Milestones in Surf History Part Ten (#56 - #62)

Milestones in Surf History Part Ten (#56 - #62)

by Sam Bleakley

#56 : 1935: John ‘Doc’ Ball, Surf Photography Pioneer and Founder of the Palos Verdes Surf Club : Doc Ball began surfing in 1929 while studying at dental school at the University of Southern California. After seeing a Tom Blake surf photo published in the LA Times in 1931, Doc was inspired to start shooting the nascent Southern California surf culture in style. Over the next decade he captured striking black-and-white exposures showing all aspects of early Californian surfing. Doc purchased a Graflex camera in 1937, constructed a pine-box waterproof housing, and began taking photos from the water. His images appeared in many mainstream magazines, including National Geographic, who published ‘Surf-Boarders Capture California,’ an eight-page Doc portfolio in 1944. The Palos Verdes Surfing Club, the second of its kind in California, was formed in 1935 by Doc and Adolph Bayer. Palos Verdes was first ridden in 1929, the home patch of Hoppy Swarts, Bud Morrissey and Tulie Clark. 'The Cove' at Palos Verdes was sometimes called ‘California's Little Waikiki’ for its easy-rollers and Diamond Head style cliffs. Surfers caught abalone and lobster, cooked over open fires, and played ukuleles. Weekly meetings for the Club were held at Doc's apartment/dentist office in south LA, before members hit the Zamboanga Club. Doc served as a Coast Guard dentist during World War II, then suffered PTSD. He published ‘California Surfriders’ in 1946, with 150 photographs, and captions: “These giant storm peaks broke in monstrous wedges,” he wrote about Hermosa Beach, “spilling tons of brine into a grinding, churning 'soup,' (and) an experienced surfer trapped in a series of these behemoths can have a serious time of it.” Unfortunately negatives used for Surfriders, along with hundreds of other prints, were damaged when Doc's house was flooded in 1964. Doc died in 2001 aged 94. He never drank or smoked, and was one of surfing's first health food advocates. He had a powerful influence on the next generation of surf photographers, including Leroy Grannis and Don James. “The quality of his shots was superb,” said Don. “I always wanted to try and get photos as good as Doc's, and I never quite made it.”

 

#57 : 1930s Hawaiian Hot Curls and Rabbit Kekai : While Tom Blake added the first fin to a board in 1936, a group of young Hawaiians were beginning to radically modify tail designs, creating the ‘Hot Curls’, allowing riders to manoeuvre the board more easily, catapulting across the wave face. At Queens Beach, Waikiki, Hawaiian Rabbit Kekai learned to ride closer to the powerful breaking foam pocket (the curl) of the wave, change direction, and move up and down the board to speed up, slow down, and occasionally to ride the nose. Kekai is widely credited as the inventor of noseriding. Surfboard design had taken a quantum leap with the addition of the fin and soon, designers would apply their talents to the fin itself, producing a range of exotic appendages. Handsome Kekai ruled Waikiki as a surfer, beach boy, canoe paddler, prankster and lady's man. He had been mentored by Duke Kahanamoku and many considered him the Hawaiian Ambassador of Aloha after the Duke. "Rabbit is the living link," wrote Longboard magazine in 1998, "to surfing's entire modern history." Kekai earned the nickname ‘Rabbit’ as one the island's fastest runners. According to Kekai, the invention of high-performance surfing - turning up and down the wave face instead of just holding an angle - came about in the mid-'30s, as he and his friends began dodging the rocks at a Waikiki surf break called Publics. Kekai's active wave-riding style would have a big influence on the coming generation of surfers, including Californians Matt Kivlin, Joe Quigg, and Phil Edwards and Hawaii's Conrad Canha and Donald Takayama. "He was light-years ahead of anybody," Kivlin said, recalling the first time he saw Kekai surf in 1947, also noting that the forthcoming ‘Malibu’ style of riding was based on Kekai's high-performance technique.

