The Beach Boys sang “Everybody’s gone surfin',” midway through the boom, and it sure looked that way driving up Pacific Coast Highway on a summer morning with a new groundswell pumping in. But how many surfers were there, really? In the pre-Gidget 1950s, a common estimate was that there were about 10,000 surfers in America—although the actual figure may have been half that. By 1965, foam-maker Gordon Clark guessed that the nation's surfing population had jumped to 200,000, and the estimates o...
Chapter 4:
Ten-Year Boom
- Gidget the All-Powerful /
- The Rebel Next Door /
- Hobie vs Velzy vs the IRS /
- Better Surfing Through Chemistry /
- Summer on the Inside /
- Surf Fashion, Lightly Salted /
- Surfing the Newsstand /
- Process of Elimination /
- Oil City Showdown /
- The Jazz Stylings of Phil Edwards /
- Technicolor Surf Boom /
- Heroes and Villains /
- Blackball Blues /
- Dick Dale, Destroyer of Amps /
- Surfing in Five-Part Harmony /
- Tokyo to Tel Aviv /
- Flight of the Larrikin /
- Bob Evans Means Business /
- Midget Wins It All /
- But Will it Play in New York? /
- Houses of the Holy /
- We Own the Sidewalks /
- Beautiful from any Angle /
- Duke's Big Contest /
- Can You Handle the Penetrator? /
- Girls, Don't Panic! /
- David Nuuhiwa Walks on Water /
- An Invincible Summer /
