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Benson, Becky

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Bermuda

Energetic legal-minded surf-world promotor, organizer and competitor, originally from East Los Angeles; cofounder of International Professional Surfers, the sport's original world tour platform; and long-time advocate for women's issues, in surfing and the workplace.

Paniccia was born (1952) in Los Angeles to an Italian-born cabinet-maker father and homemaker mother, and began surfing at age 13, during visits to her grandparents' home in Huntington Beach. Around this time, Paniccia's father, now a contractor, began taking jobs in Oahu, and the family often went with him. "From a pretty young age," Paniccia later recalled, "I was living two distinctly different lives; one in Los Angeles and the other in Hawaii." In 1970, after graduating from high school, Paniccia moved to Hawaii and began a seven-and-a-half-year balancing act between surfing and college, eventually taking a BA in Communications from the University of Hawaii.

Meanwhile, as a small (5'4", 113 lbs) but deceptively strong regularfooter, Paniccia competed as an amateur in the Hawaii Surfing Association before turning professional, and while her results were middling, her aggressive approach in bigger North Shore waves caught the attention of contest promotor Fred Hemmings, who gave her one of six slots reserved for female surfers in the otherwise all-male 1975 Smirnoff Pro. In huge Sunset Beach surf, Paniccia paddled out a prelim heat that included Eddie Aikau, Sammy Hawk, Owl Chapman, and Terry Fitzgerald. She caught two waves but did not advance.

Earlier that year, Paniccia helped organize the Hawaii Women’s Surfing Hui, with a mission statement describing the group as a "non-profit, educational, and scientific organization formed to advance women in the sport of surfing and to promote public awareness of women surfers as accomplished athletes.” Members included future world tour standouts Rell Sunn, Lynne Boyer, and Linda Davoli, as well as Hui founder Linda McCreary. The group's surfing talent was first-rate, as was their marketing and event organizing (beach cleanups, workshop classes on boardmaking and ding-repair, surf contests for kids), and the local press took notice—although not always to the group's benefit. "Dedicated, achieving sportswomen," a 1975 

 article on the Hui, "often are regarded by both sexes as curiosities who probably are endowed with too many male hormones."

The following year, Paniccia and five other female pro surfers (Becky Benson, Sally Prange, Jericho Poppler, Rell Sunn, and Claudia Bates) competed in a series of pro surfing events with stops in Brazil, South Africa, and Hawaii. This was the same year Hemmings and Randy Rarick began to form International Professional Surfers (IPS), and Hemmings asked Paniccia to be the Women's Division Administrative Director—for which she was paid $100 a month.

To the disappointment of Paniccia and the rest of the women competitors, Hemmings chose not to name a 1976 female world champion (Peter Townend of Australia, meanwhile, finished on top of the male IPS ratings that year and was declared the first pro tour world champion). In 1977—Paniccia's first full year as an administrator—Margo Oberg of Hawaii was named the first pro tour women's champion.

In the Fall of 1978, Paniccia left Hawaii to begin her first year of law school, at Pepperdine. She graduated in 1981, and later that year passed the bar in both California and Hawaii. Rather than work as a lawyer, however, Paniccia became a TV news reporter, and by the end of the decade was a reporter for CNN.

In 1993, after the birth of her second child, Paniccia was fired from her job and replaced by a male reporter with no children. She then filed what turned out to be a landmark workplace discrimination lawsuit against CNN. She won, and the case made national headlines.

Paniccia's first book, published in 2000, written in part as a way for her to process what had been a long and bruising lawsuit, was titled 

Work Smarts for Women: the Essential Sex Discrimination Survival Guide.

 By that time, Paniccia was also teaching Gender and Law classes at Pepperdine. In 1997, she founded the Patti Paniccia Law Scholarship, to assist students, male or female, who attend Pepperdine while also raising children.

Paniccia was featured in a 2015 Surfing Heritage and Culture Center exhibit titled "Trailblazers in Women's Surfing." In 2023, she was the presenter of "Battling the Waves," a BBC radio documentary on the early years of women's pro surfing.