#58 : 1930s Surfboard Ballet, Bathing Beauty and Manoa Paddleboard Club with Dorothy ‘Dottie’ Hawkins : Santa Monica surfer Dottie Hawkins was a multiple national paddling champion throughout the ‘30s and ‘40s. In a brilliant edition of ‘Surf Stories’ she discusses the effervescent California scene, including night paddling, surfboard ballet, tandem contests with Pete Peterson and champion swimmer and Hollywood movie star Johnny Weismuller (the original Tarzan) https://soundcloud.com/surf-stories/dottie-hawkins-interview-on-surf-stories Born 1929 in Hollywood, Dottie started surfing and paddling aged 9 at Crystal Pier. “My father had asthma, and thought the exercise would do him good.” Dottie soon competed in paddle races (first at Bollona Creek with luminary Mary Ann Hawkins), and before long was unbeatable on her favourite Tom Blake board. “I won all my races on that from the time I was nine years old until I was 15. I also used my Blake board for surfing. I was on that board constantly and loved it. My last two championships were won on a 14 pound canvas racing board. But the Blake board remained my favourite.” Inspired by her daughters passion for paddling and grace in the water, Ed Hawkins (Dottie’s father) founded the Manoa Paddleboard Club in 1939. The original name was a tongue-twister – Hui Maiokioki, meaning ‘colourful club’. Membership quickly became the ‘in thing’. Dottie started the Manoa Surfboard Ballet, choreographing outstanding water ballet routines at the Santa Monica Pier and other sites. Synchronized swimming was known as water ballet at the time, and during the early 1900s clubs blossomed around the world. Dottie was a champion swimmer and when the 1944 film musical ‘Bathing Beauty’ (starring Ester Jane Williams) was scouting for talent, she was offered a role as a star swimmer. “I didn't take the offer because I was training for the Olympics at the Hollywood Athletic Club, and Olympic participation demanded no professional activities in your chosen sporting discipline.” LA born Esther Williams (http://esther-williams.com) helped glamourise swimming and the swimsuit and became a Hollywood pin up through her striking role in ‘Bathing Beauty’. Williams also surfed and represented the powerful LA Athletic Club swim team winning three national championships in both the breaststroke and freestyle. Before her acting career started she was set to compete in the 1940 Summer Olympics, scheduled for Tokyo, Japan, but cancelled due to the outbreak of World War II. War-time set surfing back, but beach culture links with the Hollywood movie industry would prove extremely fruitful for the coming boom of California wave-riding. Here the ever stylish Dottie, second from the right, is pictured with some of the Manoa Surfboard Ballet girls in 1943.

#59 : 1930s Aquatic Star Pete Peterson : The stand-out Californian surfer, paddler and lifeguard of the 1930s (dominating the Pacific Coast Surf Riding Championships as four-time winner in 1932, 1936, 1938, and 1941) was Pete Peterson. His family built and ran the Crystal Beach Bathhouse in Santa Monica. In 1932 he was among the first group of Santa Monica lifeguards, renowned for his rescue skills, paddleboard speed and tandem surfing (riding with Dottie Hawkins in the early days). Peterson invented a galvanized rescue flotation device, resembling a small buoy, which evolved into the modern rubber rescue tube, and he was twice the winner of the Pacific Coast Lifeguard Championships. An LA newspaper described Pete as a "paddleboard and aquatic star," and "the bronzed paddle star of Santa Monica." At 6’ 2” he had a long reach, and consistently set paddling records in all categories. In a 1939 meet he won the 100 (his 30.7-second time beat a nine-year mark set by Sam Kahanamoku, Duke's brother), the 880, the one-mile, and the relay. Arlene, his wife, won the women's sprints. Pete designed and built boards for Pacific System Homes in the late '30s, working mainly with balsa and redwood, and also made beautiful custom boards for $35 (or $45 with a five-coat spar varnish finish). Surf photographer Don James recalled that Peterson "never used any wax on the surface of his board for traction because he felt it violated the pristine look he so admired." Peterson competed in the mid-'60s as a tandem rider with Patti Carey, Sharon Barker, and Barrie Algaw, winning the 1966 World Championships with Barrie at age 53, pictured here by Ron Stoner.

 

#60 : 1936/37 Jimmy Dix and the Tom Blake Board Signed “To the people of Great Britain” : Research by Roger Mansfield for ‘The Surfing Tribe: A History of Surfing in Britain’ revealed that in 1936 a dentist from Nuneaton called Jimmy Dix was getting curious about wave riding, having seen that iconic picture in the 1929 edition of Encyclopedia Britannica. The Warwickshire man spent his summer holidays on the north coast of Cornwall, attracted by the (not-so-exotic) beach appeal that had made Hawaii so famous with American tourists. Like many visitors to Cornwall, Jimmy was then venturing into the sea to plane shoreward on the broken waves, on thin, flat plywood boards. First World War veterans, returning from France with tales from South African soldiers of its practice on Durban’s beaches, had imported bellyboarding to Britain. In his resolve to try Hawaiian-style stand-up surfing, Jimmy penned a letter directly to the Outrigger Club in Waikiki. He requested the dimensions of a board that he might be able to build himself and ride standing up. We can only fantasize how the ‘board meeting’ of this Hawaiian surfing club viewed Dix’s request - another Englishmen wishing to go surfing in the chilly northern Atlantic Ocean, perhaps inspired by the stories of Princes David and Jonah Kuhio Kalanianaole Piikoi and their tutor, John Wrightson, surfing Bridlington in Yorkshire? Jimmy received a reply, which, in 1937 (before international airfreight), had to cross two oceans and one continent - a large box containing a 14 ft, hollow, wooden Tom Blake surfboard (likely built by The Ladder Company in California) weighing 30 kilos, and signed by Tom: 'To the people of Great Britain,' with a hand painted map of the Hawaiian Islands on the deck.

