As wealthy American and European globetrotters scanned the world for suitably exotic getaways, their attention naturally gravitated to Hawaii, which was pulsatingly tropical and yet both English-speaking and American-run. Honolulu had by then eclipsed the Big Island to become Hawaii’s political, cultural, and business hub, and it included the veranda-lined beachfront neighborhoods of Waikiki. Gliding into Honolulu harbor after their long voyage through the Pacific, visitors gazed upon a unique vista of sun, sky, water, waves, and jetting seaspray. Diamond Head’s serrated black-lava mass anchored the background. Rainbows from passing thunderstorms arced out of lush inland valleys. Walking quickly from their hotel rooms to the beach upon arrival, newcomers would pull up short at their first look at surfers and canoeists riding in from the middle-distance.
“It was one of those days when the ocean takes on all the colors of the rainbow and smiles up from the coral reef in glowing hues,” a Los Angeles Times travel writer reported on her first afternoon in Waikiki in 1908. “Boys on surfboards, their brown young bodies glistening with sea water, bobbed up and down among the crested waves; merry bathers laughed and called gaily to one another across the water . . . and life seemed a-flutter with enjoyment.”
During the first few years of the new century, tourism’s benefit to surfing—and vice versa—was fast and direct. This “uniquely Hawaiian water sport,” as it was often described, was a calling card like no other. Local governors, plantation owners, and hoteliers immediately recognized that island romance and excitement were uniquely distilled in the act of wave-riding, and surfing imagery was soon printed, stamped, embossed, and etched onto pretty much anything connected with the islands—from postcards and travel brochures to china teacups and hotel wineglasses. The PR campaign worked. Surfing was now on a growth trajectory that, apart from a nearly invisible, short-lived dip or two, remained unbroken into the twenty-first century.
Jack London and the Outrigger Canoe Club
Visitors to Hawaii nearly all became surfing advocates to one degree or another. “Surf Board Riders,” a two-minute reel produced by the Thomas Edison Company in 1906, showed a group of surfers riding at Waikiki; it played in nickelodeons as far east as New Jersey. One year later, Jack London, living high on royalties from his adventure novels like Call of the Wild and White Fang, and every bit Teddy Roosevelt’s equal as a hale celebrity outdoorsman, sailed his home-designed ketch
Snark from San Francisco to Honolulu. Not long after arriving, he sat on a piece of beachfront grass in the shade of the elegant new Beaux Arts–style Moana Hotel and watched “a majestic surf thundering in on the beach to one’s feet.” London then lifted his gaze out to the lineup.
And suddenly, out there where a big smoker lifts sky-ward, rising like a sea-god out of the welter of spume and churning white, on the giddy, toppling, overhanging and downfalling, precarious crest appears the dark head of a man. Swiftly he rises through the rushing white. His black shoulders, his chest, his loins, his limbs—all is abruptly projected on one’s vision. Where but the moment before was only the wide desolation and invincible roar, is now a man, erect, full-statured, not struggling frantically in that wild movement, not buried and crushed and buffeted by those mighty monsters, but standing above them all, calm and superb.
London first took to the surf on a paipo, then switched to a full-length board. After thrashing about ineffectively for most of an afternoon, he at last felt the “ecstatic bliss” of a long ride to the beach. His four-thousand-word essay on his Waikiki surfing experience, written longhand in a single morning’s rush of enthusiasm, brought surfing to the public’s attention like nothing before: it was published on the mainland as “A Royal Sport” in the October 1907 issue of the high-circulation Women’s Home Companion, then reprinted the following year in England’s Pall Mall Magazine, and finally included as a chapter in London’s 1911 travelogue The Cruise of the Snark. Never before had surfing been treated at such length. The godfather of American he-man prose, London really let go in “A Royal Sport,” stamping nearly every paragraph with flexed-bicep adjectives and metaphors—waves are “bull-mouthed monsters” and wipeouts deliver “smashing blows.” London was a pro at the height of his powers, and he also provided an excellent short course on the physics of a breaking wave, along with a primer on how to paddle through the surf zone, manage a wipeout, pick up an incoming swell, and guide a shoreward-bound surfboard.
JACK AND CHARMAIN LONDON, WAIKIKI, 1907.
