The History of Surfing

by Warshaw, Matt

  MICKEY DORA, MALIBU.

  Dora worked hard at his surfing. He rode constantly, drove the coast seeking out new breaks, and kept a watchful if secretive eye on all the other hot surfers. He ran through a never-ending series of boards, always looking for one that would add a bit more snap to his turns, a bit more velocity to his trim line. Yet Dora, like so much else in surfing during the 1940s and 1950s, seemed to be very much a creation of Malibu itself. The wave didn’t just suit his jazz-inflected style, it nearly dictated it. Dora couldn’t ride left-breaking waves anywhere near as well he could going right, and he wasn’t much interested in bigger surf. “Let’s face it,” he once said, “by choice, I’m a four-foot and under man.” Also, because Malibu presented itself as surfing’s own earthly paradise, it helped justify Dora’s decision to do whatever it took to stay on the surf beat and never miss a day of waves, which in turn steered him to a life of resistance and transgression.

  Black-haired and handsome, with a flashing gap-toothed Bowery Boys grin, Dora looked the part of the rebellious surfer even before he fully embraced the role. He was an enthusiastic prankster with a taste for lighting firecrackers at public gatherings, and a gifted party crasher who kept a tuxedo in the trunk of his car for quick-change makeovers that got him into some of Hollywood’s most exclusive black-tie events. On the beach or in the banquet room, Dora was a smart and witty conversationalist, with expressive long-fingered hands that often floated up in vaguely Continental gestures; his tone of voice was often mocking, derisive, or world-weary. Rarely did he speak directly to the point. As a matter of habit, he would answer a question with a question. Bob Simmons was the sport’s first real cynic, but Dora was next in line and a lot better at it: Simmons was cynical and grumpy, Dora was cynical and entertaining.

  By the midfifties he’d become an icon to a growing number of California surfers. The Malibu crew in particular were soon copying it all—the grin and the hand movements; the evasive, gentlemanly voice; the slouched but jittering riding style.

  Dora held jobs briefly and intermittently in his early twenties, first as a parking lot attendant for the Beverly Hilton Hotel, then as a host at an upscale Sunset Boulevard restaurant called Frascati, then as a delivery boy for a wine distributor. But surfing took over his life to a degree that was incompatible with any kind of work schedule. He lived for the most part on handouts from friends and supporters, usually in the form of an open guestroom and meals. He also shoplifted and stole from his employers, shook down awestruck young surfers, and convinced surfboard manufacturers to give him an endless supply of free “team rider” boards, which he used a few times then sold. (Dora stepped up the criminal activities in his thirties, and eventually served time for felony check-writing and credit card fraud, as well as violating probation.)

  Dora had his detractors, even during the Malibu glory years. Terry Tracy, his first surfing buddy and a lifelong acquaintance, allowed that Dora had “incredible presence,” but accused him of being congenitally mean-spirited. “He’d irritate the little guy. He’d take a guy’s board, some poor, helpless little guy, then a few days later he’d give it back—after charging him a few bucks.” Most surfers, though, admired Dora, some to the point of zealotry, believing that Dora lied, stole, and scammed because that was the only way a genuine surfing purist could get by. Even those who regarded Dora as little more than an charismatic sociopath felt a kinship with him. Few played the rebel with Dora’s commitment, but nearly all surfers embraced the concept and lived the part in smaller ways. Maybe they’d never commit felonies in the name of wave-riding, but for a few extra hours in the surf they’d ditch class or leave work early; or lie to their parents, their boss, their wife; or speed through red lights just to get to the beach two minutes earlier. Dora’s transgressions were everyone’s, writ large. By championing him, surfers championed themselves.

  The Decline and Fall of Malibu

  Surfers felt connected to Mickey Dora for another reason: collective anger over the decline and fall of Malibu. By the late 1950s, the original perfect wave was fast becoming the sport’s original lost utopia. Mainstream society still regarded wave-riding as a borderline cult activity, but the surfer population had grown continuously since the end of the war. Malibu, both accessible and well-known, was drawing overflow crowds. In 1950, Dora might arrive to find a dozen people in the lineup. Six or seven years later, on a hot summer afternoon with a decent south swell running, up to seventy-five surfers at a time were rotating from Coast Highway to the beach to the lineup. Few people, on such days, got their fill of waves. There were collisions and etiquette violations of every kind, and each surfer at one point or another had the same bitter Dora-like wish that everybody else would go the hell away.

