The History of Surfing

by Warshaw, Matt

  Kivlin’s approach was reserved by comparison. He used a narrow stance, like the old plank riders. But where past masters like Tom Blake and Pete Peterson tried to keep the hips, chest, and shoulders turned forward, almost in a skiing style, Kivlin positioned his feet and body plumb along the board’s centerline. It was a more asymmetrical way of riding, but it somehow felt more rooted, and all of the Malibu locals were soon doing it this way; surfers were now distinguished as left-foot-forward “regularfoots” and right-foot-forward “goofyfoots.”

  Turns were a big deal to Kivlin, but he never changed directions on a wave with attacking glee the way Williams did. Kivlin was a dancer—knees bent, shoulders loose, left arm dropped below the waist, right hand extended smoothly to hip level or above as a balancing mechanism. Williams was hot. Kivlin was cool—so cool, in fact, that he became modern longboarding’s sui generis stylist. One Malibu surfer described Kivlin’s method as “performance cruising,” which perhaps had a double meaning. As Joe Quigg explained, Kivlin surfed the way he did mostly to impress a beachful of female admirers. “Matt had quite a following,” Quigg said. “And when you bring women into the picture, it affects riding style.”

  The Malibu chip was first and foremost a better-riding board. But it was also a touchstone for a group of surfers who helped to change the sport’s disposition. In the hands of people like George Freeth, Tom Blake, Bob Simmons, and even Pete Peterson, surfing at times looked to be the province of loners and misfits. This wasn’t necessarily a bad thing, and they helped give the still-new sport its own particular energy and independence. But Joe Quigg, Matt Kivlin, Tommy Zahn, Dave Rochlen, and the rest of the Malibu chip innovators were closer in spirit to Duke Kahanamoku. They smiled their way through the whole process, from designing boards to wave-riding. They were sociable. They opened things up to girls and beginners, and managed the difficult trick—rarely achieved in decades to come—of presenting the sport as both cool and friendly.

  Malibu Magic

  Why did Southern California give birth to a national surfing craze? One simple, attractive, ahistorical, quasi-magical explanation is that modern surfing conjured itself into existence from the perfect air that hung over the perfect beach next to the perfect waves at Malibu. Surfing actually made Malibu, but from the late 1940s to the early 1960s, it often seemed to be the other way around.

  Malibu wasn’t so much a surfing location as it was a small, intimate, well-designed surfing theater. At Waikiki, and to a lesser degree at San Onofre—both still popular surfing locations, but fading in importance—waves were scattered across a diffuse tract of reef, and the adjacent beach, except for being a staging area, had nothing to do with the surf. At Malibu, the waves were focused and defined, and all but married to the beach, each one rolling in as if it had traveled halfway across the Pacific for the express purpose of gliding into this quarter-mile bit of shoreline. No surf break, then or now, has ever presented itself so well. The Pacific Coast Highway hugs the coast roughly twenty feet above sea level, so that northbound surfers delivered to the base of the point have a squared-up and slightly elevated view of the incoming waves. The Santa Monica Mountains slope down to the highway, and in the mornings, as offshore winds move through the canyons and across the beach, the lineup smells like sage. Malibu Pier frames the setting to the southeast, and the break is connected to Malibu Lagoon, a few hundred yards to the north, by a long sandy cove.

  The point itself was formed by an ancient geologic burp that sent thousands of cobblestones spilling out of Malibu Creek into the ocean, where they formed a long, evenly curved alluvial fan. Sand transported from north to south by the prevailing littoral current then blanketed and further stabilized the point. Because the water depth just offshore is relatively deep, and because there are few major underwater landmass obstructions between Malibu and the wave-producing storms to the southwest, waves here generally approach in smooth, even bands. A six-footer will start breaking north of the lagoon, run for awhile, section off, run again, section again, then move into a zone just down from the creek mouth, where the point bends almost due east. An impressive if somewhat temperamental wave so far, here it wraps itself into the cove (better known as “First Point”) and becomes the faultless Malibu wave of legend—the curl unspooling for two hundred yards with a crest line so precise and well-tapered that it looks surveyed.

