A Fine Little Revival

Jack London Loves Purple

California: The New Frontier

Beachboy Life

Duke Kahanamoku

Surf Shooting Down Under

The Bronzed Islander Shows How

Surfing in the Jazz Age

Tom Blake Redesigns the Sport

What Depression?

When Clubbies Ruled Australia

Surfboard as Woodcraft

Palos Verdes Surfing Club

San Onofre: the Nearest Faraway Place

Riding the Hot Curl

Enter Makaha

Death at Waimea

The Overwhelming North Shore

Gliding Return

Despite the vaudevillian nature of the beachboys, Waikiki was often referred to as “Society’s winter paradise.” Early Hawaii Tourist Bureau brochures didn’t just describe the islands’ dancing waters and shimmering rainbows and gleaming coral sands. They also gave assurances that visitors were of the right sort—“Cosmopolites lured from the far reaches of the earth”—and that tennis, golf, tea, and bridge would be included on the vacation schedule, along with outrigger canoe rides and surf-boarding and the rest of the local entertainments.

By the 1910s, Waikiki had just a handful of tourist hotels, but they were all well-staffed and beautifully appointed. The grandest was the four-hundred-room Arabian-themed Royal Hawaiian, which was conceived in part as an architectural homage to Rudolph Valentino and finished in a coral-pink semigloss. These hotels attracted a steady flow of actors, athletes, monarchs, and industrialists. Douglas Fairbanks was an early visitor and tried his hand at canoe surfing, as did Amelia Earhart and Prince Edward, the future Duke of Windsor. Babe Ruth, fresh off the boat, shirtless, and flaunting an incredible two-tone farmers tan, strolled down from the Royal Hawaiian and chatted easily with the beachboys. Seven-year-old Shirley Temple stood next to Dude Miller and Chick Daniels as she was presented with her own redwood paipo board. The first Hollywood movie crews arrived in Honolulu during the Depression; surfing clips flashed briefly onscreen in 

, with Dolores del Rio, and Bing Crosby’s 

. In the summer of 1933, a sunny Art Deco surfing illustration was used on the cover

Surfing in turn had its own glamour-generating force in Duke Kahanamoku, an Olympic gold medal swimmer who, by the start of World War I, was globally recognized as wave-riding’s grand patriarch. The first of nine siblings, Kahanamoku was born to a big working-class pureblood Hawaiian family. Duke was named after his father, an office clerk for the Honolulu Police Department, who had been named after Alfred, the Duke of Edinburgh. A ninth-grade dropout, Duke spent his days on the beach, surfing, swimming, and canoeing; he sometimes dove off the harbor wharf to grab coins tossed by passengers on incoming steamers, and eventually earned a few dollars a week as a beachboy.

In 1911, by then a beautifully muscled twenty-one-year-old, Kahanamoku cofounded the Hui Nalu surfing and canoe club. He was easygoing around friends and family, but diffident and largely unreadable to everyone else. “By nature,” one biographer later wrote, “he was as effusive as a cigar-store Indian.” Though known as one of Waikiki’s best surfers, Kahanamoku put most of his energy into swimming; Hui Nalu had in fact been created in part to satisfy a swim competition rule that all entrants be affiliated with an organization.

That summer, at Hawaii’s first sanctioned Amateur Athletic Union swim meet, held in an ad-hoc “stadium” between two Honolulu Harbor piers, Kahanamoku smashed the AAU 100-yard freestyle record by more than four and a half seconds, and less than an hour later broke the 50-yard record as well. He became America’s favorite for the 1912 Olympics in Stockholm. By the time he arrived in Sweden it was all but preordained that Kahanamoku would win a gold medal and set a world record in the 100-meters—and he did both, easily, pausing at one point in the final heat to look back at the competitors in his wake. Kahanamoku returned to Waikiki an international sports hero. He went on to win more Olympic medals in 1920 and 1924 (World War I forced the cancellation of the 1916 Games); his sprint times at age forty-two were as fast as those he'd turned in at age twenty.

