small amounts of beeswax added for pliability, along with Vaseline for lubrication and petrochemical resin for added stickiness. Wax formulas are treated as highly confidential trade secrets, and of course the smell and stickiness are essential.

#54 : 1935 The Year of The Fin : One of the most enduring contributions to board design, the surfboard skeg - or ‘fin’ - caused a quantum shift in riding styles. In 1935 Tom Blake tore a fixed keel off a washed-up speedboat and reattached it onto the bottom of a surfboard. The fin allowed Blake to ride on a tighter angle across the wave. Although not readily adopted by most surfers until a decade later, the skeg of course became an integral part of surfboard design. Blake used his original fin at Waikiki. "When I first went to the Islands, they used wide-tailed boards and they used to spinout on a steep, critical slide. I figured it would be easy to correct that problem, just add something - a keel. Finally, I got around to it. You didn't hurry things up over there. You were having too much fun surfing every day. Finally, I put a fin on the board and it worked fine. It was a shallow fin, about 4" deep and a foot long. It took ten years for that thing to catch on and then the boards kept getting lighter and smaller and (then) the fin became more effective for steering." To add to the accolades, in the early '30s Blake also created a sailboard prototype, as well as a waist-secured surf leash. In fact, in 1943 he even added a twin fin system to a hollow timber board.

#55 : 1935 Tom Blake Pioneers Surf Publishing : A few months after buying a Graflex camera from Duke Kahanamoku in 1929, Tom Blake crafted a first-of-its-kind camera housing for use in the water, and in 1931 one of his water shots from Waikiki was published as a full-page image in the Los Angeles Times. In 1935, National Geographic published ‘Waves and Thrills at Waikiki,’ an eight-page portfolio of Blake's surfing photography. ‘Hawaiian Surfboard’, surfing's first full-length surf book, was published the same year, with sections on history, board construction, competition, and waveriding tips. “My dream was to introduce, or revive, this type of board in Hawaii where surfboard racing and riding is at its best,” wrote Blake. He also wrote a Manual of Surfboard Technique (1935), as well as DIY boardmaking articles for Popular Mechanics (1936) and Popular Science (1939). In Popular Mechanics in 1936 Blake wrote, "At the California beaches there are schoolboys who easily rival the best Hawaiian experts in the thrilling sport of surfboard riding. That is partly because of the superior surfboards they use - light, buoyant and beautifully finished." ‘Better Ways to Build Surfboards’ in Popular Science magazine explained how to build a board with reinforced balsa wood and laminated pine-and-redwood. In 1961 Blake published his second book, ‘Hawaiian Surfriding: The Ancient and Royal Pastime’.