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 medium is the message.” Marshall McLuhan couldn’t have found Surf City if you dropped him off on the corner of Pacific Coast Highway and Main, but his soon-to-be-famous 1964 dictum fit the sport like a glove during American surfing's boom years. As the surfer image filtered out across the cultural landscape, it shapeshifted from menace to sportsman to bohemian to fashion plate to object of ridicule—and as McLuhan predicted, form was determined less by the thing itself and more by the outlet.

Hollywood presented the surfer as a mildly countercultural goof-off; just daring and mouthy enough to be interesting, but likable and ultimately safe—never more than a plot-turn away from returning to school or job. Television dramas were another matter. Maybe because the genre itself was aimed at older viewers, many of whom were uncomfortable with teen culture in general, small-screen surfers were nearly all villains. In “Who Killed the Surf Broad?” a 1964 episode of ABC’s popular crime show 

 members of a local “surf gang” crack jokes when one of their own suddenly dies on the sand, and they get back to their wild beach party as soon as the corpse is removed.

, on the other hand, did their usual respectful and professional job while covering events like the Makaha International, and the US Championships. The camera work was first-rate, and commentators treated surfers no differently then they treated NFL quarterbacks or Olympic swimmers.

Southern California surfers also had access to at least three regional low-budget surf-theme variety shows, including KHJ-TV’s 

, hosted by radio DJ Stan Richards. Each half-hour episode featured a clip or two from the latest surf movie, an in-studio interview with a guest celebrity surfer, and news on upcoming surf-world events. A few of the interviews were worth sitting through, and the TV audience—almost exclusively surfers—ate up the action clips. Richards, though, was a hapless anchor, as was made clear during KHJ’s coverage of the 1964 Malibu Invitational, when he turned to cohost and surf journalist Robert Feigel and reportedly said, “Tell me, Bob, can a goofyfoot do the hotdog, and if so, what foot does he use?”

Surfing was meanwhile getting ready to take its first turn on America’s fashion runway. In the early '60s, surfwear was still mostly an in-house project. An ambitious new San Diego outfit called Hang Ten was about to pass Katin and the other mom-and-pop beachfront garmentos to become the sport’s runaway top-selling label, expanding their line from trunks to shirts and windbreakers. Hang Ten was also the first surfwear business to license its name; by decade’s end the company had written $25 million in total international sales, and pumped up the brand logo—a pair of chubby black-thread “hang ten” feet stitched into a yellow square—until it was surfing’s most recognizable mark.

Mainstream active-wear companies got into the act, and by 1963 McGregor, Jantzen, White Stag, and Catalina all offered a full line of “surfer look” trunks, knit T-shirts, nylon jackets, and pullovers, which were available in department store outlets across the country. Loud colors were the rule. “Male plumage,” one fashion expert noted when reviewing the 1964 surfwear lines, “should be as brilliant as women’s.” Trends flashed past in quick succession: Madras-print cotton, then dark solids with offsetting white-tape trim, faux tapa cloth, and wrong-side-out Polynesian prints (for the “faded” look). Surfwear even borrowed from hot-rodders, as competition stripes briefly appeared on just about every solid-color piece of clothing.

magazine publishers loved to run surf fashion layouts. The clothes were new and hip. Better still were all those young, slim, California-tanned legs, arms, shoulders, backs, and stomachs. Surfing had always been sexy. Duke Kahanamoku emerging from the surf at Waikiki provoked swoons among both male and female admirers. But fashion ramped things up considerably—the board-toting “lucky sons of beaches” in 

 1967 “Wet Set” fashion spread are all groped, or at least admiringly checked out, by three bikini-wearing models.

The beach fashion hook was set permanently into the minds and wallets of American consumers. The new styles were loose, comfortable, and inexpensive, and the Western World was steadily if incrementally moving toward a more casual dress style—with JFK doing his part over family weekends at Hyannis Port, in his black-frame Wayfarer sunglasses (same as the Malibu guys) and shirttail left out to flap in the warm Atlantic breeze. Surf music and beach movies would vanish at the end of the boom and never again have the same cultural presence. Surfwear fell out of style too, but only temporarily. There were more booms to come, and they would always be fueled by surfing’s fashion houses.

The surfer was a Rorschach test for newspaper editors. The

, a leading news voice in a region that wasn’t yet sure how it felt about being the world’s wave-riding capital, often went out of its way to be supportive of surfing, with articles like “Surfer’s Utopia . . . That’s the Southland,” and “Surfing Just a Fad? Forget it—Sport Is Here to Stay.” A smiling gang of USC students posed for a 

 feature, and a father-son surf-themed dinner at the Holy Shepherd Lutheran Church in Chatsworth earned double-column coverage. The paper also at times showed a mothering concern for surfers’ health and well-being, with lots of features on surf-related injuries and ocean preparedness, including three separate articles in 1965 on “surfer’s knots”—the acorn-sized bumps, caused by knee-paddling, that formed on the lower knee and boney peak of the upper foot. Surfer’s knots made it onto a 

 list of surfing “wounds,” along with spinal damage and skeg cuts, but really they were a pain-free status marker—big knots meant you were logging more water time than the other guys. They were also a potential 4F ace in the hole, as a truly oversized set prevented a surfer from fitting into US Army-issue boots.

