Dickie Cross’ death at Waimea Bay in 1943 remained the sport’s darkest, most disturbing cautionary tale. George Downing, Wally Froiseth, and a few other Hawaiian surfers drove out to the North Shore occasionally over the next ten years, but for the most part it went unridden.
It was the Californians who turned the North Shore into a surfing obsession, beginning in 1953 when Flippy Hoffman and Bob Simmons, having spent three months in close quarters with their fellow mainlanders at Makaha, loa...