  The Chumash Indians living on the rivermouth named their village Humaliwo, or “loud surf,” but the Malibu surf isn’t especially large, for reasons having to do in part with the break’s position on the coast. California picks up surf all year, but individual spots are generally oriented in such a way as to either favor incoming swells ranging from north to west (the result of North Pacific winter storms) or from south to southwest (mostly originating in the South Pacific, or from tropical gales off Baja California). Winter surf breaks are best from November to March, when the biggest swells can hit twenty feet or more. Malibu and the rest of the summer breaks are best from May to September, when the surf is roughly half as big as it is during winter. Two-to-four-foot waves are common at Malibu, six-to-eight-foot surf arrives just a handful of days each year, and twelve-foot surf is almost unheard of. Size, though, has never been the point at Malibu. Shape and form and elegance—these were the qualities that made it surfing’s first truly revered break. Waikiki was filled with excellent waves, and Hawaii in general was still considered the surfer’s paradise. But Malibu was the place surfers had in mind in the 1950s when they began talking about “the perfect wave.”

  Malibu (the Spanish pronunciation and spelling of Humaliwo) was also the first forbidden wave since Hawaiian chiefs of antiquity had called down a kapu to clear the surfing rabble from their favorite breaks. When Malibu pioneers Tom Blake and Sam Reid drove out of Santa Monica in 1927, boards wedged into the rumble seat of Blake’s roadster, they were stopped two miles from Malibu point by a locked wooden fence. They didn’t mind paddling the last two miles up the coast to Malibu, and Reid later claimed that the experience of riding his first Malibu wave made him feel “noble in spirit!” But neither of them rushed back. Too many waves simply peeled off ahead of them; steering their board into the necessary tight angle was just about impossible. Pacific Coast Highway opened Malibu to the public in 1929, and Depression-era surfers visited now and then, but the break was still thought of as a bit too hot. John “Doc” Ball and his Palos Verdes Surf Club gang drove up, but not often. “Waves here are fast and crack down like dynamite,” Ball wrote in his book California Surfriders, which featured thirty-two photos of San Onofre and just two of Malibu.

  * * *

  A surf break becomes famous when it can advance the cause faster than any other break. Malibu wasn’t the right spot for the twenties or thirties, but it was made to order for the postwar progressives who first wanted to ride on a higher, faster line, and then wanted to swoop up and down across that line. Simmons, Quigg, Kivlin—the hot California shapers all made their boards with Malibu in mind. The Aggie board and the Di-Di board and the rest of the “girl boards” were launched at First Point. Les Williams did his first banked turn here. Simmons claimed that on a particularly long-walled overhead Malibu wall he hit a kind of terminal velocity when his machine lifted up and for a moment or two skimmed above the water surface, then touched down and sent him into a pinwheeling wipeout. “Malibu was the test track,” recalled boardmaker Dale Velzy. “I’d paddle out and see a guy on one of my boards just buried in the curl, and first of all it was just a beautiful sight, but also I could watch and see how the board was working. ‘Look at that rail, it’s really biting in,’ that kind of thing.” Famous surf breaks are often a challenge to ride well, but from the 1940s on that was never the case at Malibu. “Everybody looked good surfing there,” Velzy said. “It was always a very kind wave.”

  DALE VELZY, BEV MORGAN, BILL MEISTRELL, AND HAP JACOBS, AT THE DIVE ’N’ SURF SHOP IN REDONDO BEACH.

  Just like at Waikiki and San Onofre, Malibu changed the sport on th
e land as well as in the water. This sandy hook of beachfront would in fact be surf culture’s last and greatest site-specific incubator. Loose-fitting clothes, bouncy slang, pride in the sport’s detachment from other sports (and the insolence that comes with that pride), a default wariness toward other surfers, brief public nudity, and other forms of social rebellion—much of the surfer stylebook was drafted at Malibu, beginning in 1945.

  In many respects, it was like San Onofre, but with much better surf. Malibu was just far enough removed from Southern California’s suburban reach to make being there an unsupervised, semiprivate, easily accessed adventure. There were no lifeguards. There was no local police force; Malibu was decades away from incorporating as a city. There were no commuters to drive by and see a gang of plainly fit young men and women gathered together daily in the coastal version of hanging out on a street corner. This distance, ten miles up the coast from Santa Monica, which was then the northwestern edge of Los Angeles’ beachfront suburbs, helped forestall by nearly a decade the general public’s disapproving view of surfing and surfers. It also helped that the break at Malibu was located within the established sphere of leisure that surrounded Malibu Colony, the famous Hollywood bedroom community just to the north. The whole point of Malibu was to put the Santa Monica Mountains between yourself and the rest of Los Angeles and to relax in style on the beach.