  MICKEY DORA.

  There had been crowded lineups before, but the numbers at Malibu in the mid- and late-fifties were of a different magnitude compared to prewar scenes at Waikiki, or San Onofre, or Manly Beach. Furthermore, surfers from past decades gladly took off together and rode for shore in loose, comradely formation. Postwar equipment put an end to that. The surfer doing turns, fades, and cutbacks needed all the room he could get, and the unwritten rule was one rider per wave, with right of way going to the guy first to his feet, closest to where the wave began to break. Any surfer who “dropped in” or “cut off” the original rider was either ignorant or playing dirty. That was how it worked in theory, anyway. At Malibu and every other thronged surf break around the world, wave distribution actually reflected a complicated and highly fluid hierarchy. Where you stood had a lot to do with ability, but so did tenure, size and weight, toughness, and popularity. Dora wasn’t much of a fighter, but he topped out on all other measures, and could thus take any wave he wanted, drop in on anybody, and expect the crowd to mostly stay out of his way. Ray “The Enforcer” Kunze wasn’t in Dora’s class as a surfer, but he was a certified ass-kicker with a short fuse, and built like a linebacker. Nobody got in his way, either.

  On the other end of the scale, younger surfers—also known as gremmmies—could be cut off with total impunity. Same with any unknown lesser-skilled visitor, all of whom were categorized as “Valleys” or “Valley kooks,” whether or not they actually drove in from nearby San Fernando Valley. Rank and station were never stated outright, but everybody pretty much knew where everybody stood, and order generally held. But not always. A quick influx of bodies in the water, a slowdown in the number of incoming waves, a few rides taken out of turn by the higher-ups, and the whole thing became a free-for-all: six, eight, twelve people on a single wave; water splashing up like tiny white mortar rounds as surfers lost control and fell; plenty of banged-up shins; and after each set a small flotilla of riderless boards washing onto the rocks along the beach. A surfer would drop in on Dora. Two more would drop on that guy, not knowing who was back there. And suddenly Mickey was three surfers in the hole, yelling profanities as he was forced to straighten out in the whitewater.

  “I’VE BROKEN SURFERS DOWN INTO FOUR CATEGORIES: PUNKS, KOOKS, THE DEDICATED NOTHING, AND THE SENILE SURF FREAK. THE PUNKS—THEY’RE THE ONLY ONES WE HAVE LEFT. THEY’RE THE LAST HOPE. ”

  —Mickey Dora, responding to the growing crowds at Malibu

  Dora later claimed that Malibu was over for him as early as 1956. He maintained a spot in the lineup for another thirteen years, but only by turning the experience into a kind of running battle. He learned to weave his way through a crowd, using the surfers ahead of him like pylons, overtaking one from behind, then dropping down to pass the next guy with a bottom turn, and so on. Later he became more aggressive, knocking people into the water as he rode by, and occasionally, if his ride was completely ruined, kicking his board at the surfer in front of him. “These guys are thieves and they’re stealing my waves,” Dora explained. “We’re all pushing and shoving, jockeying for position, and if I get the wave first [and] someone takes off in front of me—well, he gets tapped.” In his better moods, Dora was able to turn the whole thing into a black com
edy. He threatened to bring his lawyer to the beach. He came up with long sing-songy lists to describe the forces arrayed against him: the “senile surf freaks” and “Mussolini property owners,” the “Valley cowboys,” the “goose-stepping inland slave-mentality imbeciles,” and the “nurses from New Jersey going tandem with Encino proctologists.”

  But humor, as a coping mechanism, had limits. Surfing was the best thing in Dora’s life, Malibu was the best thing in surfing, and from 1955 onward, as he watched newcomers dividing and multiplying like Fantasia broomsticks in the Malibu lineup, mostly what he felt was loss, frustration, and anger. Years passed before he was able to quit fighting what was plainly an unwinnable fight and seek out other places, other breaks. Meanwhile, his legacy for sublime wave-riding was bound to a darker, more complicated legacy of ideas, including a rich contempt for other surfers, the unapologetic use of violence, and a belief in the inexorable decline of surfing in general. To a degree, Dora was simply pointing out and reacting to existing problems. But he compounded those problems, too. He was the first person in the sport to make aggression, misanthropy, and abuse fashionable. “Localism”—surfing’s homegrown form of turf-based vigilantism, which wasn’t introduced until the late 1960s—may not have been a direct result of Dora’s rants against overcrowding at Malibu. Without him, though, it never would have had the same vogue and cachet.

