The History of Surfing

by Warshaw, Matt

  Simmons nonetheless attacked furiously with numbers and formulae. As it turned out, solving the design complexity inherent to surfboards was for the moment beyond applied science alone, and the craft would long continue to be a mixture of both art and engineering. But Simmons was right to take a more analytic approach. Not least among his accomplishments was the idea that surfboard specs and dimensions should be carefully measured, noted, and logged.

  For all the long theoretical flights of fancy and endless hand-scribbled calculations, Simmons’ design goals were pretty straightforward: more speed and a longer ride—which was mostly a function of speed. Turns and maneuvers weren’t important to him, except as a means to draw a higher line on the wave, which would allow him to go faster. Simmons didn’t so much want to ride the wave as skim pelican-like over it. His first big design change, in an effort to cut down on “pearling,” was to scarf-joint a block of balsawood to the front end of a new board, which allowed him to shape a few crucial inches of “kick” into the nose. Because the added wood wasn’t just foiled and blended into the deck, but also concaved across the top, Simmons’ board had a spoon-like appearance—“Simmons spoon” quickly became a common expression among California surfers. It was thought that a raised prow would push water and slow the board down, but that wasn’t the case; once a surfer was up and riding, the board’s nose generally hovered a few inches above the surface. When it did drop to sea level, the extra lift was a godsend, as it often kept the board up and running, instead of nosing under.

  Simmons also tapered, thinned, and rounded out the rails, nose to tail, again with the idea of increasing the board’s slipperiness. Deck design wasn’t as important, Simmons believed, but he added a slight crown anyway, thinking that it might help keep water flowing to the rear. Most of Simmons’ boards were gently convex along the bottom, but he experimented with concaves, intending to further reduce friction by putting a cushion of air between board and wave. Also, the bottom surface was turned up slightly as it moved off the tail, which, combined with the nose lift, gave the Simmons’ board an early version of rocker.

  Tom Blake’s design instincts had led to a longer, narrower, more pointed craft. The Simmons board in contrast was short and wide, with a crescent-shaped nose, parallel rails, and a roomy squared-off tail. Simmons’ own small-wave model was 8 feet by 24 inches. He believed that a broader tail was a key to higher speeds, but the added surface led to spin-out (“sliding ass,” to use the old Hawaiian phrase). To solve this, Simmons created the twin-fin board: instead of the standard center-anchored keel, he put a 5-inch-high half-moon fin near each corner of the tail.

  “SIMMONS WAS ARROGANT AND ECCENTRIC, AND NOT AFRAID TO TRY THINGS. HE’D MAKE A NEW BOARD, THROW IT ON TOP OF THE CAR, DRIVE TO THE BEACH. THEN HE’D COME RIGHT BACK. ‘NAW, THAT’S NO GOOD. I’VE GOT A BETTER IDEA.’ HE’D DO THAT UNTIL HE GOT SOMETHING HE LIKED.”

  —Surfboard manufacturer Renny Yater

  Simmons also continued to experiment with materials. Balsa was hard to find during and just after the war, but it remained the boardmaker’s wood of choice. Roughly half of the two hundred boards Simmons built between 1947 and 1950 were solid balsa, wrapped in fiberglass. Each weighed about 40 pounds—10 pounds less than the average postwar plank. (“Solid balsa” is kind of a misnomer. Boardmakers glued together several 12-foot pieces of 4-inch-by-6-inch balsa to make a rectangular “blank” from which the board was templated and cut. All-balsa boards were made before the war, but the varnish finish cracked and leaked as the soft wood beneath was dented. Fiberglass solved the problem.) Simmons also made about a hundred of what he called “sandwich” boards. Starting with a lightweight rectangular core of polystyrene foam—better known by its trademarked name, Styrofoam, which was another multipurpose war-developed industrial product—he covered each side with a pattern-cut piece of plywood, bracketed this “sandwich” with a pair of solid balsa rails, glued it all together using a complicated hand-tightened clamping frame, then fiberglassed the whole thing. Originally, his goal was lightness, but after getting one of his boards down to 20 pounds, Simmons changed his mind and went back to the all-balsa boards, believing the added weight gave the board more stability at higher speeds. There were other drawbacks. Apart from being difficult to make, sandwich boards were notoriously flimsy. “You’d go out surfing,” a Malibu local recalled, “come in, stand the board up against a wall or something, and the thing would just sproing apart in the heat of sun.”