London, furthermore, helped undermine the belief that surfing required a race-based aptitude. This idea had been around since Westerners first arrived in Hawaii, and was given credence by no less a personage than writer Mark Twain. While visiting Hawaii in 1866, Twain gave surfing a try, failed, and dolefully closed out a short account of the experience by saying that “none but the natives ever master the art of surf-bathing thoroughly.” London himself was a true believer in differences between races and in the superiority of what he called “the Teuton”; he had a special loathing of the Chinese, and famously demanded that white heavyweight boxer Jim Jeffries come out of retirement in 1910 and take back the title from black prizefighter Jack Johnson, saying that the “the White Man must be rescued.” Hawaii seemed to modulate London’s racialist views. He was worshipful in his praise of Waikiki’s local surfers and didn’t give a second thought as to his own fitness for surfing—and by extension, the fitness of his race. “You are a man,” London tells himself, before heading into the surf for the first time, “and what that Kanaka can do, you can do yourself.”
London’s surfing experience, including the idea of racial equality in the lineup, was launched and guided by Alexander Hume Ford, a small pointy-bearded Honolulu gadabout who at times seemed to be single-handedly directing the sport’s revival. The orphaned son of rich South Carolina plantation owners, Ford was a blur of motion in his early adult years, moving from Chicago to New York, traveling extensively in Russia and China as a magazine reporter, then finally sailing into Hawaii in early 1907, about six months before London and his entourage arrived on the Snark. He was thirty-nine and unmarried, with a long résumé but with no real career to speak of. Ford took to the surf right away. To learn the sport, he spent four hours a day in the waves, every day, for three straight months. Deciding that Hawaii was a place worthy of his manic energies, Ford made the rounds in Honolulu, introducing himself to every notable in government, business, and society. He hoped to get ahead by promoting Hawaii to the rest of the world, and he would do that, in part, by promoting surfing. Jack London was his first project.
London and his wife, Charmain, were having dinner on their first evening in Hawaii when Ford darted up to their table, sat down, and launched into a long extemporaneous pitch on the islands in general and surfing in particular. He concluded by telling London that they would go surfing the following day, adding that the adventure would make for a tremendous magazine article. In Ford’s presence, Charmain later wrote, “one had the sense of being speeded up. When he left, we were able to draw the first long breath in two hours.” The two men surfed together, as promised, and London wrote his Women’s Home Companion piece shortly thereafter.
“THE WHITE MAN AND BOY ARE DOING MUCH IN HAWAII TO DEVELOP THE ART OF SURF-RIDING. GAMES AND FEATS NEVER DREAMED OF BY THE NATIVE ARE BEING TRIED.”
—Alexander Hume Ford
Ford’s efforts continued. In 1908 he founded the Outrigger Canoe and Surfboard Club, surfing’s first organization, for the purpose of “developing the great sport of surfing in Hawaii.” At first little more than a surfboard depository and open-air lounge, the men’s-only club was located on a swampy one-and-a-half-acre beachfront plot between the Seaside and Moana Hotels, with a clubhouse built from a discarded grass shack carted over from a nearby zoo. Later upgrades included a wood-frame clubhouse and dance pavilion in 1910. The Outrigger was a sports-based social club, but it had another purpose. Hotel developers were in a land race for the best ocean-facing property, and Ford believed t
hat if he didn’t build the Outrigger as a literal and figurative beachhead, the surfers’ access to breaks along Waikiki might be restricted. The club was a big hit. By the time women were admitted in 1926, membership was over 1,500.
ALEXANDER HUME FORD.
WAIKIKI SURFERS, AROUND 1910.
Race was still an issue in the sport. The Outrigger Canoe Club wasn’t chartered as such, but it was a de facto whites-only organization. Ford’s “Riding the Surf in Hawaii” article appeared in a 1909 midsummer issue of Colliers, and after touching on all his usual selling points—Waikiki’s great waves, the “blinding speed” of a good ride, the healthy muscle development that comes from all that paddling—Ford addresses the sport’s changing demographics: “At the recent surfing carnival . . . practically every prize offered for those most expert in Hawaiian water sports were won by white boys and girls, who have only recently mastered the art that was for so long believed to be possible of acquirement only by the dark-skinned Hawaiian.”
