Category: eos-blog

Peter Drouyn of Australia was the first Westerner to surf in China, but just a few months later SURFER Magazine organized a visit with writer Matt George and photographer Warren Bolster, plus pros surfers Rell Sunn, Jon Damm, and Willy Morris. George’s story ran in June 1987 issue. This version has been slightly edited. * ...

Matt George’s piece on “Harbor Bill” Mulcoy ran in the July 1986 issue of SURFER Magazine. This version has been slightly edited.  *   *   * THE PROBLEM Harbormaster Steve Scheiblauer leaned against his office window, steaming coffee mug in hand, and sighed deeply. He had a problem. A big problem. Its name was a shadow...

Matt George’s critique of the ASP world tour ran in the December 1988 issue of SURFER Magazine. This version has been slightly edited. *   *   * During its 12-year existence, the world professional surfing tour has changed the face of the surfing experience, and all of us along with it. Despite the rose-colored view offered...

Geoff Luton’s “Bondi (Concrete) Soul” feature ran in I literally got luck every step of the way but wouldn’t change anything. the May 1970 issue of Surfing World. This version has been slightly edited. *   *   * When Albert suggested I do a story on Bondi for SW I must admit that at first I had...

Phil Jarratt’s profile of Dane Kealoha ran in the January 1979 issue of SURFER Magazine. This version has been slightly edited. *   *   * “I want to try and do everything. As much turning and as many radical maneuvers as I can do—you know, just overpower the wave.” Dane Kealoha speaking. He of the Charles Atlas...

Jamie Reno’s profile on Mike Hynson ran in the July 2001 issue of San Diego magazine. This version has been slightly edited. *   *   * When Del Mar Fair organizers agreed on the theme for this year’s run—“Endless Summer, Endless Fun”—they thought it would be cool to invite the stars of the 1960s surf epic...

Steve Barilotti’s profile on Mike Hynson ran in the August 2007 issue of SURFER. This version has been slightly edited. *   *   * Jimi Hendrix had been dead a year, but the revolution—or at least a movie version of it—kept right on jammin’ without him. Less than a month after Hendrix played a free concert...

KFMB-TV, channel 8, is San Diego’s longtime CBS affiliate. Tune into CBS Evening News and you’d see (depending on the decade) Walter Cronkite or Dan Rather or Katie Couric. Watch the local news and you’d very quickly see reporter Harold Keen, the Bronx-born “Dean of San Diego Journalists.” The footage here consists of Keen interviewing...

Surfer and budding film producer-director Peter Clifton, of Sydney, was 25 when he made The Surfing Years, with funding from the Australian Broadcasting Corporation. The hour-long TV special debuted in late 1966. It follows three surfers and a pair of young women on a cramped one-car road trip from Whale Beach, Sydney, to Noosa Heads,...

The Little Annie Fanny cartoon strip, written and created by Mad magazine editor and cofounder Harvey Kurtzman, was a Playboy staple from 1962 to 1988. “The Surfers” was illustrated by Will Elder, Frank Frazetta, and Jack Davis, and ran in the July 1965 issue. Some history of the strip from the frazettagirls.com website: “In order...

Frank Frazetta, the pompadoured New Yorker artist whose obsessively detailed paintings of shredded axe-wielding barbarians and their Playboyesque women made him the once and forever Michelangelo of fantasy art, did his best-known work in the 1960s and ’70s, and died in 2010 at age 82. Even if you don’t know the name, you’ve seen Frazetta’s...

This Surfing Life, Midget Farrelly’s first book coauthored with Craig McGregor, was published in Australia in 1965, and republished two years later in America, as The Surfing Life. The excerpt below has been slightly edited.  *   *   * I suppose my first ride on a surfboard, if you could call it that, happened when I...

“Ballet on a Surfboard,” Tony Pratt’s review of Midget Farrelly’s 1965 book This Surfing Life (released two years later in America as The Surfing Life) ran in the February 21, 1965, edition of the Sydney Sun-Herald. This version has been slightly edited. *   *   * We have underestimated the surfboard rider. He is a modern...

