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
Girls, Don't Panic!
Joyce Hoffman. Photo: Dick Graham
Linda Merrill, 1963
Surfboard ad, 1966
Joey Hamasaki, 1966
North Shore, mid-'60s. Photo: Ron Church
Joyce Hoffman was was blond and attractive, with a radiant smile—and the deadliest competitive drive in all of surfing: “My idea of having fun,” she once said, “is being the best at something and winning all the time.”
A smooth-surfing Honolulu tomboy named Joey Hamasaki had her own signature model surfboard, as did Joyce Hoffman—both were marketplace failures. Still, women’s surfing posted a few gains during the boom. San Diego high school sophomore Linda Benson won the Makaha International in 1959, doing spinners and cutbacks like a wind-up toy, and later that year she was featured in Bud Browne's Cat on a Hot...
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