Since Hawaiians usually didn’t bother to enter surfing competitions (or weren’t invited; the record is unclear), Ford’s implication that white surfers had caught or surpassed them is ridiculous. Yes, whites had made their way into the lineup. But not yet in great numbers, and few, if any, were on par with the top Hawaiian riders. Better evidence as to the two groups’ relative place in the surf comes from period photographs, which often feature a Hawaiian riding along with bent-knee nonchalance, while nearby, on the same wave, another local steers an outrigger canoe filled with two or three grinning but inert white passengers.
Still, Ford was encouraging all comers to pick up a board and give the new sport a try, which could only be good for the growth and development of the sport. When Ford and Jack London together named surfing the Sport of Kings, Hawaiians no doubt appreciated the designation. It did nothing to make up for the fact that their culture had been stepped on and dragged around for more than a century. It didn’t keep the locals from rolling their eyes at Ford’s vaporings about “white boys and girls” being “most expert” in the water. But everybody knew that “Sport of Kings” meant Hawaiian kings. Gestures mattered, and this was a nice one.
Class and wealth also played a part in Waikiki’s burgeoning surf scene. The Outrigger Canoe Club had two or three dozen hardcore surfers and canoeists, but its membership roll was filled with hundreds of wealthy surf dilettantes who mostly used the club for weekend brunching. In contrast, when a group of local Hawaiian surfers launched Hui Nalu (“Club of the Waves”) in 1911, membership was small and talent-based. A sheltering hau tree in the middle of a beachfront vacant lot served as the Hui Nalu clubhouse, and the hotel next door allowed members to use its basement as a changing room. Hui Nalu and the Outrigger were located just a hundred yards apart from each other, and a mostly friendly rivalry developed between the two. Yet racial mistrust and class resentment wafted almost visibly across the beach between the hau tree and the Outrigger’s terrace-bordered clubhouse and adjacent dance pavilion.
“The Outrigger was for haoles [whites], and downtown businessmen,” one Hui Nalu member later recalled in a dismissive voice. “We remained under the hau tree, dried ourselves off in the sun, and won the surfing contests. There were no dues with our club. And all the money in the world couldn’t get you in if we didn’t think you belonged.”
But money ruled Waikiki. After World War II, developers bought the property upon which Hui Nalu had been located for more than three decades, cut down the hau tree, graded the lot, and poured the foundation for a new hotel.
HUI NALU CLUB, 1915. FOUNDING MEMBER DUKE KAHANAMOKU IS SEATED IN THE FRONT ROW, FOURTH FROM THE RIGHT.
George Freeth Introduces Surfing to California
Jack London dutifully praised Alexander Hume Ford in “A Royal Sport” as a wave-riding authority, then turned his attention to another, more commanding figure. “Shaking the water from my eyes as I emerged from one wave, and peering ahead to see what the next one looked like,” London wrote, “I saw him tearing in . . . standing upright on his board, carelessly poised, a young god bronzed with sunburn.” This was twenty-three-year-old Waikiki local George Freeth, and he had that effect on people. Ford may have been early surfing’s great organizer, and London its celebrity troubadour—but Freeth was the one who actually got out there among the big smoking combers and rode.
Quiet and well-bred, the part-Hawaiian grandson of a British shipping magnate, Freeth began riding waves in the mid-1890s. By the time he shot past London in 1907, he was known from Hilo to Honolulu as an expert swimmer, a daring practitioner of “high and fancy” platform diving, and the islands’ best surfer. He would later be credited as having reintroduced the lost art of stand-up surfing, but that wasn’t quite the case. The stand-up form never completely disappeared, though most surfers at the time preferred belly-and knee-riding.
Less than two months after Freeth and Ford teamed up and gave London his first surfing lesson, Freeth sailed from Honolulu to San Francisco, with proper letters of introduction and a small stipend from the Hawaiian Promotion Committee. His intention was to introduce surfing to the mainland. No return passage was booked. Freeth was possibly estranged from his family—his parents were divorced, his mother had filed for bankruptcy, and a relative later described the Freeth family as “dysfunctional”—and he seemed to have no real career prospects in Hawaii. He left San Francisco almost immediately, perhaps because the city was still busy digging out from the 1906 earthquake, but more likely because the cool fog-bound local beaches obviously weren’t suited to his needs. From the downtown train station, he headed south to Los Angeles.
