“The Wild, the Innocent and the E Street Surfers,” by Jim Kempton, ran in the August 1979 issue of SURFER. Educated guess here: Kempton, the magazine’s associated editor at the time, was on the East Coast to cover the world tour events, while Springsteen was either on break from the Darkness on the Edge of...

Kimball Taylor’s profile on Dean Randazzo ran in the June 2010 issue of SURFER. This version has been slighted shortened and edited. *  *  * Sitting across from Dean “The Jersey Devil” Randazzo in a legendary Margate sub shop named Dino’s brought on a kind of intimidation I’ve never felt before. The cramped booths of...

“Chubby,” by Kimo Hollinger, ran in the March 1976 issue of SURFER. It has been slightly edited and shortened. *  *  * He stood about 5’9″ and weighed roughly 300 pounds. When queried by an airline stewardess as to his exact weight, he beckoned for her ear and shouted in it “282!” He often said...

Characters and stories drive Nat Young’s eminently readable new book, Church of the Open Sky. Young, a Rushmore-level figure in our sport, is complicated, almost overwhelming, a man of multitudes, to a point where everything in the vicinity bends toward him. Yet as a writer, he is and always has been incredibly generous. In Open...

SURFER ran this article in the July 1968 issue, when editor-to-be Drew Kampion was still a mere stringer. The Santa Cruz was held on the weekend of April 6-7, at the Rivermouth. SURFER went big on the coverage (seven pages; the Duke Invitational, held a few months earlier, got just six), because this was the...

Joey Hamasaki, runner-up in the 1966 World Championships, was the smoothest female surfer of her generation; maybe the smoothest ever, although I won’t argue with Steph Gilmore fans. Like nearly all the great Hawaiian-born surfers of her day, Hamasaki borrowed heavily from style-lord Paul Strauch—you see it in the bowed stance and proudly upright torso,...

Bob Feigel was the advertising director at Surf Guide magazine and managed the original Makaha Skateboard team. The image seen here ran in the September 1, 1961, issue of Life magazine, as part of a photo essay titled “The Mad Happy Surfers.” Interestingly, while hand gestures are clearly intended to be a Nazi salute, the...

“Linda Benson: the Pace-Setter,” by Paul Holmes, ran in the November 2003 issue of Longboard magazine. This version has been slightly shortened and edited.  *  *  *  It’s high summer in Southern California, the beach parking lots are jammed and the surf spots packed. Atop the bluffs overlooking Pipes, just south of Swami’s in the...

“He’s just back here,” said Vince Lawder, and led the way down the Old Burleigh Theatre Arcade toward the Mexican restaurant. “He’s been living in Katherine.” Katherine? Where the hell was that? “Way up there, mate. Northern Territory, south of Darwin.” I tried to imagine it as we walked back toward the restaurant and the thick-set...

Earlier this week I posted about a group of Northland New Zealand teens who, in 1959, not really knowing what surfboards were supposed to look like, decided to build their own equipment and—surprise! What they came up with was incredibly if accidentally anti-longboard. Very 1971, in fact. After a couple of years, when the outside...

Mike Cooney, one of the original wave-riders from the Northland New Zealand, got in touch with me a few years back and over the course of a few emails, photos included, explained how surfing came to his area in the late 1950s. What Mike described was in most ways the standard gung-ho teenage DIY surfing-origin...

Matt Warshaw’s coverage of the World Professional Inland Surfing Championships, a WCT event, ran in the November 1985 issue of SURFER. This version has been slightly shortened and edited.  *  *  *  What was certain? It was the first-ever World Inland Surfing Championship, held in Allentown, Pennsylvania, and Tommy Carroll, on paper and by general...

This was the feature story of the July 27, 1912, issue of Scientific American—which, hang your head SURFER—is the nation’s oldest continuously published magazine, and hats off to ironman editor Orson Munn, who helmed SA for sixty years, that’s SIX-ZERO, starting in 1847. Other articles in this issue include “Heart-Stopping as a Profession,” and “The...

This article ran in the August 22 issue of Teenagers’ Weekly magazine, published out of Australia. The magazine cover shows a group of surfers on the beach (young Midget Farrelly is front and center), with a cover blurb reading “Australian Wins International Surfing Championship in Peru.” Bob Pike had indeed just won the small-wave event...

The first issue of SURFER is a strange little creature, a 36-page work of outsider art that, depending on your age and station in 1960, when the magazine hit the stands, might either be venerated or tossed. At some point in the not-too-distant future, I’ll take a closer look at how that original SURFER magazine...

This short film came at me right out of left field a few years back and became my favorite bit of deep-underground surf media. For sure it has the wackiest opening you’ll ever see in a surf movie: Hollywood star Eddie Albert, 59 and very shirtless, taking a break from his Green Acres duties, looks...

The article ran in the February 1968 issue of Petersen’s Surfing. Dick Graham was Surfing’s publisher, editor, and top photographer; Duke Boyd, better known as one of the original surfwear magnates, was the magazine’s managing editor. This article below has been slightly edited and shortened.  *  *  *  The contest of all contests is over....

This article ran in the August 14, 1909, issue of Collier’s magazine. Author Alexander Hume Ford is best known in the surfing world as the founder of the Outrigger Canoe Club, and for launching writer Jack London into the surf at Waikiki in 1907.   *  *  * There are long rolling billows on both of our...

“Haole Go Home” ran in the January 1970 issue of SURFER, with a short introduction from the editor as follows: “Relationships between the Hawaiians and the haoles (newcomers, non-residents, visitors) have not always been smooth, surfers included. Lately, stories of beatings, stomps and punchouts by angry locals have been widely circulated. Often the punchout comes...

Full-page Quiksilver ad from the October 1993 issue of Surfing. North Shore surfing legend Marvin Foster, while serving time on a weapons charge, sent this letter to Quiksilver exec Danny Kwock. Foster was released not long after, but soon broke parole, went underground (sort of; he competed in the 1995 Quiksilver-Eddie contest), returned to prison,...

Tim Baker’s 1994 profile of Hawaiian underground surf legend Marvin Foster is so good it deserves to be read in full. What sort of a man carries terrorist weapons in the trunk of his car? I was about to find out. Marvin Foster had been out of jail for a week after serving almost a...

Derek Rielly of BeachGrit emailed last week to tell me about a big-budget Aussie-based drama series called Barons, which goes into production next year and will track a semi-fictitious group of surf industry players who (according to Mediaweek), “from their tiny garages and surf coast shopfronts . . . create billion-dollar empires.” When Derek and...