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 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-

 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 only went up from there: from 350,000 (

), to 400,000 (Hobie Alter), to a half-million (

, to 1 million (the USSA), to "several million" (

 Clark’s figure was probably closest to the truth; since he provided an essential building material to much of the industry, he was in the best position to estimate the number of boards out there. But nobody really knew. To begin with, how did you define a surfer? Did bodysurfers count? Mat-riders? Summer-only dabblers? If summer surfers didn’t make the cut, how many times a year did a person have to paddle out to qualify as a surfer?

Whatever the actual number, it was growing at a tremendous rate—a rough guess would be 25-percent a year between 1959 and 1967. Established breaks went from crowded to impossibly crowded, with hundreds at a time jamming the beach and lineup at places like Malibu, Huntington, and San Onofre. Meanwhile, new surfing colonies took root by the dozens on coastlines around the world. The sport once considered impossible for anyone but native Hawaiians was now attaching itself easily to just about any beach with a rideable wave and gung-ho pack of local teenagers.

Surfing was dispersed internationally by expats, vacationers, nomads, students, drug-runners, and military personnel. With few exceptions, they were all American and Australian. Los Angeles-born surfer and shaper Tak Kawahara flew to Tokyo in 1964 and traveled the nearby Shonan and Chiba coasts, much as George Freeth had done in Southern California almost sixty years earlier, to give surfing and boardmaking lessons. That same year, a group of Californians visited Canada’s Vancouver Island and lent a board to a construction worker named Ralph Devries, who in turn convinced the owner of the Wickaninish Inn at Long Beach to import a few boards for his guests. At nearby Pachena Bay, missionary Jim Stadler made himself a 13-foot paddleboard and taught himself how to ride waves. Devries and Stadler were among the handful of competitors who entered the Long Beach Surf Contest in 1966, the first event of its kind in Canada.

Dorian Paskowitz, runner-up in the 1941 Pacific Coast Championships, had by that time flown to Israel with a new Hobie, dropped the board off in Tel Aviv, and got things started in the Mediterranean. Joel de Rosnay of Biarritz, while summering on his family’s Mauritius sugarcane plantation in the late 1950s, gaped out at the flawless azure-blue waves of Tamarin Bay, turned the local township upside-down to find an old brass-screw plywood paddleboard, rode as best he could, and returned four years later to find the local kids charging the shorebreak on bellyboards.

In 1963, a relentlessly peripatetic Aussie named Peter Troy began a four-year journey that took him from Great Britain, where he introduced stand-up surfing to the English Channel Islands, to the Continent, across the Atlantic to the United States, and down to South America. Broke in Peru, Troy shaved his head and sold his long blond surfer locks to a wigmaker for $200. In Argentina, after an informal seminar with local lifeguards on the latest Aussie surf club rescue techniques, he was given a private audience with the President.

While in Brazil, strolling along Rio's Copacobana boardwalk, Troy looked across the sand to see a gangly teenager holding a board. “I’d just spent three months in the jungle traveling down the Amazon,” Troy later recalled. “I had no idea anyone on this side of the country had even seen a surfboard before. But here’s this boy, the son of the French ambassador to Brazil, who’d just had the board shipped over for the kid’s 15th birthday. He’s standing on the beach looking kind of lost, so I told him I’d take the board out and show him how to ride it—there was a nice little left-hander peeling off just down the beach. Off I go. After a few waves, I figured it was time to head in and give the kid his board back. I looked up and there were 2,000 people on the beach, watching me. That little surf session made all the papers. I was a ‘god walking on water.’ I was feted, wined, and dined; they took me to see Pele play football. It was the most amazing experience of my life.”

Visiting surfers were happy to proselytize on behalf of the sport, and a few set out for that express purpose. But more often than not, the pioneering surfer on a foreign coast rode without anyone on the beach watching or asking for a lesson. Peace Corps volunteers in El Salvador packed their boards and surfed alone after their long humid shifts in the fields. Rusty Miller, a California college student and surfing champion, rode waves in Portugal and Sri Lanka during a New York-to-Los Angeles semester-at-sea program.

