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 1960s surf boom can be parsed in a lot of different ways. The West Coast got busy inventing the surf industry, Australia was springloaded to become the most progressive wave-riding nation on earth, while surf fever went airborne and touched down on beaches from Sao Paulo to Christchurch. But based on demographics alone, the boom exploded loudest on the American East Coast. In 1959, there were maybe 250 dedicated riders between Miami and Cape Cod. By 1966, the East and West Coast surfing populations were nearly equal, at about 200,000 each. More than 10,000 spectators attended that year’s East Coast Surfing Championships, 70% of Hobie Surfboards made that year were shipped back to Atlantic Seaboard dealers.

Coastal geography had a bigger impact on the sport’s development in the East than it did in the West. America’s Atlantic shoreline is half-again longer than it is along the Pacific, and East Coast surfers were pretty evenly distributed from north to south. By comparison, roughly 95 percent of West Coast surfers in the mid-1960s lived in a compact two-hundred-mile beachfront corridor between Santa Barbara and San Diego. There were cultural differences, too. Santa Cruz was colder than La Jolla, but otherwise not drastically different as a surfing region. It all felt like California. Georgia’s humid sandbar peaks and the lobster-encrusted coves of Rhode Island, on the other hand, seemed to belong to different planets—as did the local surfers.

By the same token, West Coast surf history could be traced back almost exclusively to a single first surfer, George Freeth. The East Coast has no singular surf history as such; rather, it’s a bundle of histories. Locals often got things started. The pencil-thin Whitman brothers of Miami, Bill and Dudley, rode homemade wooden bellyboards in the early 1930s. Twenty years earlier, the Virginia Beach summer resort crowd lined the boardwalk and applauded as “Big Jim” Jordan cruised shoreward on his imported Waikiki plank. (On the Gulf Coast, a deaf lifeguard named LeRoy Columbo—later cited in the 

 as the “World’s Greatest Lifeguard”—took on the muddy brown rollers of Galveston in the early 1930s, and earned a few bucks on the side by renting out a pair of special Firestone-made surfboards built from inflated rubber tubes wrapped in heavy canvas.)

Visitors did their part during the East Coast’s formative surfing years. New Jersey got the real laying-on of hands with Duke Kahanamoku’s wave-riding demonstrations in Atlantic City in 1912, and Tom Blake, twenty years later, giving riding tips to Ocean City head lifeguard John “Bull” Carey.

World War II knocked the wind out of the small but robust East Coast surf scene—just as it did in California, Hawaii, and Australia—but for reasons that aren’t clear, the sport didn’t rebound here in the postwar years the way it did elsewhere. Board designs like the pig and the chip were late getting to the East Coast or didn’t arrive at all. Mat surfing was a hit with the kids, and a Blake-style paddleboard or two could still be found leaning up against every lifeguard station. But by the mid-'50s, East Coast surfing barely had a pulse.

That all changed, and fast, during the boom. Southern California during this period was Rome to the sport’s growing worldwide empire, but nowhere else were the communications so direct, the supply lines so open, the surf-citizenry so devoted, as the East Coast. From Narragansett to Boca Raton, legions of Atlantic-baptized grems looked west for their surfing equipment, instruction, and entertainment. Local surf entrepreneurs rushed in to service a market that was growing by the week: Ron Jon Surf Shop in New Jersey and Hannon Surfboards in New York; 

 magazines. Homegrown items were always second choice, though. Hobie, Jacobs, Weber, 

, Katin trunks, O’Neill wetsuits . . . 

 were the products that sent kids running for the surf shops.

It didn’t hurt retailers that their customers had more time to shop. East Coast surf, for a variety of oceanographic reasons—less storm activity, shorter storm fetch, a winter jet stream that typically pulls wave-making fronts away from the coast, a broad continental shelf that drains the energy from incoming swells—is by and large smaller, weaker, and less consistent than it is on the West Coast. Hurricane swells arcing up from the warm equatorial reaches of the Atlantic, usually during autumn, can produce excellent waves, but are often fast-moving and erratic. Nor’easters—like the deadly 1991 Halloween monster that inspired Sebastian Junger’s 

—also pump out good surf, but the winter jet stream will typically route a storm (and its swell) toward Europe. Ten- or twelve-foot surf isn’t unheard of on the East Coast. But at a lot beaches, particularly those south of North Carolina’s Outer Banks, an entire season might come and go without a single well-groomed eight-foot swell.