You Should Have Been Here an Hour Ago, Phil Edwards’s 180-page autobiography, came out in the summer of 1967. A lot of things were lined up in the book’s favor. It was published by powerhouse Harper & Row, home to Mark Twain, Agatha Christie, and Harper Lee, among others, and Endless Summer had just introduced...

Rose Apadoca Jones’ article on Shane Dorian ran in the April 30, 1998, issue of the Los Angeles Times. This version has been slightly edited. *   *   * Abandon all preconceptions of what constitutes surfer style. Versace lambskin boot-cut bants and an ankle-length Gucci peacoat might fit better on a Manhattan boulevard than a Hawaiian...

In 2017, not long after I posted a History of Surfing chapter titled “Surf Fashion, Lightly Salted,” Davis Jones and I did a short Q&A for SURFER Magazine. This version has been slightly edited *   *   * In Justin Housman’s 2015 piece on surf fashion, he writes that, really, fashion can’t ever be wrong. He...

This uncredited article was written by Rio surfer and photojournalist Tito Rosemberg, along with Johnny Hansen, and was published in the January 1968 issue of SURFER.  *   *   * What happens when a carioca takes vira vaca at Baixio? If you’ve ever been to Rio—the meaning is simple: a local Copacabana Beach surfer has taken...

Tito Rosemberg is best known as a hardcore Land Rover-loving surf adventurer. He has visited over 100 countries, lived and worked in many of them, and surfed throughout. Before all that, however, Rosemberg was one of Brazil’s original hardcore carioca surfers, spending his days on the beach at Arpoador, and his nights in the homes,...

Wayfaring Australian surfer Peter Troy has often been cited as the person who introduced surfing to Brazil, in 1964. A SURFER profile on Troy, for example, tells the story as follows: “While in Rio, [Troy] met the son of a French ambassador who had been given a surfboard but couldn’t ride it. As he strolled...

This installment of the Naughton-Peterson travel articles took place mainly in Morocco and Western Sahara, and ran in the July 1975 issue of SURFER. This version has been slightly edited.  *   *   * “So long. Vicky!” “Goodbye. Fela!” “Oh . . . uh . . . our addresses? Yeah, sure! You have a pen?” And...

“Why Don’t Jews Surf?” ran in the Spring 1980 issue of H2O magazine, and was written by A. M. Strand, which is almost certainly a pseudonym for H2O publisher-editor and former top-ranked California surfer Marty Sugarman. An editor’s note advises the reader to “take this article with a grain of sand,” which doesn’t mean the...

Sarah Smith’s LA Times profile on Brad Gerlach ran on August 29, 1986. The full title is “Surfer Gerlach has a Certain Style: Flamboyance, Personality Set Him Apart on Pro Tour.” This version has been slightly edited.  *   *   * When professional surfer Brad Gerlach was 14 months old, his father threw him off the...

Mick Mock’s profile on Sydney surf entrepreneur Shane Stedman ran in the Winter 1999 issue of Deep magazine. This version has been slightly edited.  *   *   * His life is a strand pulled through three decades of Sydney surfing summers: from a 1960s tin-shed surfboard factory, to popout boards and Ugg boots, to a surf...

At the beginning of this clip you see a skinny big-nosed fellow attempting to skateboard. It’s like he’s pretending to be the great alpine skier Stein Eriksen: parallel stance, knees together, shoulders forward and hips moving side to side. Except he loses control and nearly goes face-first into a parking meter. That’s my dad, Winfried...

Judy Trim wrote this essay on her longtime boardmaker and friend Shane Stedman, shortly before she died in 2018. It appeared in The Shane Gang, Stedman’s autobiography, published that same year. This version has been slightly edited. *   *   * Wham, bang, smash—the new era had arrived. Shortboards, powerful bottom turns, re-entries, and radical cutbacks....