The History of Surfing

by Warshaw, Matt

  In the summer and fall of 1907, twice each weekend afternoon, at 2 and 4 P.M., visitors were invited to the water’s edge in front of the Hotel Redondo, where a megaphone-wielding announcer introduced George Freeth as “the Hawaiian wonder” who could “walk on water.” Wearing a tight green two-piece woolen bathing suit, Freeth was already positioned beyond the surf line. As the crowd applauded, he’d wheel his heavy 8-foot redwood plank around, paddle for a wave, jump to his feet, glide toward shore, then paddle back out and do it again. Twenty minutes later, for an encore, he would ride in standing on his head. Finally, powerlifting his board into the crook of his shoulder as he exited the surf, Freeth crossed the sand to the Hotel Redondo changing room, acknowledging the whistles and cheers of approval with a quick self-conscious wave of the hand.

  Freeth’s first surf in California was actually a dozen miles north of Redondo, at Venice Beach—a nascent resort community built by cigarette magnate Abbot Kinney, with even bigger and gaudier beachfront attractions. Not long after Freeth arrived in Los Angeles, Huntington put Freeth to work, and he was soon commuting on the Red Car back and forth between the two beach cities, earning a modest income as a lifeguard, swim instructor, and surfing showman. He also gave informal surf lessons, at no charge, mostly to school-age boys. Freeth’s students remembered him as a patient and undemonstrative teacher, who not only taught them how to ride but how to make their own boards. In later years, while visiting other beach cities between Los Angeles and San Diego, Freeth continued to give surf lessons and demonstrations. Afterward, his students often clustered together to form homegrown surf colonies, which in turn grew and divided and spread—eventually creating the foundation for California beach culture.

  Freeth himself remained something of an oddity. He was handsome, but not overwhelmingly so, with black hair, dark skin, and doleful blue eyes. Though naturally trim and wiry, endless swimming and paddling had given him the surfer’s classic V-shaped upper body. Freeth became more famous for his lifeguarding work than his surfing, and during a heavy winter storm in 1908 he jumped off Venice Pier several times to rescue a group of capsized Japanese fisherman—a front-page act of heroism that earned him a Congressional Gold Medal. On a sunny summer day at the beach, men gathered around and waited their turn to earnestly grip Freeth’s hand, while the bolder women patted his bare arms and shoulders. But Freeth apparently had almost no life away from the beaches and pools. He never married. He lived in hotels and boardinghouses, politely turned down invitations to social events, and in 1919, at age thirty-five, died alone in a San Diego hospital, a victim of the Spanish Flu pandemic. None of his family attended the memorial service.

  For decades, Freeth remained a secondary figure in the surf-pioneer pantheon. He left almost no written account, was rarely photographed in the waves (none of the three known photos of Freeth surfing are especially impressive), and had about him a stillness and melancholy that doesn’t fit with the sport’s kinetic, swaggering self-image. Recently, though, his reputation has again risen. Freeth is now recognized not just as the first “name” surfer but as a worthy envoy, along with Duke Kahanamoku, between surfing’s indigenous Polynesian past and its modern future. Also, with dozens of lifesaving credits to his name, Freeth welded surfing and beachfront heroism, and the two would remain linked for nearly fifty years.

  WAIKIKI BEACHBOYS “SPLASH” LYONS (LEFT) AND “TOUGH BILL” KEAWEAMANI (BACK RIGHT) WITH AUSTRALIAN TOURISTS, LATE 1920s.

  The Freeth legacy also includes the surfing truism that a really dedicated wave-rider has to make sacrifices, sometimes big ones, in nearly every other aspect of life—education, career, family, relationships, and until recently, social standing. And last, he was the first commercialized surfer. Freeth himself probably made little or no distinction between riding for pleasure and riding for money, but future generations of surfers would debate the subject endlessly.

