Milestones in Surf History Part Fifteen (#91 - #97

Milestones in Surf History Part Fifteen (#91 - #97)

by Sam Bleakley

#91 : 1957-59 ‘Gidget’, ‘Cat on a Hot Foam Board’ and ‘On The Road’ : The late ‘50s was a vital time in America. A more relaxed approach to life had emerged. Quality of life and life expectancy increased. Gender and racial inequalities were being questioned and addressed and more bohemian lifestyles tolerated. The arts were enjoying an explosion of innovation. In 1957 Jack Kerouac’s ‘On the Road’ was published in the same year as Frederick Kohner’s Gidget (the little girl with big ideas), relaying the story of his daughter’s (Kathy ‘Gidget’ Kohner) summertime learning to surf in Malibu and meeting local surfers. She falls in love with surfing against the inclinations of her friends and the reservations of the all-male surf crowd. Putman Books sold the film rights for ‘Gidget’ to Colombia Pictures and the first ‘Gidget’ movie (1959) featured Sandra Dee, James Darren and Cliff Robertson. We now see the picture postcard, sensual images of California surfing as a simulacrum of surfing. But the film’s success spawned numerous sequels (the saturated beach movie), with catchy theme tunes, spreading the beauty and appeal of surfing in America beyond California and Hawaii. Malibu’s proximity to Hollywood had helped beach culture to boom. ‘Hang ten’ was the favourite phrase, noseriding the ultimate goal and Malibu was at the heart of it. A surf wear company, Hang Ten, showed two bare feet as its trademark. Automobiles, highways and the development of roof racks meant that inland (‘Valley’) surfers could hit the coast too. But while Sal and Dean were dancing mambo jambo in Mexico in Kerouac’s On the Road, Californian surfers were also making ‘real’ surf films, heading to Mexico, loose and relaxed in open toed sandals in Bruce Browne’s 'Surfing Hollow Days' and 'Barefoot Adventure', performing manoeuvres to maintain balance between speed and stability, cross-step walking to trim the board or adjust speed and riding the nose as a signal of excellence. The new surfing repertoire was modelled by a now maturing Phil Edwards in a pioneering 1959 surf film by Bud Browne - 'Cat on a Hot Foam Board' - a take on Tennessee Williams’ play 'Cat on a Hot Tin Roof'.

#92 : 1958 Marge Calhoun Wins Makaha International and Becomes First Women’s World Champion : Born in Hollywood in 1924, Marge remembers rolling around in the surf at her home beach in Santa Monica from age 3. Her parents couldn’t keep her out of the water and were forced to give her swimming lessons so she wouldn’t drown. She became an expert swimmer and diver, set to compete in the 1940 Olympics in Tokyo, her dream collapsed when the games were cancelled due to World War II. She worked as a stuntwoman, married Tom Calhoun in 1942 and had two daughters, Candy and Robin. Walking along the beach at Topanga with Tom in the ‘50s Marge watched surfers styling across the point. “You can do that,” said Tom. He surprised her with a new, lightweight board made by his friend, Joe Quigg. At Malibu, where a handful of women were ripping on Quigg’s innovative balsas, Marge met Darrylin Zanuck, who taught her the basics. “I didn’t plan my life as a surfer - it just happened,” said Marge. In 1958 she flew to Hawaii with Eve Fletcher, inspired by Bud Browne’s films. “At first I thought, ‘My god, I can’t leave my family, my girls!’” But, that’s exactly what Marge did, her husband holding the fort at home. George Downing introduced Marge and Eve to Makaha. “We were just in search of surf. The Hawaiians were very good to us, especially when they found out we could more than hold our own in the water.” Marge earned a reputation for charging. "I was a big, strong woman, and I was always good in big surf. I always loved a wave that was dramatic.” On the spur of the moment, she decided to enter the Makaha International Contest. “We hadn’t planned on it - we just wanted to see the top Hawaiian women surfers compete.” She won, aged 32. Four years later Marge returned with her teen daughters to compete at Makaha, and placed 2nd. Candy became a top bodysurfer, and was the first woman to ride both the Newport Wedge and Pipeline. Marge was a longtime contest judge and co-founder of the US Surfing Association. Leroy Grannis took this iconic photo of Marge, Candy and Robin walking down the beach at Makaha, which appeared in the 1963 debut issue of Petersen’s Surfing Magazine.