  * * *

  The Simmons board came without a logo, stamp, builder’s signature, or decorative touch of any kind, and its craftsmanship was only passable. Next to the elegant multiwood laminated planks made a decade earlier by Pacific System Homes, or the sleek mahogany hollows made by Robert Mitchell Company, Simmons’ boards looked raw, if not flat out crude. The builder himself couldn’t have cared less. Engineered speed was all Simmons cared about—the rest was frippery. Simmons believed that by way of rigorous calculation and applied science he’d taken surfboard design from well-intentioned primitivism into the age of reason. Crowing to his less-enlightened fellows on the beach, Simmons would introduce his latest model as a “hydrodynamic planing hull.” In a more playful mood, he’d simply call it “my latest machine.”

  But did the boards actually work? That depended on who was riding. On a long, straight line, they were the fastest things in the water, and for a few dozen speed-obsessed Southern California surfers, during the late 1940s and early 1950s, Simmons was nothing less than a boardmaking messiah. But a Simmons board was as limiting in its own way as a rocket car tearing across the Bonneville Salt Flats. Maneuverability would soon be performance surfing’s main goal, and better turning meant the surfer not only had to occasionally sink the board’s tail into the water but ride closer to the curl in order to better tap the wave’s power. Both ideas disgusted Simmons. Surfboards, he believed, were meant to ride as high out of the water as possible, and the speed-line he followed often took him twenty yards out ahead of the curl.

  The Simmons board also had a pokey look, with its rounded baby-rattle nose, ungainly width, and rough-hewn appearance. What was wrong with a glossy finish? Maybe even a color or two? As California’s postwar generation of surfers took shape, many wanted their boards to be functional and look sharp. Because of Simmons, boards were lighter and stronger than they’d ever been, the rails were now beautifully rounded, and bottom curves were in play. Innovation had replaced stasis in board design. Otherwise, Simmons was out of step with the times. As one of his peers remarked, “Simmons thought that everyone should ride the way he did.” This arrogance kept him from making an even bigger mark in surfboard design. Limited by his injured arm, and a narrow view of performance surfing, Simmons rode in the same point-and-shoot riding style that defined the previous generation—except he went half-again faster.

  WINDANSEA, SAN DIEGO, EARLY 1950s.

  Simmons moved to San Diego in 1950 to finish college, and he cut way back on his boardmaking. In late September 1954, he and a few other surfers paddled into a rough swell at a La Jolla break called Windansea. After about an hour, Simmons was pitched off his board on a ten-footer, came up bleeding from a cut on his head, and was last seen doing his crabbed one-armed sidestroke toward the beach. His twin-fin board washed around near the shore a few minutes later, and a group of kids ran down and pulled it out of the water. Simmons never came in. Three days later a lifeguard discovered his body, mottled and eyeless, floating in the shorebreak about a mile to the south.

  Simmons’ legacy was built in part on his death. It’s bending the truth to say that he went down in pursuit of a better surfboard, but only a little bit, and his dramatic final act helped make him the embodiment of a dramatic period in surfing’s history. Even before Simmons died, a younger crew of Los Angeles shapers had in fact already pushed the design wheel in another direction—one that had an equal or greater bearing on future boardmaking. Yet for a long time afterward they were all grouped together as Simmons’ a
colytes. The guy who caught everyone’s attention was the doomed antisocial genius. Fair or not, the other postwar boardmakers had to live in Simmons’ shadow.

  Turn, Turn, Turn: The Girl Boards

  Simmons wanted to ground the entire boardmaking process in numbers and equations, but it didn’t work that way. Improved surfboard design in the postwar years was advanced just as much by luck and providence, even romance. Young Santa Monica surfer-designers Joe Quigg and Matt Kivlin also floated breakthrough boards into the lineup during the late 1940s and early 1950s, but these weren’t so much prototypes as valentines—shorter, thinner, lighter all-balsa “girl boards” originally made more or less on a whim for surfers’ sweethearts, then quickly hijacked after the guys discovered how much fun they were to ride.

  VICKI FLAXMAN (LEFT) AND CLAIRE CASSIDY, WITH THEIR “GIRL BOARDS.”

  In 1947, Joe Quigg was one year out of the navy and a GI Bill photography student at Art Center College of Design in Los Angeles. He was also a weekend boardmaker. No other twenty-two-year-old in the state had as much surfing experience; Quigg had made himself a bellyboard at age four and had been riding waves ever since. He was a solid performer, especially in the bigger stuff, and was already earning a reputation as a first-rate craftsman. It might take a few weeks, months even, to get a Joe Quigg surfboard, but each one was a thing of beauty.