  After the war, there was a new readiness among wave-riders to live an unadulterated version of the surfing life. Prewar surfers, to one degree or another, had all hedged their bets. Pete Peterson no doubt would have described himself in the thirties as a lifeguard who surfed. Tom Blake was forever trying to align wave-riding with paddling and rescue work. Surfing by itself didn’t seem to be enough. Or maybe it was, but prewar surfers weren’t yet comfortable admitting it to themselves and the world at large. At Malibu after the war, this reluctance to fully embrace the sport as a reason for living in and of itself vanished, particularly for those American surfers who’d enlisted and served in the military. “We’d spent four or five years in the war,” Malibu surfer Dave Rochlen explained, “and it had all been bad. When the war ended—boom—we were back [on the beach]. It was devotion. Like, ‘I’m never going to leave.’ We gave ourselves over to it entirely.”

  Extracurricular surf-related activities were trimmed back. The associations with paddleboarding and lifeguarding remained but were less important. In a complete turnaround from the 1930s, surfers no longer showed much interest in organizing the sport through clubs or competitions. Wave-riding, along with endless association with fellow surfers, could stand up—could in fact flourish—without support structures or formal organizations. At this point, surfing had been part of Southern California’s recreational landscape for forty years. It had its own history, and was beginning to take on the heft of permanence, which likely helped the Malibu surfers make a bigger commitment to the sport. Then again, the stakes had been raised. Lounging on the beach was a harder act to justify during the postwar prosperity boom than it had been during the Depression. In 1937, you could ride waves for hours a day because there wasn’t really much else to do. In 1947, serious water time was paid for with reduced paychecks and a much-shortened list of job choices. For a lot of surfers, this was a fair trade. They waited tables, worked as lifeguards, fished, or learned how to milk a GI Bill stipend—anything to stay on the beach.

  During the late 1940s and early 1950s, surfer rebellion—if it could even be called that—was quiet and friendly. For Quigg and Rochlen and another two dozen postwar Malibu regulars and hangers-on, the surfing experience was often pursued as if it were an extended vacation with friends and family: lots of beer and wine, parties and get-togethers, some horseplay and the occasional brawl. It had a pre-rock-and-roll cadence—just what you’d expect from a small fifties community in which the teenagers were led by a core of older surfers who’d been overseas, served in the war, and in some cases even gotten married. They built hot new boards. They put surfing closer to the center of existence than any group before them. And for their efforts they were all but erased over the following decade by a Golden Horde of suburban teenage newcomers who would spread out across the beach and the lineup at Malibu by the thousands.

  Dale Velzy and the Pig

  The Malibu of popular legend was mostly created by four surfers: Dale Velzy, Dewey Weber, Terry Tracy, and Mickey Dora. Three were from broken families. Tracy and Weber attended junior college, but to no real purpose; they were mostly beach-educated. All four were entertainers. All four, to varying degrees, were hustlers. They commuted to Malibu (with just one or two exceptions, none of the break’s best-known riders were actually Malibu residents), and by 1953 they’d become First Point regulars, just as Quigg and Kivlin and the rest of the original postwar Malibu crew were ready to move on.

  Dale Velzy became the defining midfifties boardmaker. He was the oldest of the new group, a grinning tattooed former Merchant Marine and part-time pool shark from Hermosa Beach who loved hot-rods and horses nearly as much as he loved to surf. Everyone wanted to pal around with Velzy. He occasionally rode with the notorious Boozefighters motorcycle gang, but was just as comfortable having drinks on the veranda with British actor and sophisticate David Niven. Velzy and Niven surfed together often in Waikiki during the early fifties. “He was always using the word ‘splendid,’” Velzy later recalled. “He’d say to me, ‘Oh that was a splendid wave you just had!’ And I’d say, ‘Niven, don’t say splendid, say bitchin’—that was a bitchin’ wave!”

