Chapter: 2
Gliding Return
- 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
Surfing in the Jazz Age
Corona del Mar, 1920s
PCH, north of Santa Monica, 1920s
Waikiki, 1929. Photo: Ray Jerome Baker
Malibu, 1920s
Bellyboarding in Cornwall, UK, early 1920s
A warm summer Sunday afternoon in Corona del Mar, 1928: the economy was roaring along, the cheerier side of early twentieth-century American culture—Hollywood and jazz, Mae West and Buck Rogers, Gershwin and Valentino—was in its brightest bloom, and several hundred people turned out for the debut Pacific Coast Surf Riding Championships.
In a 1918 public service photo, Duke Kahanamoku sits on the beach in Waikiki in his woolen two-piece bathing suit, solemnly knitting a sweater to be care-packaged off to American troops on the Western Front. It’s a touching, if discordant image. World War II, a generation later, would inadvertently reshape surfing from top to bottom. But the Great War was as psychologically removed from the world’...
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