 on how Miki Dora was influenced by his two fathers. "My own father taught me a gracious way of living," Dora said, "while my stepfather showed me how to survive. One showed me how to atone for indiscretions and the other demonstrated how to commit them.” The stepfather—the rough one, the committer of indiscretions—was Los Angeles surfer and woodworker Gard Chapin, who married Dora's mother Ramona in the early 1940s, when Dora was still in grade school. For the most part, Chapin's name is brought up, if it's brought up at all, in terms of his relationship with Miki. But for 10 or so years, starting in the mid-'30s, Gard was himself regarded as one of California's best high-performance surfers. This is a hard statement to qualify. There aren't many photos of Chapin surfing, and no film that I know of, and the era itself is now so distant that "high-performance" itself is hard to define. In the simplest terms, Chapin rode at a more acute angle across the wave-face than other surfers, and invented a wicked drop-knee turn that allowed him to change directions.

Miki turns up now and then in the article below, but the idea here is to shine a light on Chapin himself who, for better and worse, deserves his own niche in surf history, adjacent to but separate from that of his famous stepson.

Special thanks to David Rensin, author of 

All for a Few Perfect Waves: The Audacious Life and Legend of Miki Dora

. Most of the quotes gathered here are either from the book itself or Rensin's notes. Thanks also to Barry Haun at Surfing Heritage and Culture Center.

MIKLOS DORA SR (Miki Dora's birth father)


Ramona made a big mistake and married a man who, in my opinion, was a bum: a surfer named Gard Chapin.


Gard and Ramona were a god and goddess, stunning to look at. Gard was 6' 1" or so. Extremely muscular. Kind of Aryan blond. He was also a chauvinist, intolerant, maybe racist, and loud. He drank too much. Ramona did, too.


He was the wildest surfer of the ‘30s and ‘40s; the most radical. He would come up to Malibu and just ran circles around everyone. I thought Gard Chapin was the living end.


Gard was one of the finest surfers on the coast. And one of the most disliked.


Gard was unbelievable. I remember him coming across a seven- or eight-foot wave, and he did this fabulous cutback on a 90-pound redwood surfboard. He drop-kneed this thing and came back into it so hard, I just thought, 


Gard was the best surfer of the time. Flawless surfing. He could drop his knee clear into his thigh, and just whip that board around. He'd stick the nose of his board right into the foam, drop, spin on his knee, and come out of the hook going the other way. No other big-board rider did that.


If you ever saw Miki Dora at Malibu, riding along and picking people off in front of him who got in his way—Gard was doing that in the ‘30s and ‘40s.


Sometimes Gard would use guys paddling out as a slalom course. He’d go around one, then around the other, yelling “We’ll all be killed!”


He would howl while he rode, and his voice would echo off the Palos Verdes Cove cliffs.


The yelling was exuberance and wanting to have people watch him. Most of us felt it wasn’t necessary to draw attention to yourself. If you were good enough, we’d watch anyway.


Surfers in Gard's generation were laid-back. To them, surfing was like going fishing. Then here’s this wild, radical guy tearing up the ocean. No wonder some guys didn’t like him that much. I think they were jealous.


As far as Gard was concerned, other surfers were all kooks.


When Gard was surfing he was happy as a clam. But if you crossed him, he could do anything. He'd lose his temper and just tear up the joint. I didn't like him. I was a little afraid of him.


Gard had two sisters, Nancy and Martha. Nancy took a fancy to a guy named Bill Van Dorn, a freewheeling intellect who went to Stanford. He was a brilliant engineer; his father invented the modern streamlined train.


