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

Hawaii invented surfing, and Waikiki remained by far the easiest and most agreeable place in the world to ride waves. Yet by the 1930s, Southern California was uniquely qualified to begin reinventing the sport. America’s capitalist-consumer culture had already transformed Los Angeles from an adobe village outpost into America’s most innovative and forward-looking big city. Now, it would turn its attention for the first time to surfing.

The first commercially made surfboards were built, stored, packaged, advertised, and shipped by Pacific System Homes, a light industrial company sprawled over twenty-five acres in south Los Angeles. Founded in 1908, Pacific System soon became the world’s leading manufacturer of precut houses, and by 1930 the firm had produced more than twenty thousand read-to-build kits—popular models included the “Waikiki Cottage,” the “Patio Farmhouse,” and the “Distinctive Spanish Home.” Myers Butte was the son of a company cofounder, and in 1929, after the stock market crashed, Butte dropped out of Stanford, returned to Los Angeles and the family business, and convinced his father that building surfboards might be a profitable Pacific System sideline. It’s not clear whether Butte himself tried surfing, but like any other young Southern Californian he went to the beach often and knew the sport was on the rise. The subsidiary interest he organized was called the Swastika Surf-Board Company—in 1930 the hooked-cross design was recognized, if at all, as an obscure good luck symbol; it wasn’t yet associated with Germany’s Nazi party—and a small swastika was wood-burned into the tail section of each board.

The first Pacific System boards were finless single-slab redwood planks weighing 70 pounds. Butte knew this was too heavy, so the following year he made wholesale buys on light kiln-dried balsawood. From 1932 on, Pacific System boards (all planks; no Blake-style hollows) had a balsa core and redwood on the sides, nose, and tail. Half-inch strips of redwood or mahogany might also be laid along the board’s vertical axis. The laminated mixed-wood designs were nearly as strong as the one-piece redwoods, but much lighter—a 10-foot Swastika weighed just 45 pounds—and each board, with its contrasting and perfectly interlocked pieces, looked as if it had been pulled from Frank Lloyd Wright’s sketch pad.

Butte hired Pete Peterson, Whitey Harrison, Calvin “Tulie” Clark, and other top Southern California surfer-craftsmen to make his line of boards. They usually worked in pairs, shaping and sanding, varnishing and finishing. Commercially-made surfboards were a luxury item during the Depression, and there weren’t many orders; Peterson’s workload in 1938 amounted to a dozen boards. Custom jobs were accepted, but most boards were built to preset dimensions—the 1938 line consisted of three “Hawaiian” models, a 14-foot paddleboard, two “kiddie boards,” and an aqua-plane. These were sold in sporting goods stores, beach clubs, and department stores like Robinson’s and the Broadway. (Later that year, when swastika-draped Nazis marched through Austria, Butte hurriedly changed the name of his line to “Waikiki Surf-Boards.”)

Pacific System spent freely on surfboard advertising and promotions, and Butte was expert at getting his boards into the hands of celebrities, including Duke Kahanamoku and Shirley Temple. A new Pacific System board retailed for $35—as compared to $8 and change for a DIY model—making it the sport’s original status item. Pacific System boards were also surfing’s first export product, and a 1932 shipment of a half dozen Swastikas to Waikiki was novel and newsworthy enough to get coverage in the Los Angeles papers.

Dale Velzy, destined to become the most celebrated boardmaker of the 1950s, was a schoolboy when the Pacific System boards were at their peak. “The Swastikas were real droolers,” Velzy recalled. “I remember these brothers, Roger and Bob Bacon. They had two brand-new ones that they hauled around in their candy-apple red ’36 Ford convertible. God, those boards were beautiful sitting in that cherry Ford. It hurt to look at them, they were so bitchin’.”

Meanwhile, in 1932, Tom Blake secured a patent on his hollow surfboard—or “water sled,” as Blake called it on the Patent Office filing papers, keeping the board’s potential uses as open as possible. He then entered into the first of a series of licensing agreements to manufacture, market, and sell his signature line of boards. One of the firms Blake signed up with made airplane wings, another was a ladder manufacturer; making surfboards, for all of the companies, was never more than a tiny sideline operation. Blake himself designed and built the prototypes, but almost all of the boards made under his name were assembled by professional woodworkers of one kind or another. The best Blake hollows came from the Robert Mitchell Company, a midsized Cincinnati furniture plant; they were built with African mahogany, had an elegant two-tone keyhole design on the deck, and were cross-hatched on the deck for traction. A small round sticker reading “A Genuine Tom Blake Hollow Surf-Board” was placed near the tail; Blake himself was featured in the middle of the sticker, in color, smiling as he rode one of his own boards, arms extended in a pose of casual mastery. The Mitchell boards were available only in Hawaii and along the East Coast, and were pitched to the upscale buyer: ad copy promised the Blake hollow had the look of a “miniature yacht.” Though monastically uninterested in material goods for the most part, Blake had the company build him a one-off board completely from teak.

Where Pacific System boards were designed and marketed primarily as wave-riding craft, the Blake hollow was offered as a paddleboard, a rescue board, a tow-board, and a water polo board. The companies Blake signed up with likely believed that paddleboarding, not surfing, was where the real sales were; paddling required no real skill and could be done in any body of water, including rivers and lakes. Blake himself never seemed comfortable with the idea of the surfboard as solely an instrument of pleasure. His design required not just a moral, heroic purpose—the Blake hollow was endorsed by the Red Cross and beach lifeguard companies everywhere—but multi-use functionality. Blake often came up with uses for the hollow board that had nothing to do with surfing: he used it to shoot down river rapids, and he created the “sailing surfboard,” as well as a plate-glass “look box” that let you peer through the board’s deck and “enjoy the beauty that is hidden underwater.”

None of it had much effect on the bottom line. Never mind what the brochures said, paddleboarding wasn’t really a sport, it was just exercise. Add-ons like sail rigging and the “look box” gathered dust on the warehouse shelf. Lifeguards might use the Blake hollow, but its obvious first function was riding waves. The problem was that the worldwide surfing population in the 1930s remained below five thousand. The sales figures are long lost, but Blake said his semiannual royalty checks rarely topped $100 and were often below $40. Pacific System Homes did no better: just fifteen boards were made in a given batch, and the boardmaking operation shut down completely after America entered World War II. Surfing wasn’t yet big enough to support even a cottage industry.

But who needed a fancy store-bought board, anyway?

 believed that “any amateur woodworker” could build a redwood/balsa plank surfboard, and the magazine’s 1935 do-it-yourself article was there to help. The job required perfectly cut strips of redwood and balsa, as well as some dowel-and-glue joining, which made for a reasonable intermediate-level woodworking project. The hollow board was a different story. Tom Blake’s 1937 

 article on how to build a 12-foot “hollow Hawaiian surfboard” was dense with cutaway views and blueprints, and its materials list included 32 copper nails, six gross of flathead brass screws, a brass drain plug, twenty yards’ worth of spooled cotton cloth seam tape, marine glue, seam compound, and spar varnish. Huge amounts of DIY effort were spent on these boards. And a lot of them, upon launch, gurgled quietly and sank to the bottom.

The Pacific System surfboards were stunning, made of redwood, mahagony, and balsa; each one, with its contrasting and perfectly interlocked pieces, looked as if it had been pulled from Frank Lloyd Wright's sketch pad.

Chapter: 2

Gliding Return

Surfboard as Woodcraft

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