Other Southland papers took a dimmer view the sport. A 1961 Long Beach 

 front-page feature was titled “Surfboard Cult! New Way of Life,” and the picture here was ominous: “The Pacific is washing up new troubles on the West Coast—the surfboard riders.” What kind of trouble? Stolen boards set afire “as sacrifice to an imaginary ‘Surf God’,” lots of “trespassing, petty theft, truancy, and vandalism,” plus “older surfers who infect younger boys with an ambition not to have any.” A Laguna Beach high school football coach talked about a once-promising young player now lost to surfing. “He’s down at the beach [learning] how to cuss and drink wine. Maybe to steal. He’s already getting shifty-eyed. He’s a bum.” Then a final warning: “There’s a certain glamour to these blonde, suntanned, rebellious youngsters. Teenage girls go for them [and] parents are becoming alarmed about their daughters seeing surfers. Police reports tell of beer-and-sex parties involving girls of 14.” (In Australia, a 1964 issue of 

 magazine sang the same tune almost note for note. "New Beach Cult: the Surfies," screamed the headline. These "young savages" will first "ride a few waves, [then] lie on the beaches joking about the squares who don't follow their weird cult." Surfing, the magazine concluded, was producing "a riding tide of juvenile ratbaggery.")

These representations, in both Australia and America, weren't wholly unfounded. The sex fears were justified. Nearly every beach town in Southern California and Sydney had its own community of indulgent, prestripped teenage surfers, with a bottomless store of free time, lots of roomy surf wagons parked nearby, and a short list of parent-free weekend-night house parties to cruise. But other accusations made by the newspapers were debatable. Surfers probably did break the law and misbehave at a rate above that of middle- and upper-middle-class suburban American teenagers. But the difference was incremental, and the crimes were almost always misdemeanors. The 

 litany of surfer infractions—trespassing, petty theft, truancy, and vandalism—covered things pretty well, although it failed to include public nudity, bad language, and a heckling disrespect for authority figures. A Santa Monica surfing area was closed after surfers yelled profanities at lifeguards. A few Southland auditoriums refused to show surf movies once audience members began to light fireworks, throw beer cups, and moon each other. Surfboard stealing was common enough that the Huntington Beach Police Department created a special stolen-goods form with a surfboard-shaped outline that allowed theft-victims to fill in colors, decal placement, and any other identifying characteristics.

 were eager to put surfers in league with bikers, or any other “troubled” youth group. Add together every last surfer-generated “rowdyism,” however, and you were still a mile short of anything that even remotely looked like the Boozefighter motorcycle gang’s rampage in Hollister, or the Zoot Suit riots in Los Angeles. Maybe surfers were deviants. But it was a suburban deviancy. Foul language and naked asses, mostly. Not blood and chains.

Another popular '60s surfer-image icon, one that was propped up next to the deliquent and the sexy fashion plate, was the blond-haired idiot. A reporter asked 1964 Makaha winner Joey Cabell to describe the attraction of surfing. “It’s the color of the sky,” Cabell began, “and the shape of the clouds, and the color and shape of the water, and a wave with the sun shining on it all. Then all of a sudden—wow! It just knocks you out.” Sandra Dee’s 

 answered the same question, perched atop a new surfboard laid across her bed, squeaking with excitement. “Surfing is out of this world! It positively surpasses every living emotion I've ever had!”

Surfers weren’t necessarily expected to be any more eloquent or profound than any other athlete, yet they somehow opened themselves up to more mockery. Maybe it was the Hollywood beach movies, or the slang, or their struggle to articulate the incommunicable wave-riding experience. In any event, when general interest newspapers and magazines weren’t publishing “surfer cult” scare stories, they often made surfers look like sun-baked dunces.

East Coast journalists in particular enjoyed laughing at surfers. The sport had long since jumped across the continent to the Atlantic coast and was thriving on beaches from Florida to New England, but it was still viewed as a quintessential Southern California product—making it kooky almost by definition. Mocking it was an easy way to reassert the East Coast’s metropolitan superiority. New York writer Gilbert Rogin kept a smirk in place for nearly the entire length of “An Odd Sport and an Unusual Champion,” his 1965 

 article on 18-year-old Joyce Hoffman, the reigning women’s world champ. Rogin took a few pokes at surfing in his own voice, but mostly just served up quotes by Hoffman that seemed cherry-picked to make her and the sport in general look ridiculous.

 than the other girl surfers,” Hoffman says of her competitive peers, “not 

. Most are real heavyset. I like to be skinny. If I get any bigger I’ll die. Do I diet? Oh boy!” She doesn’t like surf magazines because they’re “full of stupid stories and stuff.” School was okay, but could be better. “My dad doesn’t give me money for A’s. It’s horrible!”

Halfway through the article, Rogin detoured for an interview with North Shore big-wave heavy Fred Van Dyke, who mused on the hidden motives of those who ride huge surf. “Surfing should be fun. [Big surf is] not fun. It’s absolute terror. Big-wave riders are scared people . . . they have to go out there to prove they’re not afraid, to prove their masculinity.” Van Dyke was just warming up. “Most big-wave riders,” he concluded, “are latent homosexuals.” Van Dyke spent years explaining that he didn’t mean 

of homosexuals, but the Freudian kind, where guys want to do guys-only stuff—like surf—and only care about what other guys think of them. Perfectly true, but not nearly as interesting or quotable, and Van Dyke wore the "latent homosexual" remark around his neck for the rest of his life.

And so it went throughout the boom, and after. Athlete, adventurer, gigolo, hoodlum, dimwit—in terms of public image, the surfer could be seen in nearly any terms that suited the viewer.

Athlete, adventurer, gigolo, hoodlum, dimwit—in terms of public image, the surfer could be seen in nearly any terms that suited the viewer.

Chapter: 4

Ten-Year Boom

Heroes and Villains

Subscribe or Login

Encyclopedia of Surfing

History of Surfing

Interviews

Features

The Sunday Joint

Videos