  The realization that any break could be overrun—with Malibu standing as the number-one cautionary tale—had a chilling effect on the sport. Beginning in the late 1950s, surfers learned to view unfamiliar surfers with caution. The fewer people who knew about your home break, the better. This led to the “secret spot” becoming the hot and hoarded new thing, and pretty much every Southern California surfer had one—a Baja pointbreak, a tucked-away reef up the coast, even a rinky-dink overnight sandbar that wouldn’t last through the next big swell. Surfing didn’t become less social, but the community splintered. Trading waves with a few buddies would always be everyone’s favorite way to surf. Conscientious newcomers, under circumstances that changed from break to break and even day to day, would almost always find a slot in any given lineup. But after Malibu, the sport atomized. Groups of surfers began to detach themselves from their peers, just as surfing detached itself from the sporting world at large.

  Something else changed, too. Given that Malibu was the conceptual starting point for the perfect wave, its decline and fall helped give birth to an impulse that proved nearly as important to the sport: the search for the perfect wave. Right away, wave-riding became a lot more interesting. Thousands of surfers looking for the next perfect wave set out by car, plane, or boat, and returned with a litany of road stories: hotel hijinks, strange meals, sexual conquest, engine repairs in the middle of nowhere, drunken afternoons on the esplanade. Adventure was dependable, even if the surf was not. Travel broadened surfers, just as it did anybody—but the journey itself usually wasn’t the point, at least not the way it was for other travelers. The surfer’s objective was clear and unchanging. They all wanted what Dora had in the midfifties. “Every surfer,” as filmmaker Bruce Brown said in his 1966 travel classic The Endless Summer, “dreams of finding a place as good as Malibu.”

  As it turned out, the world contained hundreds of breaks—from Sumatra to El Salvador, Durban to the Bay of Biscay—that were just as good or better. But none of them would occupy the sport’s vital center the way Malibu did for two decades after the war. Not even close.

  Hawaii Calls

  Malibu was a great surf break, but it was never the ultimate surfers’ destination. It wasn’t tropical, or exotic, or gut-testing. In short, it wasn’t Hawaii. Every surfer worthy of the name, Malibu diehards included, spent a lot of time either reliving or planning their big trip to the islands.

  So did a lot of other Americans. Politically and economically, Hawaii was now closer than ever to the mainland. This relationship was greatly deepened by World War II; Oahu remained America’s single-most militarized region, and thus the country’s greatest recipient of Pentagon largesse. Hawaiian sugar plantations shipped most of their nearly one million tons of raw product a year to the mainland. Statehood had been in the cards for decades, and President Eisenhower signed the Hawaiian statehood bill in March of 1959, two months after doing the same for Alaska.

  Tourism was fast on the rise. Commercial air travel between the West Coast and Honolulu had been outrageously expensive (nearly $8,000 in 2009 dollars for a Pan Am “Flying Clipper” roundtrip ticket in 1940), but it was now making a long, slow descent to affordability, and the beaches at Waikiki were filling up with vacationing white-collar workers and their families on ten-day package deals. The number of people visiting Honolulu increased tenfold between 1947 and 1959, from 25,000 to nearly 250,000. Commercial beachfront development was Hawaii’s greatest boom industry, and gift shops clustered like pilot fish around the new multistory resort hotels, pushing a mountain of surfer-motif items: miniature koa wood boards, copper-plated “Hawaiian Surfrider” statuettes, souvenir demitasse spoon sets with bas relief surfers on the handles. Diamond Head–framed “Aloha Hawaii” surfers were stamped or screened onto ashtrays, pennants, lighters, keychains, serving trays, and every other imaginable trinket.

  Middle-class tourism brought forth a second generation of Waikiki beachboys, and a good portion of this new crew—stuck working the downmarket side of the beach where tipping wasn’t a noblesse oblige show of form—were ready to hustle. Pushing a tourist into the water at Canoes on a buck-an-hour hollow board rental, the beachboy might surreptitiously pull the cork plug from the board’s nose, wait ten or fifteen minutes until the waterlogged board was dragged back up the beach, then charge the embarrassed visitor an extra two bits for losing the plug. If the out-of-towner owned his own equipment, a more predatory beachboy might wait for the board to wash in, snatch it off the beach, and have it up on sawhorses, partially reshaped, by the time the mark walked over to ask if anyone had seen his board float by.