Nancy Chapin and I met while skiing at Snow Valley. We were engaged two weeks after we met, and married two weeks after that. I only saw her twice before we got married. The second time, I invited her to come up to Big Bear for the weekend to do some more skiing. There were about twelve of us going. She wouldn't go unless her sister went too, but at the last minute, it turned out Martha couldn't go. Nancy came anyway. We had a terrific weekend. But because I was on the ski patrol, we came home very late. A couple had had a toboggan accident, and we had to fish them out of the canyon, where they had wrapped around a tree. Since we were very late coming back, and I lived in Flintridge with my folks, I asked a friend to take Nancy home. So my friend, Sachs Montgomery, got to Nancy's house in Hollywood, and Gard came out from behind a palm tree and dragged Sachs out of the car, saying, "There's the son-of-a-bitch who took my sister skiing for a weekend with no chaperone!" Sachs goes, "Wait a minute! You got the wrong guy." He didn't get slugged, but it scared the hell out of him. I got a call from Gard the next day. "You're going to marry my sister, aren't you?" And I said, "I think I am." She was 19. I was 24. We had a great life. We were married for 56 years.


He couldn’t go into the service, because of his ulcers [from excessive drinking]. He was 4-F and had to rest a lot. But as soon as the ulcers healed up, he’d go on another binge.


The Chapin place was run-down and didn’t look like anybody lived there. Chunks of cars rusted in the yard and surfboards leaned up against the eaves. Inside the front door, immediately to the right, was a piano in an alcove, but it was completely covered with skis. Books were piled everywhere. Gard's mother, Louise, had pretty advanced cerebral palsy. Nancy supported the whole family working for a Hollywood advertising agency. Martha wrote scripts and contributed to a few books now and then. Gard did nothing much. Nancy and I didn’t socialize much with Gard.


Gard wasn't an engineer, but he went to Douglas Aircraft right out of high school and worked in a tool crib making twenty dollars a week. In the late ’30s that was still a lot of money.


He wasn't in the war, didn't work that much. Gard was surfing every day; surfing was his first love. There was a guy we all knew from Laguna, Peanuts Larson, he died without a Social Security number. He never worked. That was the general idea among those guys who were surfing the most, like Gard.


My father liked to fire off buckshot down on the neighbors below us on July Fourth, then wait until the police came. Then he'd show them a shotgun that hadn't been fired. Of course, the trick was that he had two identical guns.


My stepfather grew up around the area [Los Angeles] and was well-connected. That fact that he was a dangerous psychopath helped earn him respect wherever he went.


We were messing around with somebody's car [at San Onofre] and found a sail in the back. Gard said, "Hell, this would make a terrific kite." So after midnight we snuck into the lumber yard in San Clemente and got a bunch of 20-foot-long 2 x 3s and made this monster kite. We attached it to some galvanized iron fence wire which we tied around the back of somebody's Model-A. This kite was 20 feet across. We tried to fly the thing, but it was unstable; obviously it needed a tail. We put more and more tail on it but it wasn't enough. Finally, Gard said, "We'll put Miki on it for weight." So we tied a boatswain's chair to the tail of this kite. Then it flew beautifully! We got it way up there, scrambling up the top of the cliff, running across the field. Then it went down. Miki was found on the other side of the tracks, in a field, perfectly OK. He said he kind of glided down.


My stepfather had strange ideas about raising kids and devised some pretty strange disciplinary programs for me.


Miki told me that Gard used to come home drunk and drag him out of bed and beat the hell out of him.


When Miki was 12, Gard insisted that his stepson get circumcised.


Once, in the middle of the night, he came into my bedroom and woke me up. “Hey kid, you’ve got to come with me to see something.” Then he dragged me down to Hollywood Boulevard. “Look around—what do you see wrong here?” Then he opened the trunk on his car and took out a sledgehammer and walked me over to the curb. "Miki, these bastards want to control everything. Now they want to make us pay money to park on the street.” Chapin then smashed the head off every brand-new parking meter that the city had just installed. It was the first day they had been put out, and he creamed every one of them for several blocks. His anger was something that you could never forget seeing. When he was finished he suddenly became very calm, and he climbed up the sign pole on the corner. "Here's a souvenir." He handed me a street sign from Hollywood and Vine.