Then there was the weather and water temperatures. East Coast summers are hot, clammy, and often waveless. Winters along the upper two-thirds of the Atlantic Seaboard—which lacks a stabilizing feature similar to the Alaska Current in the Pacific—are cold beyond belief. The water at San Francisco’s Ocean Beach, for example, is usually 54 degrees during January. At Virginia Beach, the temperature can drop to a brain-numbing 39.

The 1960s East Coast surfer—with his depressed stock of good waves and an ingrained belief that the California was holding all the high cards—started out as a creature of deference. “Our surfing boom is a mere cap-pistol shot compared to the West Coast movement,” one Floridian put it. The first quote in 

 1966 feature on East Coast surfing was a near-apology. “You have to understand,” Virginia Beach boardmaker Bob Holland said, “that the eastern surf is not all that good.” This was 

s first surfing cover story, and to bring as much legitimacy to the subject as possible, the accompanying photographs—including the “Surfing’s East Coast Boom” cover shot—were all of California ace Phil Edwards.

On the other hand, East Coasters were far more appreciative than their western counterparts for the waves that 

 come through. Surf was never taken for granted; nobody here was blasé. This was especially true at Long Island’s Gilgo Beach, 45 miles by car from midtown Manhattan and home to the debut East Coast Surfing Championships in 1962. The Gilgo surf didn’t so much break as dribble in, and beachfront parking cost a buck. But it was happening. Boardmaker John Hannon had a beachfront rental shack, and day-trippers from Queens to West Babylon lined up on summer mornings to rent boards and talk shop with Gerry Stewart—the stunning bikini-wearing blond behind the counter who not only outsurfed most of the guys but out-styled them as well, charging down Ocean Parkway in a Cadillac hearse with a load of boards rattling around in the back. Gilgo wasn’t much to look at—a parking lot, a few rows of weather-beaten vacation houses, and a long spread of marshland to the west. But San Onofre wasn’t much to look at either. The scene is what counted, and the 

 wasn’t being flip when it named Gilgo the “Surfing Paradise of the East.”

 and the rest of the mainstream media, but the 

 hot surf action along the Atlantic was taking place in Central Florida, on a long, thin, sticky, suburban-lined ribbon of beach between Daytona and Melbourne. The waves weren’t all that great here, either, but it was a lot warmer, surfing was an all-year activity, and the streets of Flagler, Ormond, New Smyrna, Cocoa Beach, Satellite Beach, and Indialantic were filled with allowance-rich teens, many of them sons and daughters of the huge aerospace workforce hiving around Cape Canaveral.

Boardmaker Dick Catri of Satellite Beach—a decade or so older than the boomers—had already ridden the big stuff in Hawaii and been featured in two or three West Coast surf movies, thus demonstrating that an East Coaster could run with the world’s best. Yet Florida would be put on the map as a surf-talent hothouse by a group of school kids, most from Cocoa Beach. Bill “Flea” Shaw and Mimi Munro got things rolling. Shaw, a comically freckled eleven-year-old Huck Finn lookalike, had a show-stealing cameo in 1965’s 

 and later that year he was named as the East Coast’s runner-up best surfer by 

 magazine. Munro was a noserider with gyroscopic balance; she won the 1965 East Coast Surfing Championships at age 13, and the following year finished third in the 1966 World Championships in San Diego. Claude Codgen and Mike Tabeling were both smooth, fluid, stylish teen surfers. Codgen had his own hot-selling West Coast-made signature-model surfboard. Tabeling was the first East Coaster to make the cover of 

, and in 1968 he placed runner-up in the US Championships.

Gary Propper of Cocoa Beach, though, was the East Coast’s real boom-era star. A hyperactive white-blond fireplug of a surfer, Propper had blinding foot speed and picked up the latest tricks faster than anybody. At the 1966 East Coast Championships he hotdogged his way past visiting surf icon Dewey Weber to take first place. On land, he talked constantly, hustled and promoted—“Yes, I’m Gary Propper” read the front of his T-shirt—flashed his wide cherubic smile for the cameras, and lost his temper on a dime. A poor swimmer who never got over his fear of big waves, Propper rarely ventured out when the surf was over eight feet. Otherwise he was a model of drive and ambition, channeled for the most part into his surfing career—the Gary Propper signature model Hobie was America’s top-selling board of the decade, by a long shot, thanks to Propper’s nonstop efforts on its behalf.

In the early '70s, Propper would become the voice of East Coast regional pride. The East Coaster, he wrote, should be “stoked to say they’re from Cocoa Beach, or Belmar, or Long Island,” and not have to “fake it and say he’s from Hermosa or Santa Cruz. It’s a phony trip, putting together pieces of things we dig from California and using them for our East Coast bag. We can still be influenced. But people can also be influenced and impressed by us.” Future generations of East Coasters would accept this idea as their surfing birthright, until eventually the East Coast bag was not only influencing and impressing the surf world at large but dominating it.

