Malibu Swing

Surfboard design rocketed forward in the postwar years. It was a group effort, but Bob Simmons, a knobby misanthropic engineer from Pasadena, was the person who got things started. Simmons was strange, brilliant, and experimental, permanently ungroomed, and often angry—he once answered some bullying by a group of Palos Verde Cove locals by splitting open the decks of their hollow boards with an ax. He died by surfing misadventure at a young age, which helped secure his place in the top rank o...