  Velzy began surfing in 1937 at age ten. He was wiry and athletic, graceful at times, but more interested in pushing limits: he was likely the first surfer to hang ten, and unquestionably the first to decorate a surfboard with a pair of resined-on black lace panties. When the mood struck, he was also a hard worker. Woodcraft was a Velzy family tradition; his father made chessboards with hand-carved pieces (which were sold at the Biltmore Hotel in Los Angeles), and his cabinet-maker grandfather built the oak casket Teddy Roosevelt was buried in. Velzy himself, after the war, earned enough money as a backyard boardmaker that he decided to try and make a real vocation of it.

  Velzy rode Malibu often—driving up the coast in his mean-looking, chopped, and channeled 1940 Mercury—and knew that Quigg, Simmons, and Kivlin had all the beaches in northern Los Angeles County pretty well locked up. So Velzy decided to work closer to home, in an area called South Bay, which included Hermosa Beach, Manhattan Beach, and Palos Verdes. Barefoot and bare-chested, using a pair of sawhorses and his grandfather’s tools, he worked beneath Manhattan Pier in 1949, until city officials noticed the wood shavings fanning out across the beach and shut the operation down. Undeterred, Velzy rented a tiny storefront just up from the pier. He had a two-tone “Designed by Velzy” surfboard logo made, and at age twenty-two became owner of the sport’s first licensed boardmaking outlet. From the beginning, business was good: there was always at least a board or two to work on, and in a good week he and a hired laminator cranked out as many as ten. Rent was $45. Each board sold for $55.

  “SIMMONS MADE THEM LIGHT. I MADE THEM TURN.”

  —Dale Velzy, on his contribution to surfboard design

  Velzy ran a strange, stripped-down operation. Future generations of beachgoers, in fact, wouldn’t have recognized it as a “surf shop” at all. There were no shiny new boards lined up on racks. No display cases. No beachwear. No stickers or surf wax. No countertop, telephone, or cash register; not even a storefront sign. “I didn’t want people to notice that much,” Velzy later said. He had as many orders as he could handle anyway, and thought it best not to give city inspectors any reason to take interest in his small, dirty, health code–violating boardmaking setup.

  In 1952, after putting his business on hold for a year to live in Hawaii, Velzy opened a second shop on a beachfront lot just south of Malibu Pier. Simmons was by that time living in San Diego, Quigg would soon move to Honolulu, and Kivlin was about to start working as an architect. Right away, just like in
South Bay, Velzy had plenty of work. He also did himself a favor and got his hands on a new chain-driven electric planer, and this big, shrieking, first-generation power tool saved him a lot of time and sweat while “hogging out”—rough shaping—each glued-up slab of balsa. Not long afterward, a woodworking genius from Waikiki named Abel Gomes designed a router jig for Velzy that allowed him to easily maintain a consistent thickness and rocker from board to board, which was another huge time-saver.

  In 1954, Velzy closed the Malibu operation and opened a shop in Venice—closer to the customer base—with new partner and fellow South Bay boardmaker Dudley “Hap” Jacobs. Velzy had been making Quigg-style chip boards for nearly five years, and one afternoon, weary at the thought of another, he instead shaped a board with a narrow nose, continuous rail curve, a lowered wide point, and a round tail. It was a funny-looking board, kind of homely, with its bulbous rear end—“a real pig,” Velzy thought, smiling.

  DEWEY WEBER, MAKAHA, LATE 1950s.

  The pig turned out to be a killer, and the name stuck. Lighter versions weighed in at just over 20 pounds, and the reduced nose area allowed the board to spear through the water with fewer catches and snags and to come around a beat or two faster during turns. To keep the wide tail anchored into the wave face, the pig had an oversized fin, about the size and shape of a croquet wicket, but raked back so that the trailing edge actually stuck out past the board’s rear end. Like the chip only more so, the pig proved that board speed wasn’t just a matter of improved planing (as Simmons believed), but also a function of how well the board handled in and around the pocket—the concave zone just below the curl. This was a tricky place to ride. It was steep and fast-changing and attached to the whitewater, which was then considered nearly unrideable. But the pocket, clearly, was the place to be. Get up there high enough, aim back down, shift forward a little, and it was like releasing a catapult.