#93 : 1958 Jersey Surfboard Club : In the late 1950s the largest surf community in Europe was in Jersey. In 1957 visiting South Africans Bobby Burden and Cliff Honeysett made some hollow 14 ft plywood boards. The following summer, the owner of the Watersplash (at the centre of the five-mile stretch of sand at St Ouen’s Bay), Harry Swanson, hired them as lifeguards. Charles Harewood recalls. “I was with Peter (Dr Lea) that day. We couldn’t believe what we saw - surfers sweeping in on their boards, standing up all the way to the shallows. Peter ran up the beach to speak to the South Africans when they came out the water and then came sprinting back all excited to tell me about their plywood boards. Later, I tried to make one myself, but it was no good at all. Peter bought one of the huge boards when the South Africans left at the end of the season.” The Durban surfers fired up the locals. With a long established bellyboard culture, the standup surfers founded the Jersey Surfboard Club in 1958, spearheaded by Peter Lea and Charles Harewood. By August 1959 they had more than twenty members and 14 boards. No other place in Europe hosted such a strong and vibrant scene. By 1960 there were 40 members. Local foam and fiberglass board building soon took off. The local crew started travelling to Biarritz every year. In 1963 they hosted Australian legend Peter Troy who was on a series of epic world surfing tours. He was quickly knicknamed ‘The Messiah’ for his surfing skills. A young Gordon Burgis shadowed his moves. Burgis won the Channel Islands Championships in 1963, and represented Jersey at to the first World Surfing Championships in Australia in 1964, helping place British surfing alongside the best in the field. The innovative Jersey Surfboard Club gained top flight sponsorship for the 1964 National and International Championships, attended by 10,000 spectators. Burgis, tuned from travel, took the win. “Travelling for me builds a community’s awareness. It’s possible to become a little stagnant living in any area for a length of time,” said Burgis in a ‘Surf Insight’ interview in 1972. “To escape from this, turn over the mind, absorb different surroundings, surf unfamiliar breaks, tune in on different concepts in board design, and meet other surfers. This all contributes to play an important part in a surfer’s life.” The following year the event tempted Australia-raised Rodney Sumpter. Having just won the US Open junior title at Huntington Beach Californian (against many of the best in the world), Sumpter was the unofficial world junior champion. Sumpter won the vent in ’65 and ’66. Jersey was the first European port of call for many travelling surfers, including Bob Cooper and Keith Paull. Dave Grimshaw and Dave Beaugard helped form the British Surfing Association in 1966, taking the annual event to Newquay in ‘67. When the Championships returned to Jersey in 1968 Gordon Burgis regained the title. The same year, Britain’s six-man team for the World Contest in Puerto Rico had five Jersey surfers. In 1969 Jersey threw its decade of expertise into presenting the first European Surfing Championships, including reigning Miss World, Penny Plummer, from Australia, to present the prizes. In a battle of the titans, Burgis beat Sumpter. Jersey was tops in European surfing.

#94 : 1959 Linda Benson Rides Waimea and Wins at Makaha : Raised in Encinitas, Linda Benson started surfing at age 11: “I remember watching the guys surf from the cliff. I thought it was the greatest thing," she said to Liquid Salt magazine. "It was right before the surfing boom. My soul was just absolutely drawn to it... I remember just touching the boards—it was just an immediate connection. Finally, one guy said ‘Do you wanna try?’ … Back then a lot of people didn’t know about surfing. This was before the Gidget book or the beach party movies or even Surfer magazine. We knew we had something special. We had a vibe, a feeling of such ‘inner stoke’. We just knew.” Linda was inspired by Dewey Weber and Phil Edwards and mentored by master shaper Donald Takayama. She had made her competition debut aged 15 in 1959, winning the West Coast Surfing Championships, and on her first trip to Hawaii the same year she won the Makaha International. Days later she rode Waimea on David Cheney’s 10 ft gun. “I just went and did it. As I paddled out, I saw Fred Van Dyke wipeout. He popped up and then two parts of his board popped up beside him. Another set came in and John Severson rode a wave and then he wiped out. He looked at me as I was paddling out and said ‘You’re crazy.’ When I came back in, I remember just stumbling over myself. I was just so happy I had done it and that I was back on land. It was amazing. I never did it again and I never wanted to!” Linda worked as an air steward for United Airlines for over 35 years, fortunate to be on the Hawaii route. She won multiple competitions, stunt doubled in 'Gidget Goes Hawaiian' (1961), 'Muscle Beach Party' (1964) and 'Beach Blanket Bingo' (1965), directed the Women’s World Longboard Championships, and pioneered a women’s surf school at Moonlight Beach in Encinitas, the very same spot where she caught her first wave. Linda is pictured here at Makaha in 1959 by John Severson.