  Birth of the Waikiki Beachboys

  While Freeth spread the surfing gospel in California, Waikiki became packed with true believers. By 1910, the huge aquamarine field of surf breaks spread out between Honolulu Harbor and Diamond Head had been mapped and named, starting with the nearshore spots like Queen’s Surf and Canoes, moving on to Cunha Surf, Public Baths, and Papa Nui, and then out to Castle Break, Waikiki’s most distant surfing reef, located a glittering half-mile offshore. The era’s heavy wooden boards required a particular kind of wave, and Waikiki had them in abundance: easy-rolling and not too powerful, gently sloped, with a curl line that was more likely to fringe along the top of the swell rather than loop over and explode into the trough. Currents along Waikiki’s beach were mild or nonexistent. Sharks kept to the other sides of the island. Deep-water channels ran perpendicular to the shore, making it easy to get from the beach to the lineup. With a medium-big swell running, the generous Waikiki surf zone accommodated all skill levels independently and simultaneously, with beginners thrashing about closest to the beach, intermediates grouped among the “first break” reefs, and the experts, three hundred yards further out, talking among themselves during the long lulls between sets.

  After Jack London departed aboard the Snark, surfing’s popularity in Hawaii shot up rapidly, and in 1908, Alexander Hume Ford wrote that “at times there are hundreds in the surf with their boards.” By this time, a landed Hawaii-born haole named George “Dad” Center was doing a nice little side business making custom boards out of prime California redwood on the beach in front of the Outrigger Canoe Club. First-generation surf slang also emerged: just-minted colloquialisms like “logjam” and “sliding ass” were getting tossed around in surfer-to-surfer conversations.

  RIDING WAVES WAS IMPORTANT TO THESE BAREFOOT TROUBADOURS. SO WAS THEIR SEXED-UP, EASY-GOING. EMPTY-POCKET DEVIANCY. BY COMBINING THE TWO, THE WAIKIKI BEACHBOYS LAID A FOUNDATION FOR WHAT WOULD LATER BE CALLED THE SURFING LIFESTYLE.

  Hawaiian surfers formed small clusters beneath the shade trees and elegant verandahs of the Moana Hotel, and later the Royal Hawaiian, both of which faced a beachfront newly augmented with a few hundred tons of sand freighted in from Southern California. These groups of surfers, informally vetted by hotel managers, were mostly in their twenties and thirties, and were collectively known as “beachboys.” Some were associated directly with the hotels, others worked freelance, and all earned money by befriending tourists and serving in whatever capacity was required: island guide, surf instructor, lifeguard, babysitter, serenader, gigolo. It was an informal, tips-only, cash-based business. Arrangements between beachboy and tourist, as frequent Waikiki visitor Cary Grant put it, were often based on “friendship, a handshake, and a bottle of scotch.” None of the beachboys got rich, but a few turned up flush now and then—William “Chick” Daniels, king of the Waikiki beachboys for nearly fifty years, could make $1,000 a week or more, even during the Depression.

  Most of the first beachboys were members of the Hui Nalu club; they figured out right away that there was a bit of money to be earned in taking visitors out in the surf, either riding in a canoe or on a board. By 1916, a sharp-dressed surfer and musician named Edward Kaleleihealani “Dude” Miller had organized a dozen or so beachboys to work out of a beachfront concession stand he ran for the Moana Hotel. Like Miller, most of the beachboys were excellent musicians and singers, and they helped popularize lilting Hawaiian pop songs, which were being exported to the mainland. Impromptu beachfront comedy performances also became part of the act: groups of beachboys would dress up—more often than not in frilly bathing-beauty costumes—and prance through the sand in front of the hotels, mugging and posing. Soon the cheerful, wave-riding, music-making, pidgin-talking beachboy was as much a Waikiki icon as Diamond Head.

  The beachboys walked a fine line between entertainment and indignity. A 1926 Good Housekeeping article on Hawaii, for instance, made dress-up beachboy entertainment sound like a minstrel show revival. “[They] array themselves in outlandish costumes, and indulge in all sorts of pranks and buffoonery, their own childlike enj
oyment in these pastimes as great as the amusement they afford others.” Alcoholism and a high divorce rate were beachboy specialties, as were the inevitable embarrassments that come from a life based in perpetual adolescence. Chick Daniels was known for his special hula—where he’d loosen his belt, hold his arms out, and shimmy around while his pants slowly dropped to the floor—but it’s hard to say just how much “childlike enjoyment” he felt while performing his little trick at Don the Beachcomer’s in his sixties.