Much of the East Coast boom was of a piece with the West Coast boom. Surf moviemakers flew in from Los Angeles during summer, rented a car, and barnstormed the beach town auditoriums and VFW halls, just like they did in California. A Stomp party was a Stomp party, whether in Mission Beach or Jacksonville. The herding instinct was the same. A 

 magazine reporter counted three hundred surfers in the water at Gilgo on a weekend morning in 1965 and “900 more catching their breath on the sand.” In Miami, seventeen thousand people turned out when WQAM disk jockey Roby “Big Kahuna” Yonge ordered all surfers within the sound of his voice to meet at South Beach.

Nevertheless, East Coasters had their own flair. At a beachfront wedding ceremony in Kitty Hawk, North Carolina, the groom stood before God and family in a competition-stripe Weber Surfboards T-shirt, and after kissing the bride, escorted her up an “aisle” made of crossed boards. A New England band called the Trade Winds had a minor hit in 1965 with a surf music gem called “New York’s a Lonely Town.” The harmonized chorus, accented with a few notes of sublime Beach Boy-like falsetto, was the lament of the northeastern surfer in winter: “My woody’s outside, covered in snow / New York’s a lonely town, when you’re the only surfer boy around.”

The East Coast was also distinguished by some genuinely hardcore antisurfing legislation. New Jersey’s Asbury Park issued a complete ban on surfing. Same thing for all Boston-area beaches—with the Massachusett’s General Court chipping in with a provision against night-surfing. Town officials in Florida’s Palm Beach Shores didn’t just ban surfing but made surfboard possession itself a misdemeanor offense.

From there, things got weird. Rhode Island surfers had to use the buddy system, ride only when conditions were deemed safe by the Director of Natural Resources, return to shore in the event of heavy fog, and wear a full wetsuit from December 1 to March 31. The New York State Legislature tried and failed to pass a bill requiring all surfers to wear “a life preserver, lifebelt, or similar device.” Council members in Long Beach, Long Island, on the other hand, passed a measure giving the right to surf only to notarized, permit-issued, fee-paying, swim-tested, ID-tag-wearing town residents. Plus every surfer under 21 had to get a surfing-permission waiver signed by at least one parent.

Why was East Coast surfing legislation so heavy-handed? It's hard to say. Compared to the West Coast, there was more beach to go around and, by and large, East Coast surfers weren’t as loud, confrontational, or lewd as their West Coast peers. Comfort around the ocean probably had something to do with it. East Coast beachgoing had its own long history, but it wasn’t an art form, the way it was in Southern California, and the ocean here was still regarded first and foremost as place of danger. Surfing laws having to do with buddy systems, life jackets, parental approval, and so on were probably sincere if misguided attempts to keep young people safe from what lawmakers regarded as untenably high-risk behavior.

Politics also likely played a role. West Coast teens held a lot of economic and cultural power. As thousands of surfers massed on Southern California’s beaches, lawmakers reacted strongly, but so did movie studios, music producers, radio DJs, and TV programmers—all of whom profited hugely from the teen trade. This explains how a place like Huntington Beach could issue hardcore surf restrictions one month, then turn around the following month and enthusiastically support the West Coast Championships. The region was invested in the business and promotion of surfing. As such, most beach city surfing regulations deemed unreasonable were quickly modified or struck down.

East Coast surf laws, on the other hand, often remained on the books for years—decades, in some cases. Groups like the Eastern Surfing Association (created in 1967) patiently, state by state, took on anti-surfing codes and regulations. The going was slow, but things eventually began trending was in the surfers’ favor. It was in the political realm, in fact, where East Coast surfers first distinguished themselves from their West Coast counterparts. After all those rallies, petitions, newspaper write-in campaigns, city hall hearings, and grassroots lobbying, East Coasters emerged as the best-organized surfers in the world. “We’re the backbone of the sport,” Florida boardmaker Dick Catri drawled in 1970, justifiably, right after putting together a well-organized drive to get Sebastian Inlet—the hottest off-limits break in the state—opened to surfers.

At Gilgo Beach, day-trippers from Queens to West Babylon lined up to rent boards from Gerry Stewart—the stunning bikini-wearing blond behind the counter who not only outsurfed most of the guys but outstyled them as well, charging down Ocean Parkway in her Cadillac hearse with a full load of boards rattling around in the back.

Chapter: 4

Ten-Year Boom

But Will it Play in New York?

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