HEIGHT AND WEIGHT AT PEAK of SURFING CAREER: 5’4” 113 pounds

RAISED IN (INCLUDE YEARS MOVED IN/OUT): Los Angeles, Waialua, Huntington Beach. See below for dates.

FATHER'S OCCUPATION (when you were born): Cabinet maker and then later, contractor. (I was the daughter of immigrants. Father born in Italy and my mother born shortly after her family arrived in the US. Father grew up in the Great Depression and did not finish high school (or maybe even elementary school) but he was really really smart and hardworking, and I respected him tremendously.

MOTHER'S OCCUPATION: Homemaker with four kids.

BEGAN SURFING WHERE: Hawaii when my father’s work took him there, and Huntington Beach where my grandparents lived in a small duplex a block from the beach.

IF YOU WENT TO COLLEGE, LIST YEARS ATTENDED, NAME OF COLLEGE, YEAR

GRADUATED, DEGREE: My education doesn’t fit into the boxes. Graduated in Dec 1977 after seven and a half years because I was busy surfing and competing, plus I was paying my own way and working. I went to several colleges. A class here. A class there. In no particular order, I went to Leeward Community College in Waipahu (my favorite because it was only a 20-minute drive from my home in Waialua on the North Shore); San Diego State for a semester but decided the water was too cold so I went home to Hawaii; Los Angeles City College for a year, which was inner city and really expanded my awareness. I loved what I learned there; Hawaii Pacific University for a class or two; University of Hawaii where I escaped with a B.A. in Communication.

CHRONOLOGY OF WHERE YOU'VE LIVED, WITH APPROX. MOVE-IN, MOVE-OUT DATES: Matt, again, I don’t fit into the boxes. My background is so unlike any surfer I’ve ever met, most of whom grew up with beach lives. Born in a pretty poor neighborhood in East Los Angeles – El Sereno and Cyprus Park. In fact, my “front yard” was a billboard and across the street were the train tracks and junkyards. But the hubcap junkyard… I thought that was beautiful. I didn’t know any better. It’s just that they were all hanging up on giant walls and were always glistening in the sun like a fairy tale.

We lived in half of a tiny duplex, which was in the middle of where two big boulevards crossed each other in an X. We were literally in the center of that X so there were cars all around. I climbed the billboard for fun. I wonder what the people driving by thought. I was only about six or seven, but I have a clear memory of it feeling very similar to surfing big waves– the risk, the daredevil attitude. I got a lot of splinters. At an even younger age, we had an old swing set in my front yard that had a two-person teeter totter like swing on it. I would ride the teeter totter thing alone and get it going as fast as I could. Then I would stand up on one of the seats, and then quickly climb up to balance on the handle bars, and then time it so that I could do a giant leap and land swinging on the cross bar that connected the two A-Frame bars. Again, what must have all those people thought when they were driving by. And where was my mother? In fact, I have old movies showing me doing that so they must have known.

Sometime around 1960, we moved to Eagle Rock which was a modest nearby neighborhood that was lower middle class at the time. I have a distinct memory of running around the house the night we moved in, shouting, “We’re rich ! We’re rich! We have a bathtub!” My dad's business kept doing better and better, so a few years later, as his business grew, he put in a pool. Imagine! (He was a contractor by then so he put it in himself.) After that, I spent every day in that pool.

My grandparents moved to Huntington Beach and I would often go stay with them in the summer. In the late 50s and early 60s, Huntington Beach was not an expensive place to live. They lived in a small duplex a block from the beach on 8th and Walnut. I liked it so much. I would fish with my grandmother every morning off the south side of the pier behind the bait house. Not for fun, but for lunch or dinner. We would catch small halibut, which were plentiful back then. And then we would go back home and she would drink wine and fall asleep, and I would go back to the beach alone and watch the surfers, which is what I was watching whenever I was fishing. When they wiped out, there were no leashes back then so I would run get their boards and wade into the water to give it back to them, and ask, “Can I try your board?” Only two ever said yes. 

My dad’s work brought him to Hawaii in the mid-1960s so my dad (and sometimes both parents and sometimes the kids) would join him. So there I was living two distinctly different lives. One in Eagle Rock and the other in Hawaii.