  Matt Kivlin was then eighteen. He’d been surfing for just four years—virtuoso surfer-boardmaker Pete Peterson of Santa Monica had pushed Kivlin into his first wave and been a mentor by example—but the older guys returning from the war immediately recognized him as the hottest young rider on the coast. In the midforties, Kivlin had gone wave-hunting a few times with Simmons, and not long after Quigg returned from service, he and Kivlin joined forces with Simmons to make a run of sandwich boards. The partnership quickly failed, mostly over design issues, but also because of differences in temperament. Quigg and Kivlin were friendly and good-looking, smooth and sociable; Kivlin had a reputation for throwing the best beach parties in L.A. County, and if he was more popular with the honeys than Quigg, it was by the tiniest of margins. The solitary Simmons, meanwhile, glowered across the beachfront like a resin-stained Diogenes.

  In the summer of 1947, Quigg got a board request from Tommy Zahn, his best friend and a fellow navy veteran. Zahn had just started dating Darrilyn Zanuck, the tiny blond seventeen-year-old daughter of Twentieth Century Fox mogul Darryl Zanuck. Zahn asked Quigg to make a board small and light enough for Darrilyn to load herself into the backseat of her new Chrysler Town and Country convertible and drive up to Malibu. Quigg visited a half dozen lumber yards to find the lightest possible wood, and a week later he handed Zahn a 10-foot 2-inch, 40-pound redwood-and-balsa squaretail, lifted slightly on both ends and gently curved on the rail line from nose to tail, with egg-shaped rails. The whole idea was to ease the learning process for a hundred-pound teenage girl; each feature was designed to make the board as forgiving as possible.

  MATT KIVLIN (LEFT) AND TOMMY ZAHN, MALIBU, 1950.

  Zahn presented the board to Darrilyn, borrowed it and returned it, then borrowed it again, and again, and eventually didn’t bother to give it back. Dave Rochlen, another easygoing Santa Monica surfer-vet, rode the board and liked it as well. So did thirty-four-year-old surf hero Pete Peterson. Nobody really wanted to admit they liked it. When borrowed, the Darrilyn board, by unspoken protocol, had to be used in a kind of bluff, grinning, throwaway manner. It was okay to play around with your girlfriend’s board on a slow afternoon, when the surf was blown out. Serious wave-riding, though—that was still done on bigger, heavier, man-sized equipment. The following year, after Zahn and Zanuck broke up, ownership of the 10-foot 2-inch board became an issue. Darrilyn, remembered fondly by Quigg as “the first girl to buy a surfboard, stick it in the back of her car, and drive up and down the coast learning how to surf,” finally had to break into Zahn’s garage and steal her own board back.

  These promising if gender-fraught board developments were put on hold in the fall of 1947 as Quigg, Kivlin, Zahn, and Rochlen all sailed to Hawaii. Each surfer brought along a wide, straight-railed, fiberglassed Simmons-style board with either one or two fins. Waikiki’s best surfers were still riding finless spear-shaped hot curls, coated in varnish instead of fiberglass. The Hawaiians weren’t impressed with the visitors’ boards, which were a bit skittery in the larger, more powerful island surf. When Quigg and his friends returned to Los Angeles in mid-1948, however, they immediately began to incorporate some Hawaiian features into their new boards, slimming the template and pulling in the nose and tail. Not too much, because the weaker California surf was better tapped using a bit more surface area. But the new boards were at least two inches narrower than what Simmons was making, and that alone was enough to set off a regional design schism: Simmons and his straight-railed, unidirectional “machines” on one side, and the younger Quigg-led boardmakers on the other.

  In the late 1940s, Quigg made the first in his “pintail” series, where the aft rails were drawn together like a pencil point, after dreaming about a rocket-shaped board fast enough to deliver him in a blur of speed from the top of the point at Rincon, California’s best winter break, three hundred yards down the coast on Highway One. The hot curl was already enshrined as the first big-wave board. Quigg’s pintail series brought a new level of sophistication and craftsmanship to this specialized field in board design.

