All quotes below are from Greg Noll's 1969 biography "Da Bull: Life Over the Edge." To keep this at a reasonable length, the time frame begins with Noll moving to Manhattan Beach and runs through his high schools years—well before he became a famous big-wave surfer. Some of the excerpts been slightly edited and-or compressed.


My mother and I moved from San Diego to Manhattan Beach in 1943. We’d lived in San Diego since I’d been born, in 1937, the only child of Grace and Robert Lawhead. I was only three when they divorced. In Manhattan, we lived about seven houses north of the Manhattan Beach Pier. Mom worked. Whenever I could, I’d stay out on the pier all day and into the evening, learning about the fish, the ocean and the tides from the older fishermen. By the time I was eight, I’d got myself a job dishing bait on the pier. A few years later my mom met and married Ash Noll, a chemical engineer with Allied Chemical. He became one of the most positive influences in my life.


I began surfing in 1948, when I was eleven, during the summer before seventh grade. Every day, as I was walking to and from the bait house, I’d see all the guys [from] the Manhattan Beach Surf Club, surfing beside the pier. It looked like so much fun, I thought, “I’ve just gotta do that.” So I cornered some guy with an old redwood surfboard and got him to sell it. It was some old hunk of junk that he was probably going to push off some cliff for a surf sacrifice. Instead, he sacrificed it to me for fifteen dollars. It was made of solid redwood and weighed twenty pounds more than I weighed! I nailed some rollerskate wheels onto a wood plank and used that to push the board down to the beach from my house. Then I'd drag it to the water and try to surf it. When I was done for the day, I'd leave the board under the pier, sometimes for two or three days at a time, as long as the surf looked good.


Bing Copeland began surfing the same summer that I did. There was another kid, Buzzy Bent, who rode at his home turf of Windansea. I first met Buzzy at the annual luau that was held at Windansea. I hitched a ride down there with a couple of the guys from the Manhattan Beach Surf Club. Buzzy and I became buddies, and I ended up spending two weeks with him, surfing Windansea every day. He was a year older than me and Bing. Years later, after Bing and I had become established surfboard manufacturers, Buzzy teamed up with Hawaiian surfing champion Joey Cabell to form the Chart House restaurant chain. But in 1948, the three of us were the only young kids surfing in Southern California.

Since Bing and I hung around the Manhattan Surf Club club so much, the guys in the club made us honorary members. They called Bing and me their Everlasting Mascots and wrote in the club’s bylaws that there could be no other kids but us. Bing and I were honored. We went to all the meetings and hung out with these guys for several years. We grew up quickly, surrounded by guys eighteen and older, in their prime. They lived to surf, drink, raise hell and score heavily with women.

I’ll never forget that first summer. One time, after surfing Windansea, Larry Felker and a couple of the Manhattan Beach Club guys took Bing and me down to Tijuana and indoctrinated us into the world of wine and women. I was a pretty skinny little guy at age eleven. This big ol' gal reached down and grabbed me by the hand, almost jerked me off the floor. She bellowed out, “Ya got four dollars, sonny? If ya do, come with me!” It was scarier than twenty-foot Waimea.


My mom was pretty outgoing. She'd been down to the pier to meet Dale Velzy and the Manhattan Beach Surf Club gang. I guess they gave her the impression of being like big brothers to me. [But] I think my folks already knew that they had lost control—it had happened the first time I pushed that redwood board down to the pier. During eighth grade, I used to go down there to surf before school. I’d wake up Bev Morgan, and he’d go with me. Morgan was already out of high school and drove this cut, chopped and lowered black Chevy with chrome pipes and a hole in the back window where the surfboards could stick out. It was quite a showpiece and any kid’s dream car. Morgan and I had a deal. In exchange for a hot breakfast at my house after surfing, he’d drive me to school. We timed it to perfection. When all the kids were lined up, waiting to go into class, we’d roll up in the Chevy, and Bev would gun the motor a few times to get everybody's attention. Then he would get out, open my door and dust me off with a whisk broom, as though he were my personal chauffeur, [while] all my buddies and teachers were standing there, watching.