  These kinds of scams were a constant source of irritation to a lot of Waikiki boosters, including ukulele-strumming TV personality Arthur Godfrey. A frequent visitor to Hawaii, Godfrey had once flown old-school beachboy Chick Daniels all the way to New York to sing and play guitar on his show, Arthur Godfrey and His Friends. “Waikiki’s become a Coney Island with palm trees,” Godfrey complained to a newspaper reporter. “All you get on the beach are insults and insubordination.”

  Laws were passed, and beachboys were supposed to be licensed and certified, but the ongoing tourist boom nullified all regulatory efforts. By the early 1960s, the Waikiki beach scene had devolved into a free-for-all. When seventy-seven-year-old Duke Kahanamoku, spiritual head of the beachboys since the 1920s, died of a heart attack in the parking lot of the Waikiki Yacht Club in 1968, beachboy culture itself was unofficially laid to rest.

  * * *

  West Coast surfing champion Pete Peterson sailed to Hawaii for a long visit before World War II. So did Orange County surfers Whitey Harrison and Tarzan Smith. Tom Blake spent the better part of three decades living in Waikiki, starting in the mid-1920s. Honolulu was the first port of call for seventeen-year-old Merchant Marine Dale Velzy during the war, and he returned in 1951 to briefly open a small boardmaking operation. Joe Quigg, Tommy Zahn, and Matt Kivlin all came over in the late 1940s, and Mickey Dora’s 1954 Hawaiian holiday came to a premature end when he was arrested as a stowaway on a Honolulu-to-Hilo cruise ship, briefly jailed in Honolulu, fined $150, and sent home.

  After World War II, more and more California surfers set out for Hawaii, usually arriving on a one-way ticket with nothing more than a duffel bag and a board. During the first few years after the war, it was a given that a visiting surfer would stay in Waikiki, and that the trip would last for months, not weeks. The idea was to find cheap digs (a small rental house if there were three or four guys chipping in; otherwise a room, a flat, even just a garage), buy an old car, eat a lot of rice and canned beans to stretch the travel budget a
s far as possible, and then either head home broke or find temporary work of some kind in Honolulu. Pioneering big-wave surfer Walter Hoffman of Los Angeles shared a basement room two blocks off the beach with another surfer for $25 a month in the summer of 1951; by making and selling one surfboard a week for $90 they covered their monthly nut and had enough left over for a movie or two.

  Relations between visiting and resident surfers were complicated, often strained, and occasionally violent. This tension went as far back as 1929, when Tom Blake used his new hollow “cigar board”—a cheating piece of equipment, according to the Hawaiians—to destroy the best local paddlers in flat-water races. Tarzan Smith from Los Angeles regularly scrapped with the local toughs, and one especially violent beating put him in the hospital for more than a week. Matt Kivlin was punched out on his first visit, as was Tommy Zahn, who nonetheless made another dozen or so trips to Hawaii. “It took me five or six years before I was finally accepted,” Zahn recalled. “And when it finally happened, I said to myself, ‘Was it even worth it?’”

  ALBERT “RABBIT” KEKAI, WAIKIKI, EARLY 1950s.

  Fights and flare-ups were nearly always triggered by something specific. Tarzan Smith, for example, a thug to begin with, moved in on the beachboys’ prized oceanfront turf by renting boards and giving surf lessons to tourists. But there was also a riptide of cultural and class differences separating the two groups, beginning with the fact that the Hawaiians (a misnomer to some degree, as islanders had long been mixing with resident haoles, Filipinos, Chinese, and Japanese) were a dark-skinned underclass majority in their own home. Even the most easygoing, apolitical beachboy could see that the people on top—starting with Hawaii’s US-appointed governor and the vast island-wide network of oligarchical Big Five executives—were white and connected directly to the mainland by birth, family, or education. Just like the visiting California surfers. Anti-white anger was unevenly distributed across the Islands, and usually kept in check. But it could ignite quickly, especially in places where the demarcation between tourists and residents wasn’t especially clear—a crowded lineup, say, or late Friday night at the corner bar. Acts of violence often seemed both spontaneous and predictable. “Once in while,” as a Hawaiian surfer wrote, “when I get a few good blasts of beer going, and some haole acts up—well, I just bust him a good one, and I feel a little better.”