Surfing occasionally planted itself with no outside help at all. A copy of 

 with boardmaking blueprints would fall into the right hands. Or—as would be the case in Viareggio, Italy, a few years later—a subtitled Hollywood surf movie would play in the local theater, and send a few local kids running to the nearest beach to ride on whatever they could find. The sport’s best and strangest migration story took place on Easter Island. One hot afternoon in the mid-1960s, lobster fisherman Kio Pakarati watched as a board floated mysteriously in on the tide. Pakarati, in the tradition of Rapa Nui fisherman, knew how to ride waves on a tusk-shaped 

 fishing boat made of bundled reeds (similar to the Peruvian 

), and even at a distance he could tell that the plastic craft now drifting perilously close to the rocky shore was someone else’s version of the 

. Recognizing the invisible hand of Nanaku, the sea god, Pakarati didn’t hesitate. “I jumped from the cliffs,” he later said, “grabbed the board and brought it home.” Pakarati tried the board himself, then passed it around to his children, brothers, nephews, cousins, and neighbors, who kept it in service until it became too waterlogged to ride.

Surfing growth also happened for reasons no more exotic than a local alderman getting the town council to sign off on beachfront lifeguard expansion. For decades, bourgeois British “surf bathers” had flocked to the beaches of Cornwall during the summer months and rented flip-nosed plywood bellyboards. But stand-up surfing didn’t take root until 1959, when Newquay officials posted summer guards along the district’s resort beaches, at which point local wave-riders began cycling through with plywood paddleboards, surf skies, balsa chips, and imported “foamies.” By 1963 Newquay surfers were riding first-rate custom equipment from local boardmakers.

Without meaning to, the military did its part to export surfing around the world. Wave-riding US servicemen bargained with cargo pilots to have boards shipped from home—as one vet later recalled, six cases of Chivas got a Weber Performer and two Jacobs noseriders flown from California to a beachfront depot in southeast Asia. Servicemen posted in Morocco humped their boards down to Mehdia Plage, seventy-five miles northeast of Casablanca. Sailors in the Philippines found waves near their Subic Bay station in 1962, the same year a Pacific Fleet serviceman first took on the hairy coral-spiked reef passes on Guam’s west coast.

Whenever possible, a jug-eared navy sailor from Pensacola named Larry Martin, wearing combat boots and surf trunks, would hitch a ride on a tank from Da Nang, South Vietnam, to a little slice of in-country tropical paradise called China Beach, where the Navy had a beachfront rec center. With a go-ahead from the local US Marine command post, Martin organized the China Beach Surf Club, which had its own plywood-walled clubhouse, membership cards, and an official cloth-patch logo made by a Vietnamese seamstress. By the time the war ended, the club had nearly two hundred members. Most of the time, Martin recalled, China Beach was a godsend—beers and barbeque, movies, USO shows, and eight-track rock-and-roll playing over the PA. “Whole platoons at a time would fly in,” he said. “They’d get down to the beach, cut off their fatigues with a knife and run right into the water.” But the war was always right over the hill. Martin and a friend once paddled out at dusk to catch a few, and had to sprint frantically for the horizon when Vietcong soldiers started machine-gunning the lineup. After three hours floating in the warm darkness, the two surfers finally got an all-clear holler from friends on the beach and paddled in.

Wherever surfing took hold, it was fashioned, as much as local conditions would allow, on the Southern California model. 

. The Nippon Surfing Association translated and adopted the entire USSA rulebook. Safari Surfboards in Durban looked and smelled like the Hobie shop in Dana Point. In Newquay, just as in Newport Beach, it was skateboards and competition stripes, club T-shirts, beater station wagons and panel vans, surf music, stomp parties, and hassles from the squares.

“The authorities took a rather dim view of the sport,” an early-generation British surfer recalled, “connecting it with drugs and noise. Then the reporters came down, looking for ‘sex on the sand’ type of stories. It all got slightly out of hand. But we were certainly out of the drag old fifties.”

The military did its part to export surfing around the world. Wave-riding US servicemen in Vietnam bargained with cargo pilots to have boards shipped from home—six cases of Chivas got a Weber Performer and two Jacobs noseriders flown from California to a beachfront depot in southeast Asia.

Chapter: 4

Ten-Year Boom

Tokyo to Tel Aviv

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