Gard fell off a ladder, broken a leg, and was in the hospital where he overheard some nearby drama: a young man had been critically injured in a bicycle accident—factured skull, broken leg, smashed left elbow. The head and leg healed, but the arm was now wired in a loosely extended position, and the doctors were saying that unless he found some new way to exercise the limb it might have to be amputated. Chapin later slipped in and told the young man about surfing—stoked him on wave-riding and suggested that paddling a surfboard would be perfect physical therapy. The injured man was Bob Simmons.


Bob's first board was a redwood with a piece of plywood on the deck he bought from Gard Chapin.


Gard had a garage door business, as I remember, and Simmons went to work for him. They had access to a lot of different materials.

DREW KAMPION (writer and former SURFER editor)


Chapin had a door-making business, and it was nicely set up for building surfboards as well. It was there in the late 1940s that Simmons pulled together his hydrodynamic theories and interpreted them with newly discovered composite materials to create the first foam and fiberglass surfboards.


Gard's boards were different than the other guys' boards, straighter and flatter, with harder rails. He was into planing hulls before the rest. He had the most advanced boards for a long time. Bob Simmons took up where Gard left off. I remember Gard getting really upset 'cause Simmons was going up and down the coast making all these claims about great his [Simmons'] board were. Simmons' deal was what marine architects called a displacement hull, or a rowing shell hull, round along the bottom. But that roundness will suck itself underwater, and will only go so fast. That's why Gard liked the idea of a flatter planing hull, and he fought Simmons and those guys about their round bottoms. The boards I made were more like Gard's boards; he was my hero. So the modern streamlined board—part of it was Simmons, part of it was Kivlin, part of it was Zahn, part of it was me, and part of it was Gard Chapin.


Gard had a cabinet shop, in South LA, down in the Figueroa area. That worked pretty well, and things were going pretty well with Ramona too. Then he was in an accident [in 1947] and broke his neck, and everything came unglued.


Someone rear-ended him while he was at a stop sign. It broke his neck. He wore a huge cast for a year. He started in on codeine and drank more. After the cast came off, he was still in a lot of pain, so he drank even more. But my dad's real downfall was the absinthe he smuggled in from Mexico. The stuff made him insane. Everything came unglued. He lost the cabinet shop, he and Ramona split, and I was sent to live with my relatives. My dad came to see me only twice. The first time was great. The second time he was drunk as hell, so [my Aunt] Frances had him arrested. That was the last time I saw him.


Gard died in 1957, at age 39. He was with a fisherman in La Paz, a guy who had befriended him. Gard was in the dumps over Ramona. He'd go get dried out with this fisherman. The guy wouldn't let him drink. This particular occasion they were down in Cabo for a month. Then just before Christmas, this guy who owned the boat called us and said he had some bad news. They had been at dinner in La Paz, and Gard said he had a headache. They were drinking beer and having a good time. Gard said he had a headache and was going to take the dinghy out to the boat and go to sleep. This guy eventually had to get a ride out to his own boat, a big fishing boat. There was no dinghy, no Gard, nothing. So he went to bed. He thought Gard had gone somewhere else. In the morning they started looking and. they found the dinghy down in the bay, beached. Then they found Gard's body five days later, floating. There was no evidence of foul play. Nothing was missing from the boat. We figured he could have just slipped getting out of the dinghy, or getting in. The dinghy was upside-down when they found it. So the guy on the phone said, "What would you like to do?" My wife Nancy said, "Let's have them bury him down there," [and we] sent him $1,000. They buried Gard in La Paz. Eventually we went looking for his grave, but couldn't find it.

GARD CHAPIN, THE LIVING END: AN ORAL HISTORY

Subscribe or Login

Subscribe or Login

Encyclopedia of Surfing

History of Surfing

Interviews

Features

The Sunday Joint