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

Ten-Year Boom

The origins for the word “hodad” are long forgotten, but it came into use during the '50s and was popular enough to get an entry in the Oxford English Dictionary: “An ill-mannered or boastful surfer.” By the early '60s, according to the sport’s nascent organizational establishment, “hodads” were interchangeable with the “bad element,” and their actions were responsible for what was often called “the surfing problem.” The United States Surfing Association and the surf press did a lot of hand-wringing over this issue during the early boom years. 

 John Severson said it was time to launch a “clean-up campaign” from within the ranks. 

 editorialized that the “tough boys” and “showoffs” and “nonconformists” in the sport might benefit from a city-enforced program of surfboard confiscation. And the USSA told anyone who’d listen that the sport’s troublemakers weren’t 

 surfers at all, but “pseudo surfers”— attention-seeking punks and pretenders who’d recently attached themselves to the new “in” thing.

But really? Were surfing's troublemakers A) actually causing problems above and beyond that of any given group of outgoing teenagers, and B) made of up glom-on newcomers? Probably not, on both scores. Miki Dora, the Windansea gang, and plenty of other surfing trendsetters were all proud, open reprobates. There were “pseudo surfers” lurking on the fringe, but not many. The rogue element in surfing was internal, and not all that menacing. Proof of this would begin 20 or so years later, when it became hard to find a boomer-age surfer who 

 want to talk about his glory days of dropped baggies, stolen food, and lifeguard abuse.

There were other forces at work. Stern, responsible-sounding voices from inside the surfing world was good for business. The surf industry was trending up, and from a manufacturers’ point of view, the bottom line could only improve if the sport was handed over to the USSA and its approved list of surf clubs—as well as organizations like the LA County lifeguards and the YMCA, both of whom now offered classes in surf instruction and safety.

The “clean surfing” campaign wasn’t 

 blame-shifting and semi-collusive business tactics. Severson and his fellow magazine editors were also concerned about the growing number of beach towns passing restrictive surfing laws and regulations. This was hurting surfing for everyone, and hooliganism—real or perceived—was the main cause.

Anti-surfing legislation began during the late 1950s in Santa Monica, Huntington Beach, San Clemente, and San Diego. Rules were different from town to town, but board surfing was generally prohibited during summer months from late morning until late afternoon, except in designated surfing areas, which were often pitiably small and miles apart. Lifeguards raised a bright yellow flag with a solid black circle in the middle to indicate non-surfing hours. Five or 10 minutes after the flag went up, the water was usually cleared. Surfers who pushed their luck and got caught were fined.

Laguna Beach took things a step further in 1961 with a mandatory surfboard licensing program, which included a $5.00 registration fee. Newport not only levied a “surfing tax” on resident wave-riders, it used the collected money to police the beaches. Enforcement was spotty in both Laguna and Newport, but if a surfer turned up in the local police station for some other reason, he could get dinged for fees owed.

, it was much the same in parts of Australia, especially Sydney-area communities, where board registration fees at a few beaches were mandatory. Furthermore, surf magazine publisher and contest organizer Bob Evans, like John Severson, felt compelled to scold the troops. "We might be the best surf riders in the world," Evans wrote in a 1963 editorial to his Australian audience, "but we are the worst-dressed best board riders in the world. The American surfer today is a well-clipped, clean-cut, well-groomed man. Such an outfit accents a new and welcomed swing to better appearance." If anything, the friction between surfers and the authorities was more pronounced Down Under, as lifeguard-based surf clubs aligned with local police to confront what were often called "surf nomads." As one Freshwater surfer from the period recalled, "If you didn't get out of the water in time, the club guys would come down, ring up the cops, and the cops would then come down and chase us around the rocks." (On the shore at places like Bondi Beach, meanwhile, hat-wearing "beach inspectors" were charged with making sure that womens' bikinis had at least three vertical inches of fabric along the hip.)

In Southern California, property owners who showed up at city council meetings to report any bad-surfer experiences were usually given a sympathetic hearing; John Severson and the USSA believed—not entirely without reason—that there was a punitive tang to some of the law-making that resulted. There was no real reason that a surfing-only zone should be reduced to a cramped 180 feet in width, for example, as was the case in Newport. Ten dollars for a Huntington Beach blackball violation seemed outrageous.

But city fathers, as well as lifeguards, had a case. Many restrictions were a simple matter of public safety. The surfing population shot up exponentially during the boom, but the overwhelming majority of beachgoers on a given Southern California summer day were still swimmers and non-surfers, and they had a right to enjoy the ocean without having to dive clear of whitewater-propelled 25-pound surfboards. Keeping the two groups apart was common sense. Yes, a bit of flexibility would have been welcome—letting surfers ride if there were no swimmers in the water, for example. But on-the-fly regulation is tough. Lifeguards did as they were told, followed the blackball schedule as written, raised the flag, and for the most part stoically ignored the shouted insults and raised middle fingers from the lineup.

Furthermore, not every council decision went against the surfers. Malibu was designated a boardriding-only beach in the summer of 1960. San Diego taxpayers spent more than $125,000 to create the Tourmaline Surfing Park in Pacific Beach, which opened in 1964. Windansea was a board-riding-only beach, and local lifeguards would occasionally ticket bathers who refused to leave the surfing area. None of California’s A-grade breaks were under regulatory threat, in fact. The no-surf zones were located on popular sand-fronted beachbreaks, where swimming was easy. At Malibu, Rincon, Swamis—all the hot point- and reef-breaks—there were no surfing restrictions at all.

But the worrying continued. Each new piece of anti-surf legislation was grimly reported in the surf press. A 

 fiction piece called “The Death of Surfing” looked ahead to the 1970s, when just three West Coast beaches remained open to surfers, and wave-rationing was law. In a 

 editorial, John Severson warned that “if conditions continue . . . it’s likely that surfing will be outlawed in most cities, if not the whole State.” The sport was at a fork in the road, Severson wrote in a separate editorial: “It’s the start of a new era . . . or it’s 

The “clean up surfing” campaign ran out of steam in the mid-'60s. Surfer rowdiness didn’t go away, but it didn’t go up, either. Further legal and extralegal skirmishes were fought between surfers and authorities on the matter wave-rights, but détente was struck on most beaches.

And of course, there suddenly seemed to be bigger things to worry about—assinations, race riots, Vietnam, LSD. The surf boom continued. The “surfing problem,” though, was mostly forgotten.

One surf magazine editorialized that the "tough boys" and "showoffs" and “non-conformists” in surfing might benefit from a city-enforced program of board confiscation. John Severson himself ominously warned that "It's the start of a new era. Or it's the end of surfing!"

Chapter: 4

Ten-Year Boom

Blackball Blues

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