#95 : 1960 John Severson Founds ‘The Surfer’ Magazine : Californian stylist John Severson earned a BA in art education from Chico State College in 1955 and an MA from Long Beach State College in 1956. He was a pioneering surf filmmaker, producing ‘Surf’ (1958), ‘Surf Safari’ (1959) and ‘Surf Fever’ (1960), with outstanding (and witty) hand-drawn ink posters to promote the showings. They would become collectors favourites. In fact Severson had already created a massive body of art inspired by the Hawaii-California surf culture. To promote ‘Surf Fever’ (and while working as a high school teacher) Severson put together a small magazine, ‘The Surfer’ featuring black-and-white photos, cartoons, one fiction piece (‘Malibu Lizards’ by Harvey Haber), a map of Southern California surf breaks, and a how-to article for beginners. He sold 5,000 copies, funding four editions of ‘Surfer Quarterly’ in 1961. The magazine grew slowly but surely, and Severson could soon hire future surf culture legends, such as cartoonist Rick Griffin and photographers Ron Stoner, Ron Stoner, Jeff Divine and Art Brewer, writers Bill Cleary, Craig Lockwood, Fred Van Dyke, Drew Kampion and Steve Pezman, and designers John Van Hamersveld and Mike Salisbury. Colour pages and a bimonthly publishing schedule were introduced in 1962. The name was shortened to ‘Surfer’ in 1964, and monthly issues were introduced in 1978. Severson was a fantastic big wave rider, and in 1961 he won the Peru International. He also continued to produce surf movies, including ‘Big Wednesday’ (1961), ‘Going My Wave’ (1962), ‘Angry Sea’ (1963), ‘Surf Classics’ (1964) and the unforgettable ‘Pacific Vibrations’ (1970). Severson sold ‘Surfer’ in 1972 and moved with his family to Maui to focus on his artwork, painting and sketching (and surfing) for a steady output of oils, watercolours, drawings, prints (and waves). Pictured here (cover image by Woody Woodworth) is the latest issue of ‘Surfer’, lined up to the horizon as the longest continuous surf magazine.

#96 : 1961 Phil Edwards Rides Pipeline : Back in the late ‘50s and early ‘60s every surfer was deeply inspired by the style, skill, power, creativity, cool and flow of Californian Phil Edwards. In 1953, aged just 15, Phil developed radical cutbacks towards the curl at Dana Point. Articulate and calculated, Phil described the feeling “swimming up the cresting waves and looking into the comb of water hissing along the top…a special kind of mood sets in - a feeling which forms like a knot on the inside of your stomach…In your mind's eye you know how the scene must look from the beach: a small figure scratching up the side of a towering wave, making it to the top and going over the other side, paddling for the next one. And suddenly, an insulated, quiet confidence begins to form inside. You know you can do it. It is as if you were, momentarily, standing outside yourself, watching all this, critically, unemotionally, and feeling, vicariously, the terrible, tensed stoked feeling building up in the surfer.” Word soon spread that Phil was the performance standard to judge by. His reputation was not earned in contests, but word-of-mouth, free surfing and surf films – including Bud Brown's 'Cat on a Hot Foam Board' (1959) and 'Gun Ho!' (1963). Edwards was surfing's first media star, winning the inaugural Surfer Magazine Readers Poll Award in 1963. Hobie Surfboards introduced the Phil Edwards signature model surfboard in 1963, and Hang Ten sportswear produced a Phil Edwards line of beachwear in 1964. Phil loved travelling to Hawaii. In 1961 Bruce Brown captured the first completed ride at Banzai Pipeline in ‘Surfing Hollow Days’. Phil handled the critical drop, speeded ahead of the curl and charged for the shoulder. The name combines the fronting Banzai Beach with ‘Pipeline’ not because of the shape of the wave, but the fact that there was a construction project on an underground pipeline across the Kamehameha Highway at the time, and Mike Diffenderfer (travelling with Phil and Bruce Brown) suggested naming the spot ‘Pipeline’. Phil rode it again the next day with Dave Willingham. Modern-day Pipe continues to deliver, captured here by Grant Ellis.

#97 : Early 1960s Miki 'Da Cat' Dora the Dark Knight : New King of the early 1960s Californian surfers, voted ‘best surfer’ in the Surfer magazine poll, was Phil Edwards. Phil was an unassuming gentle giant, a master of poise not pose, with an uncanny sense of balance, so that a joke emerged about Phil never falling off his board. If Edwards was the Yin of surfing - expansive, welcoming and warm; Malibu’s Miki Dora was the Yang - tart, slightly bitter and irascible. Dora was so light-footed that he was nicknamed ‘Da Cat’ - but you’d better not get on the end of those claws! Da Cat was perhaps the most naturally gifted surfer of his time, but possessed an irascible temper and was famous for getting into scrapes with other surfers in and out of the water, echoing Bob Simmons. (Dora’s stepfather, Gard Chapin, actually taught Bob Simmons to shape). The surfing styles of Dora and Edwards followed their personalities, as did their choice of boards. Dora preferred a heavier board for trim and speed on the walls of Malibu, but also as a weapon to knock others off the wave should the occasion demand this. Edwards’ boards were lighter and more flexible, allowing for more turns and critical positioning. Edwards preferred to surf around anybody who dropped in on him, rather than gun them off the wave or bully them into a wipeout. Early ‘60s surfing was associated with sun-filled days, the Californian love of leisure and health, the wide, open lung of the Pacific breathing life into a post-war generation. But surfers were also outsiders, agitators, who somehow instinctively knew the rules of nature and could openly call themselves a new ‘royalty’ of hipsters, following what was preserved for kings and queens in Polynesia and democratising this. Miki Dora was the head of this dark hipster clan. Who do you relate to? Yin Edwards or Yang Dora? White Knight or Dark Knight? Or a bit of both?