I continue to do that to this day. Two lives. Back and forth. For example, I took the bar in both states. I have close friends in both states. My relatives of Hawaiian descent are in Hawaii but I also have close relatives in Los Angeles and in Italy. (I am a dual citizen of the US and Italy.) My neighbors in Waialua have been my neighbors for more than 50 years, but I’m not always there because my and my husband’s careers keep us in California a lot.

So I guess the short answer is that I have just lived constantly going back and forth between the two homes. I prefer Hawaii. I prefer hanging with the local guys and gals I hung out with in my teen years - really formative years for surfing. We lived (and still do) in Waialua. At the time it was a non-expensive residential area of the North Shore with only local people living there – mostly sugar cane workers who worked at the Waialua Sugar Mill. I still deeply love Waialua but the Sunset Beach crowd has been moving in lately along with a lot of new people from the mainland, so it’s changing. I also still have friends from Eagle Rock, from law school, and from my CNN years.

I left for law school in the late 1970s. Walked away from the North Shore and competition, but not from surfing. I've never walked away from surfing. I chose Pepperdine Law School on the beach at Malibu and started surfing Malibu and places north.

CHRONOLOGY OF YOUR WORK LIFE; PLACES OF EMPLOYMENT, JOB TITLES, DATES

LOL. I’ve always struggled with these kinds of questions because again, I don’t fit into the boxes but…I’m trying here.

I worked at Kentucky Fried Chicken in Los Angeles starting at age 15. It’s allowable if your parents sign a work permit. I hated it but needed the money.

I worked as a waitress at Jerry’s Sweet Shop in Haleiwa in the early 1970s. It was a local breakfast and lunch dive. Any surfer who was around the North Shore back then will remember it.

When Kuilima opened (now Turtle Bay Resort) I left Jerry’s to work there as a banquet server.

And of course, I ran the women’s division of International Professional Surfing (IPS) beginning in 1976. I got paid $100/month. Not because Fred Hemmings was cheap. The fact is that he wasn’t making any money at that stage, and was paying me and Randy Rarick out of his pocket.

I went to law school on student loans that took years to pay off. I was a law clerk for the summer of 1980 for a Honolulu law firm. I stayed in Hawaii for the Fall semester of my third year and got a full time law clerk externship with a federal judge, plus while I was there, I took two classes at the University of Hawaii Richardson School of Law. When I came back to the mainland and was still in law school, I clerked for the US Attorney’s Office in Los Angeles – Criminal Division.

I got lawyer job offers both in Hawaii and California, but after passing the Hawaii and California bars, I decided to be a TV news reporter instead. I started working as a news writer for KTLA, and then got my first on-air job at South Bay Cable News in Manhattan Beach as a reporter and anchor. It was like public access TV. We were all novices and it was not great production quality, but I cut my teeth and loved becoming immersed in the South Bay during that period. And unlike other news people, I always gave great surf reports! South Bay surfers would sometimes see me on stories and thank me for that. Were you around Matt in the early 1980's?

Then I took a job at KEYT-ABC Santa Barbara where I stayed for a few years. (And surfed Rincon, the Ranch and many other great places)

In TV news, the bigger the audience, the higher the pay since the advertising time sells for more. That means that those who climb the highest and are most respected work in either New York or LA, or for a network such as the national news (like the CBS Evening News with Norah O’Donnell) or for a worldwide network (CNN). I guess I drank that Kool-Aid because from Santa Barbara, I took a job at KCOP Channel 13 in Los Angeles (now defunct). In Los Angeles, I began covering a lot of serious, important news.

From there, I took a job as a network correspondent for CNN in the Los Angeles bureau. My audience was 83 countries and I was covering serious important news plus traveling throughout the western United States and a few of the nearby countries.

CNN let me go for getting pregnant with our second child, and such were the times that the executive vice president actually put that in writing, telling me that I “should think about mommydom for a career.” I went from being what he had publicly said was “one of his strongest reporters” to being an undesirable mommy of babies. Even my LA bureau chief told me that I should “stay home and take care of my two children.” I sued them. I became the poster child for pregnancy discrimination. It garnered national news for a year while we battled it out. In the end, I won. I started a scholarship with some of the money to assist law students (men or women) who were primary caregivers for minor children while they were in law school. I never returned to broadcast news. Even though I appeared strong to others throughout, the truth is (and I’ve never shared this publicly) that two years of litigation knocked the wind out of me. Times have changed and employers can no longer do this, but they sent private investigators to explore every part of my life. They sent subpoenas to everyone around me. They made wild untruthful accusations. But in the end, everyone in the CNN Bureau testified for me, except for the two men I sued, one of those men’s wives, and an entertainment reporter who was terrified of losing her job.