Kahanamoku’s swimming achievements were towering, but they didn’t define, or even redefine, the sport, which had roots in antiquity and a long, venerable list of champions. Surfing was a different story. In Hawaii, and for a few devotees in California, it may have been the activity of choice. But to the masses—most of whom knew of the sport only through magazine or newspaper articles, newsreels, or perhaps live demonstrations—it remained nothing more than a fringe recreational activity. For many, it wasn’t even clearly a “sport,” since it wasn’t scored, measured, timed, or otherwise quantified.

Kahanamoku changed this. Through his gracious example, surfing, while still exotic, was made accessible. He didn’t set out with a single-minded notion to make surfing converts, the way George Freeth did. It’s not even clear that he was the era’s best rider. One eyewitness later recalled that his younger brother Sam Kahanamoku was “without a peer in surfing” during the 1920s and early 1930s. But Duke was famous and well-traveled, eager to try new waves, and happy to pass on instruction. He was so much at ease on a board that the ocean itself appeared less dangerous. All that, plus he was tall and broad-shouldered, with high cheekbones, a radiant full-lipped smile, and a brushed-back crown of thick black hair—one admirer fairly described him as “the most magnificent human male God ever put on earth.” Surfing would have caught on without Duke Kahanamoku. But not as quickly, and not with the same opening bolt of style and élan.

Kahanamoku began surfing at age eight, just before the turn of the century, and he may have been informally mentored by George Freeth, who was seven years older and had been surfing at least a year or two longer. In 1911, eight months before his spectacular AAU performance at Honolulu Harbor, he “authored” a lengthy first-person 

 feature titled “Riding the Surfboard” (the article was in fact ghost written by 

 publisher Alexander Hume Ford). Kahanamoku was introduced to readers as the “recognized native Hawaiian champion surf rider,” and the article’s opening photograph showed him riding casually for shore with a boy perched on his shoulders.

Kahanamoku then rose to fame almost in double vision—the esoteric wave-rider and the champion swimmer. After the 1912 Olympics, during his roundabout return passage from Stockholm, he began the ambassadorial work for which he is best known. First, Kahanamoku spent a few weeks giving swimming demonstrations in Western Europe—thousands of excited Parisians made their way past the 17th arrondissement to watch him thrash up the Seine River. Then Kahanamoku returned to the US mainland, where he continued the swimming performances and also gave a surfing exhibition in Atlantic City. It’s unclear where Kahanamoku got a surfboard, but he opened with a bang, tossing his board off the end of the famous Steel Pier, diving in after it, then surfing in alongside the pilings.

California surfing pioneer Sam Reid, then a seven-year-old onlooker, was standing on the Atlantic City boardwalk when Kahanamoku finished his first ride, and he broke into wild applause along with the rest of the crowd. “The next day,” Reid said decades later, voicing what must have been a fairly common response to a Kahanamoku surfing performance, “I almost got a whipping when I brought home the family ironing board, wet and dripping after my first experience at catching waves. Boy against the sea! I used the ironing board for the next four years.”

Kahanamoku also bodysurfed in New York, at Rockaway Beach, and Sea Gate (just a few miles southeast of Manhattan), and in mid-July he gave a surfing demonstration for over a thousand people in Long Beach, California. Two years later he was back in Waikiki, popular but poor as he moved from one low-paying job the next. He refused offers to swim for money in order to retain his amateur status, so he could compete in the next Olympic Games. In late 1914, “running away from my problems,” as Kahanamoku told a friend—money worries, mostly—he sailed for Australia, where he could more or less trade swimming demonstrations for room and board.

He was tall and broad-shouldered, with high cheekbones, and a radiant smile—“the most magnificent human male God ever put on earth,” as one admirer put it. Surfing would have caught on without Duke. But not as quickly, and not with the same opening bolt of style and élan.

Chapter: 2

Gliding Return

Duke Kahanamoku

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