Freeth wouldn’t be the first person to surf in North America. More than twenty years earlier, a Kauai chief had sent his three adolescent sons to military school in San Mateo, California. In the summer of 1885, the boys made themselves boards out of local redwood and paddled into the surf at the San Lorenzo rivermouth in Santa Cruz. “The young Hawaiian princes,” reported a local paper, were “giving interesting exhibitions of surfboard swimming as practiced in their native islands, [and] enjoying it hugely.” Three years later, according to a scandal sheet called the National Police Gazette, a bare-shouldered “Sandwich Island Girl” was seen riding her wooden plank for three days running at Asbury Park, New Jersey, “her body swaying to and fro in harmony with the motion of the waters.” (Was this a made-up bit of titillation or an East Coast surfing milestone? Surfing historians haven’t yet answered that question.) Also, just three or four years before Freeth arrived in California, a young college-age scion of the Aloha Lumber Company in Washington State built a few alaia-style boards out of cedar, which he and his friends used during brief, shivering runs through the still-cold summer surf near Joe Creek, on the Olympic Peninsula.
None of these initial mainland surfing experiments took root, however. George Freeth sailed toward California thinking he would be North America’s first wave-rider.
Los Angeles had become an ideal place for the new and offbeat. In terms of surfing basics, it had sunny weather, beautiful beaches, tolerably warm water for most of the year, and consistent waves. Just as important, Los Angeles would try anything; it inhaled people, and exhaled ideas and trends. This was the only place in early-twentieth-century America where surfing might be embraced as something more than a curiosity.
Los Angeles was itself a curiosity. People came to the city to start over or to be part of the next big thing, and everything here seemed to boom. Over a hundred new Los Angeles County towns were mapped and named in the late 1880s. Five million orange trees were planted in the 1890s. There were oil strikes, and derricks sprouted up by the thousands in residential neighborhoods. Sophisticates from New York, Chicago, and San Francisco generally regarded Los Angeles with scorn or raised-eyebrow amusement—“Tip the world on its side,” Frank Lloyd Wright offered, “and everything loose will land in Los Angeles”—and true enough, the city earned its reputation by welcoming roadside freak shows, wigwam hotels, gondola rides,
Arabian-themed bathhouses, and a long roster of visionaries, hedonists, utopians, healers, cranks, and charismatics. None of which stopped people from flooding in. Though Los Angeles’ greatest population booms wouldn’t begin until the 1920s, by the time George Freeth arrived, in the summer of 1907, the population had more than doubled over the past five years, and fully three-quarters of the city’s 275,000 residents were born out of state.
THESE THREE HAWAIIAN PRINCES SURFED IN SANTA CRUZ IN 1885.
NATIONAL POLICE GAZETTE, 1888.
GEORGE FREETH AND REDONDO BEACH PROTÉGÉS, AROUND 1909.
LOS ANGELES WOULD TRY ANYTHING; IT INHALED PEOPLE, AND EXHALED IDEAS AND TRENDS. THIS WAS THE ONLY PLACE IN EARLY-TWENTIETH-CENTURY AMERICA WHERE SURFING MIGHT BE EMBRACED AS SOMETHING MORE THAN A CURIOSITY.
The vast Los Angeles Basin had few internal borders or boundaries, and individual mobility was highly prized. Hundreds of miles of light-rail line radiated out from downtown, most running west and south, with many lines terminating at a series of newly incorporated beach cities. One of these, Redondo Beach, was owned by Henry Huntington, the flamboyantly mustachioed land baron who also ran the Pacific Electric Railway, LA’s dominant light-rail line. The Pacific Electric network—locals called it the Red Car—was created in large part to deliver the middle-class wage earner from LA’s overheated interior to the ocean-cooled beachfront, where he would disembark at places like Huntington’s enormous Hotel Redondo, remove his derby and sack coat, change into a woolen bathing costume, take to Huntington’s gigantic indoor saltwater plunge, shade himself inside Huntington’s 34,000-square-foot Moorish pavilion/ballroom, watch any number of free open-air attractions, and perhaps thoughtfully gaze out across the hundreds of newly surveyed lots to the east—all owned by Huntington, of course, and all for sale.
The History of Surfing Page 5