When it was over, I was afraid to take another news job because my lawsuit, which had garnered national news coverage, affected people differently. I either walked on water or I was the she-devil herself. I was afraid that my broadcast career would get sabotaged in ways I couldn’t imagine or predict. I was so exhausted from being challenged. CNN told the judge they had spent $400,000 on just their investigators and lawyers. Like I said, some of the things they did are no longer legal, like subpoenaing my gynecological records, parking private investigators in the park across the street from my house, sending fake survey people to my door, etc.

I put together a proposal to write a book to help other women. I managed to sign with a well-respected New York city book agent who sold my book to Ballantine Books, a division of Random House. They paid me to write it and sent me on a nationwide book tour in 2000. It was called “WorkSmarts for Women: The Essential Sex Discrimination Survival Guide.” But it was a different time and some interviewers were really put off by a woman asking for equality in the workplace. It was interesting and eye-opening doing interviews around different parts of the country and getting challenged about that.

I had started teaching law school part time in 1987 (only one class a semester) while still a journalist. I started out teaching Media and Law given my expertise as a journalist and that I had been on a lot of ABA and California State Bar Committees and Task Forces having to do with the First Amendment. And of course, I was living the First Amendment with my cameras in the courtroom. I instituted a course “Gender and Law” in 1991 after I lived through the pregnancy discrimination case. And then a few years after that, I instituted “Employment Discrimination.” But again, I only teach one class at a time because I am busy. So I am part time there; not a tenured professor nor did I ever want to be that.

LIST OF MAJOR AMATEUR COMPETITION WINS or TITLES: AND

BRIEF DESCRIPTION OF YOUR CAREER IN SURFING, ACHIEVEMENTS, ETC:

I'm being candid here. To be honest, I usually sucked in competition because I could only surf North Shore Waves well, and they always sent the women out in small slop. I never knew what to do with myself. I was used to carving big bottom turns. But most of the waves in those contests demanded a flat bottom board doing a lot of little maneuvers with practically no bottom turn. That's not an excuse because a great surfer can surf in any conditions.

First I surfed in a lot of HSA (Hawaii Surfing Association) amateur contests. I think the highest I got was a third place at a Haleiwa contest, which wasn’t bad considering those competing against me were the top women in Hawaii at the time. The waves were substantial in that contest. I did that for a few years in the first half of the 70s. When I moved to San Diego for a semester in Spring of 1973, I joined WSA (Western Surfing Association) and surfed in a couple contests and took a couple 2nd or 3rd places but nothing spectacular.

The first pro contest I surfed in was in Malibu for WISA’s all women pro event in 1975 but the waves were pretty small and I didn’t advance.

The first real pro contest I surfed in was the Smirnoff against the men in 1975. In my heat were Eddie Aikau, Sammy Hawk, Owl Chapman and Terry Fitzgerald. It was in 

 big waves at Sunset that year. There was no “priority” back then. It was just a free for all…whoever could catch the wave closest to the peak had priority. I caught two waves, which at the time, was not bad considering who was competing with me to catch them. But they take your top three waves so I got last in my heat.

I qualified to get invited to the first Lancer’s Women’s World Cup held in January 1976, and took an 8th place.

And of course, I surfed on the first women's world pro surfing tour. There were only six of us as you know – me, Becky Benson, Sally Prange, Jericho Poppler, Rell Sunn and Claudia Bates Kravitz. Jericho and Becky won those contests.

I do have to say though, almost none of the other women at the time were surfing the North Shore when it got big; not like Sally, Becky, her sister Blanche and I regularly did and were able to do. But all I have to show for that are the guys who were around at the time who remember me. There were no contests for that.