  For better and worse, the beachboys of Waikiki established the particular value system that surfing became known for. Style counted for a lot. Beachboys as a rule wore the finest coconut-button silk aloha shirts and the sharpest-creased pants in Waikiki. Money wasn’t very important, except when it could be flaunted; more often than not, a beachboy on the receiving end of a “hundred-dollar handshake” from a grateful departing hotel guest would turn up at the bar that night and blow the better part of his windfall on a round for the house. Beachboys often made no great distinction between work and free time. A circle of uke-strumming beachboys happily playing for themselves in the afternoon would invariably perform the same songs, with the same enthusiasm, for dinner crowd tips later that night.

  Surfing was as important to these barefoot troubadours as their sexed-up, easygoing, empty-pocket deviancy. By combining the two, beachboys laid a foundation for what would later be called the surfing lifestyle.

  Duke Kahanamoku: Surfing Icon

  Despite the vaudevillian nature of the beachboys, Waikiki was often referred to as “Society’s winter paradise.” Early Hawaii Tourist Bureau brochures didn’t just describe the islands’ dancing waters and shimmering rainbows and gleaming coral sands. They also gave assurances that visitors were of the right sort—“Cosmopolites lured from the far reaches of the earth”—and that tennis, golf, tea, and bridge would be included on the vacation schedule, along with outrigger canoe rides and surf-boarding and the rest of the local entertainments.

  By the 1910s, Waikiki had just a handful of tourist hotels, but they were all well-staffed and beautifully appointed. The grandest was the four-hundred-room Arabian-themed Royal Hawaiian, which was conceived in part as an architectural homage to Rudolph Valentino and finished in a coral-pink semigloss. These hotels attracted a steady flow of actors, athletes, monarchs, and industrialists. Douglas Fairbanks was an early visitor and tried his hand at canoe surfing, as did Amelia Earhart and Prince Edward, the future Duke of Windsor. Babe Ruth, fresh off the boat, shirtless, and flaunting an incredible two-tone farmers tan, strolled down from the Royal Hawaiian and chatted easily with the beachboys. Seven-year-old Shirley Temple stood next to Dude Miller and Chick Daniels as she was presented with her own redwood paipo board. The first Hollywood movie crews arrived in Honolulu during the Depression; surfing clips flashed briefly onscreen in Bird of Paradise, with Dolores del Rio, and Bing Crosby’s Waikiki Wedding. In the summer of 1933, a sunny Art Deco surfing illustration was used on the cover The New Yorker.

  Surfing in turn had its own glamour-generating force in Duke Kahanamoku, an Olympic gold medal swimmer who, by the start of World War I, was globally recognized as wave-riding’s grand patriarch. The first of nine siblings, Kahanamoku was born to a working-class pureblood Hawaiian family. He was named after his father, an office clerk for the Honolulu Police Department, who had been named after Alfred, the Duke of Edinburgh. A ninth-grade dropout, Duke spent his days on the beach, surfing, swimming, and canoeing; he sometimes dove off the harbor wharf to grab coins tossed by passengers on incoming steamers, and eventually earned a few dollars a week as a beachboy.

  In 1911, by then a beautifully muscled twenty-one-year-old, Kahanamoku cofounded the Hui Nalu surfing and canoe club. He was easygoing around friends and family, but diffident and largely unreadable to everyone else. “By nature,” one biographer later wrote, “he was as effusive as a cigar-store Indian.” Though known as one of Waikiki’s best surfers, Kahanamoku put most of his energy into swimming; Hui Nalu had in fact been created in part to satisfy a swim competition rule that all entrants be affiliated with an organization.

  DUKE KAHANAMOKU, WAIKIKI.

  That summer, at Hawaii’s first sanctioned Amateur Athletic Union swim meet, held in an ad-hoc “stadium” between two Honolulu Harbor piers, Kahanamoku smashed the AAU 100-yard freestyle record by more than four and a half seconds, and less than an hour later broke the 50-yard record as well. He became America’s favorite for the 1912 Olympics in Stockholm. By the time he arrived in Sweden it was all but preordained that Kahanamoku would win a gold medal and set a world record in the 100-meters—and he did both, easily, pausing at one point in the final heat to look back at the competitors in his wake. Kahanamoku returned to Waikiki an international sports hero. He went on to win more Olympic medals in 1920 and 1924 (World War I forced the cancellation of the 1916 Games); in his early forties, he was turning in sprint times as fast as he’d done at age twenty.