 

#61 : 1938 Jimmy Dix’s Board Inspires Papino ‘Pip’ Staffieri : Having received a Tom Blake ‘cigar box’ from the The Ladder Company in 1937, Jimmy Dix built a smaller replica for his wife and in the summer of 1938 drove to Newquay in his Alvis sports car to experiment with stand-up riding. While we have no proof that Jimmy or his wife stood up on their boards, perhaps it was Mrs Dix who first careened to shore in the image of a Polynesian Princess. Further research by Roger Mansfield for ‘The Surfing Tribe: a History of Surfing in Britain’ reveals that at the same time as Dix’s adventure, another Brit was developing an interest in stand-up surfing, inspired by the same image in Encyclopedia Britannica showing Hawaiians surfing at Waikiki, which he had seen at his local dentist’s surgery. Papino ‘Pip’ Staffieri was born in 1918 into an Italian family who moved to Newquay at the beginning of the century to pursue the ice cream business in the first glimmer of a beach tourist industry. Pip overcame polio at two years of age, but even with a disabled left leg, became a keen long distance swimmer with a strong love of the ocean. By the 1930s, Newquay was developing a reputation as a bathing resort, attracting the wealthy and upper class, like the Dix family, for a healthy escape from the city. In his early teens, curly haired Pip sold ice creams and serviced the bathing machines that stored beachgoers’ clothing. In the evening, he watched the thrilling Pathe newsreels in the Pavilion cinema above Towan Beach, showing epic Australian surfboat races. But Pip dreamed of the surfers off Waikiki. Then, in 1938, when he took his pony and trap to the beach to sell ice cream at the harbour, he was amazed to see two surfboards lying on the sand side by side. He examined them closely. He didn’t meet Jimmy Dix and his wife, but the sight of their surfboards was sufficient to stir him into action. He left the beach with a working design for a board. Working more than 12 hours a day, seven days a week, for half the year, and eight hours for the remainder, it took Pip almost two years to prepare plans, acquire the materials and build the board.

#62 : 1938 Black Sunday, Bondi Beach, Australia : The mood in Bondi was festive in February 1938. Sydney was brimming with visitors and many of them joined the usual weekend crowd of Sydneysiders flocking to Bondi. The weather was clear but a large swell was running. On Saturday, lifesavers on patrol at Bondi had been busy pulling people from the heavy surf, recording 74 rescues in one hour. Despite the heavy seas, beach inspectors decided to open the beach on Sunday, mindful that there would probably be a big crowd. As the tide moved out, more and more people ventured out to a sandbar. Ted Lever, 16 at the time, was a member of the Bondi Amateur Swimming Club. “It was just on three o’clock in the afternoon and all of a sudden a rapid succession of three waves washed in to the shore, wiping away the sandbank and washing people into the water. The first wave knocked a lot of people off the sandbank, the second wave did worse and the third wave committed more trouble.’’ The surf reels, pioneered by Sydney lifesaving clubs, spun into action. The reels fed out a line that could be taken by a ‘beltman’ - a lifesaver wearing a belt with the line attached - to reach people in trouble. One Bondi beltman brought in about 25 people, one after another. As the stricken swimmers were brought to the beach, about 60 were unconscious and many needed to be resuscitated. The club records say 180 were rescued, but news reports at the time put the figure as high as 250. Five people drowned, one, Carl ‘Sweety’ Saur, a German-born chef from East Sydney, died while saving another swimmer. Visiting US doctor Marshall Dyer helped resuscitate swimmers. “I have never seen, nor expect to see again, such a magnificent achievement as that of your lifesavers,’’ he said. “It is the most incredible work of love in the world.’’ Tom Lever concluded: “There were probably many heroes on that day, and I would think that that was the day that surf lifesaving in Bondi came of age. We were given all of those things to deal with, we lost five people, but it was a tremendous day in surf lifesaving history.’’