  Not until 1950 did Quigg turn his attention back to the kind of smaller, lighter performance board that he’d made three years earlier for Darrilyn Zanuck. A new group of high school girls were on the scene. Aggie Bane and Robin Grigg, both sixteen, met Quigg and Kivlin on the beach at Santa Monica; Bane developed a huge crush on Quigg and decided to have a party and invite all the local surfers. The mixing and flirting continued through winter and early fall, and just before school let out for summer vacation, a handful of girls all placed orders at once for new start-up boards. Quigg made one for Bane (their shotgun wedding followed a few months later) and her friend Vicki Flaxman. Kivlin was a half-step behind Quigg as a craftsman, but he worked a lot faster, and he made boards for Robin Grigg, Diane Griffith, and Claire Cassidy. The boards were all about 9 feet long, with more rocker and a narrower profile than the still-circulating Darrilyn 10-footer, and by carefully picking only the lightest balsa, Quigg and Kivlin trimmed the weight down to 25 pounds. After each board was shaped, but before it was glassed, the owner would paint her name in big letters across the deck. From then on, each board was known by its moniker—the Vicki board, the Di-Di board, the Aggie board, and so on.

  THE MALIBU “PIT,” 1950.

  These new girl boards were the prototypes for what would soon be called the “Malibu chip”—thin, nose-lifted, yellow-beige, and covered in paraffin wax for traction, they looked like giant, greasy potato chips. Quigg and Kivlin for the most part kept their boards plain. It was Dave Rochlen, boardmaker to Peter Lawford and other Hollywood-connected Malibu Colony habitués, and future founder of the baggy-legged Jams line of surf trunks, who began finishing his boards with bright colors and designs.

  These latest Malibu surfers were the daughters, sisters, and nieces of women who’d put on workpants and shot rivets at Lockheed, Douglas, and the Long Beach Naval Shipyard, and they arrived in their teenage years with a certain proto-feminist swagger. They were nice upper-middle-class girls, but they cursed and drank, smoked cigarettes, and often drove too fast. They were never going to be dilettante wave-riders, as nearly all previous female surfers had been over the past fifty-plus years, propped up ornamentally on the nose of their boyfriends’ boards. The Malibu girls had their own equipment, and by the fall of 1950, after just a few months’ practice, they had collectively advanced from beginner to high intermediate, while Flaxman and Cassidy were riding better than most of the men.

  Quigg and Kivlin loved having the girls in the water, and often rode with them, side by side, shouting encouragement. But there was the occasional erupt
ion of male resentment, especially from a thick-chested twenty-year-old Golden Gloves fighter named Buzzy Trent, and from Bob Simmons, who began his rides from further up the point at Malibu than anyone and made it clear while barreling across that he wouldn’t hesitate to mow down any or all of the distaff newcomers. (Vicki Flaxman never beefed with Simmons, and was even-tempered by nature, but she was a broad-shouldered 150-pound surfing Amazon, and if someone cut her off on a wave then smirked about it afterward she would paddle up, shove him into the water, lean over and growl, “Don’t you ever, ever take off in front of me again.”)

  The only surfers who improved at a similar rate as Flaxman and Cassidy were the guys who, once again, began shuffling up and asking to borrow their boards. Kivlin and a nineteen-year-old New York transplant named Les Williams were the two best surfers at Malibu, and they couldn’t keep their hands off the Di-Di board and the Aggie board. By 1951, it was becoming obvious that the same lighter, smaller board design that had made learning so much easier for schoolgirl neophytes was also going to raise the high-end performance standard. Any lingering doubts about the propriety of a man riding a girl’s board didn’t last much longer. “The most macho guys on the beach,” Quigg later said, “all had one by that summer.”

  * * *

  This shift marked the start of what would be called the Malibu style of riding. During their Waikiki trip, Quigg and Kivlin had been inspired by Rabbit Kekai, the era’s quickest surfer. As Kivlin recalled, “All of a sudden it became really important who could turn the best,” and the new boards opened the door for turning. They rode smoothly, to begin with. Ten years earlier, in order to maintain any directional control at all, plank riders had to stand near the tail, and the unweighted front end would pitch and yaw as it came across any surface bump. The chip allowed the surfer to ride near the center, which kept the board on a much quieter track. Further, the new board didn’t just hold an angle. By leaning over one rail or the other and applying pressure, the surfer could now drive a few degrees up and down the wave face. Williams in particular took advantage of the new mobility, steering his chip into one banked turn after the other, and then as the wave flattened out, muscling the nose around until he was actually riding against the grain—a move soon known as a “cutback.”