  Kahanamoku’s swimming achievements were towering, but they didn’t define, or even redefine, the sport, which had roots in antiquity and a long, venerable list of champions. Surfing was a different story. In Hawaii, and for a few devotees in California, it may have been the activity of choice. But to the masses—most of whom knew of the sport only through magazine or newspaper articles, newsreels, or perhaps live demonstrations—it remained nothing more than a fringe recreational activity. For many, it wasn’t even clearly a “sport,” since it wasn’t scored, measured, timed, or otherwise quantified.

  Kahanamoku changed this. Through his gracious example, surfing, while still exotic, was made accessible. He didn’t set out with a single-minded notion to make surfing converts, like George Freeth. It’s not even clear that he was the era’s best rider. One eyewitness later recalled that younger brother Sam Kahanamoku was “without a peer in surfing” during the 1920s and early 1930s. But Duke was famous and well-traveled, eager to try new waves, and happy to pass on instruction. He was so much at ease on a board that the ocean itself appeared less dangerous. All that, plus he was tall and broad-shouldered, with high cheekbones, a radiant full-lipped smile, and a brushed-back crown of thick black hair—one admirer fairly described him as “the most magnificent human male God ever put on earth.” Surfing would have caught on without Duke Kahanamoku. But not as quickly, and not with the same opening bolt of style and élan.

  Kahanamoku began surfing at age eight, just before the turn of the century, and he may have been informally mentored by George Freeth, who was seven years older and had been surfing at least a year or two longer. In 1911, eight months before his spectacular AAU performance at Honolulu Harbor, he “authored” a lengthy first-person Mid-Pacific Magazine feature titled “Riding the Surfboard” (the article was in fact ghosted by Mid-Pacific publisher Alexander Hume Ford). Kahanamoku was introduced to readers as the “recognized native Hawaiian champion surf rider,” and the article’s opening photograph showed him riding casually for shore with a boy perched on his shoulders.

  Kahanamoku rose to fame almost in double vision—the esoteric wave-rider and the champion swimmer. After the 1912 Olympics, during his roundabout return passage from Stockholm, he began the ambassadorial work for which he is best known. First, Kahanamoku spent a few weeks giving swimming demonstrations in Western Europe—thousands of excited Parisians made their way past the 17th arrondissement to watch him thrash up the Seine River. Then Kahanamoku returned to the U.S. mainland, where he continued the swimming performances and also gave a surfing exhibition in Atlantic City. It’s unclear where Kahanamoku got a surfboard, but he opened with a bang, tossing his board off the end of the famous Steel Pier, diving in after it, then surfing in alongside the pilings.

  California surfing pioneer Sam Reid, then a seven-year-old onlooker, was standing on the Atlantic City boardwalk when Kahanamoku finished his first ride, and he broke into wild applause along with the rest of the crowd. “The next day,” Reid said decades later, voicing what must have been a fairly common
response to a Kahanamoku surfing performance, “I almost got a whipping when I brought home the family ironing board, wet and dripping after my first experience at catching waves. Boy against the sea! I used the ironing board for the next four years.”

  Kahanamoku also bodysurfed in New York, at Rockaway Beach, and Sea Gate (just a few miles southeast of Manhattan), and in mid-July he gave a surfing demonstration for over a thousand people in Long Beach, California. Two years later he was back in Waikiki, popular but poor as he moved from one low-paying job the next. He refused offers to swim for money in order to retain his amateur status, so he could compete in the next Olympic Games. In late 1914, “running away from my problems,” as Kahanamoku told a friend—money worries, mostly—he sailed for Australia, where he could more or less trade swimming demonstrations for room and board.

  ART DECO–ERA POSTCARD SET.

  BING CROSBY, CANOE SURFING WITH WAIKIKI BEACHBOY LOUIS HALE IN 1936.