CURRENTLY LIVING IN (CITY, STATE, COUNTRY):

La Cañada Flintridge, CA (part of the greater Los Angeles area) and Waialua, HI

Greetings from Florence!
Here are the answers to your questions.

So, at the end of the 1976 IPS season, the debut year, when Fred and Randy pulled the women's title out from under your feet, you then signed on to run the women's side in 1977, right?

No, Fred had me working for IPS for the second half of 1976. He just decided on his own not to name a women's champion without telling me. Even Randy recently asked me why Fred did that so either he wasn't in on the decision or he just can't remember.
Did you have a title?Administrative Director, Women's Division, IPS. See the 1977 newsletters attached, which lists my title. (We didn't send any newsletters in 1976.) And note the point I always make about how (example) Gabriel Medina was THE world champion and Stephanie Gilmore was the WOMEN'S world champion, as if the women's division was an afterthought. The IPS newsletters list Randy as "administrative director" and me as "women's executive director." Randy should have been "men's executive director."


You mention that you earned 100 a month (hahah! that's pretty much EOS wages!), but how long did that last? 

Yes, $100/month. Randy made $200./month. But that was never a problem because the Equal Pay Act is equal pay for equal work, i.e., equal time, effort or responsibility. And Randy had many more men surfers to manage so Randy's job entailed more. I don't advertise the fact that I was paid half as much because I think people are apt to take it out of context and unduly criticize Fred or Randy.


When did you quit that and begin law school? 

It lasted through the 1978 season. Although I left for law school in September 1978, I had already coordinated the 1978 contests before I left and was able to keep track of them and tally them from Pepperdine in Malibu and continue most, not all, of the communication from law school, but obviously I couldn't go on the tour. Not that I could afford to. I couldn't even afford to go for the first Australia contest in 1977.
I think I mentioned that the reason that some think IPS was formed in 1977 was because of the Aussies. They just didn't want to be part of the women's 1976 tour the first year. By the second year (1977) they realized that other countries were doing so and they agreed to have an IPS-sanctioned women's contest. For the Aussies, 1977 was their first year seeing the women so they have mistakenly documented for years that 1977 was the first year. And now, lots of people think that.
IPS was a group of contests that agreed to be IPS-sanctioned. That meant that they paid a fee, applied by our deadline, and agreed to certain judging and prize money standards. IPS set all that up in 1976. That is separate from naming a world champion. The first IPS tour was in 1976. It wasn't until close to the end of 1976 that Fred decided to name a champion. But he only named a men's champion; not a women's champion. Naming a tour champion was not done for the women until 1977. Between us, I think it stems from Jericho raising a fuss that she was not going to be named champion. She wanted to include points from a contest that had not met the IPS prize money standard. So the title would have gone to Margo. I think Fred got sandwiched in between those two, and he got scared off and decided, on his own, to just not name one. He didn't even tell me he was going to do that. I didn't know until I was at the announcement and heard it for the first time. And then Jericho and blamed me. It never ends. But I honestly see both sides of this. From Jericho's perspective, it wasn't her fault that the contest folks didn't treat us well and wouldn't give the prize money they had promised so that their contest didn't meet the IPS standards they had promised to meet. On the other side, I see how Margo could say, "Hey I got the most points for all the IPS-sanctioned contests." Also, had Margo known that Fred was going to name a champion, she (like Shaun and Mark) would have traveled in 1976. But the bottom line is that Jericho never beat Margo. She beat her once in a Smirnoff but that was not direct competition. Instead, they put one woman in the heat of all men. Then, the woman who got the highest scores in her heat compared to the other women "won." That meant they sent out some of us in great conditions and others of us in terrible conditions. It wasn't fair to compare the waves scores from someone's early morning glassy manageable waves to blown out huge Sunset storm surf. That's the only time Jericho "beat" Margo.
Fred ran into a lot of complaints even for naming a men's champion because he decided to do so at the last minute. As a result, a lot of the men pro surfers objected since only PT had gone on all the tour contests so he had the highest number of points. In reality, I don't think PT had even won a contest; he would have had to beat Shaun and Mark and others. They all complained that had they known Fred was going to name a champion, they would have traveled as much as PT did.


Paniccia, Patti

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