Velzy was the main guy in surfing when Bing and I were growing up. We looked up to him. I was pretty scrawny and Velzy called me Mouse. I went everywhere with him, even up the coast to Malibu. I was his gremmie. Velzy is mostly remembered as a great surfboard shaper, but he was a hell of a surfer, too. He had a beautiful, easy style. His whole life was geared towards surfing and getting laid. “Catch waves, drink beer, and get laid as often as you possibly can,” was the motto of the day. This was the influence Bing and I grew up around. How were we poor little guys supposed to turn out?

Everything went really well between Velzy and me for about three years. He built boards at Manhattan Pier and I hung around all the time, soaking up all I could about shaping balsa boards. One day, Velzy and his friend Billy Barr decided to go to lunch. He’d been working on a board and I asked him if I could just take off the rough wood with a drawknife while he was gone. Velzy said, “Yeah, but don’t do any more than that, or you’ll screw up the board.”

Velzy and Barr ended up in some saloon until late afternoon. Rolled in shitfaced about four o’clock. By that time, I had finished shaping the whole board. Velzy walked in, picked up the board, looked down the deck. Looked over at me. Looked down one rail, looked over at me. Looked down the other rail, looked over at me. Looked at the bottom.

That was the first and last board I ever shaped for Velzy.

Two months later, I was doing reshapes, and not long after that, I was shaping new boards under my own name. Velzy and I remained good friends, but I wasn’t his little gremmie anymore. I was the competition.


When we were freshmen at Mira Costa High, Bing and I were the only guys on campus who surfed. As soon as school let out, our buddies from Redondo High would be there with their cars and boards, waiting to pick us up. The guys at our school wondered, “What is this surfing deal?” and by the time we were sophomores, in ’52, we started seeing more and more younger guys interested in surfing. The school officials were concerned. Some of the guys who normally would have been going out for sports were surfing instead. They didn’t care about the letterman sweater and the squealing girls in the grandstands. I shared their feelings.

During one of my many visits to the principal’s office, I was asked, “What do you guys do down there at the Manhattan Beach Surf Club? What are your goals, what do you want to become?” I told him that I wanted to surf, make surfboards, and go to Hawaii. I wanted to see the world and have a good time. From the principal’s point of view, that qualified me as most likely to end up a beach bum and never amount to shit.


The first time I went to Hawaii was during the fall of ’54. We’d all heard about older guys like Buzzy Trent, and Flippy and Walter Hoffman, living in quonset huts at Makaha. I couldn’t wait to go. I was seventeen, six or seven years younger than these guys and still in high school. To live and go to school in Hawaii, I’d need a guardian. I found one in Billy Ming, a surfer about seven years older. Somehow I bullshitted my folks into believing that Billy was a fine upstanding individual and that he was going to be my guardian while I finished high school in the Islands.

Steve Voorhees, Mike Stange, and a couple of other guys we knew also went with us that winter. We found a big quonset hut to live in at Makaha. I bought an old truck to drive back and forth between Makaha and school. Whenever the surf was up, Ming wrote me whatever excuse I needed to stay home and surf.

Waipahu High was the nearest school. There were two haoles in the entire school, myself and a girl. Everybody else was Hawaiian. Lots of badass characters from Nanakuli, a real tough nearby neighborhood. Nobody messed with Nanakuli guys. When I first started school there, they gave me a really tough time, like spitting on the ground in front of me wherever I walked.

I finally made friends with Bongo Alapai, a three-hundred-pound Hawaiian. We had woodshop together. That was one class I excelled in, but Bongo wasn’t worth shit at wood. He couldn’t make a thing. So I built him a doorstop to turn in for his project. He got an A, and from then on I was his haole boy. Nobody could mess with me after that.

My claim to fame at Waipahu High was I became the only guy who never wore shoes to school. I had real bad sores on my feet from stepping on coral. The sand gets in your sores and gets infected, and the sores take forever to heal up. I still have the scars. At school, you had to have a permit from the nurse to wear go-aheads, or else you had to wear shoes. Well, the nurse was an old haole gal and she liked me. I told her I just couldn’t wear shoes, I’ve got these awful sores, and she gave me a permanent pass to wear go-aheads.

No Hawaiian I know likes to wear shoes, so this really pissed them off. Guys from Waipahu High still remember. Years later, whenever they see me they say, “You fockin’ haole, how come I hadda wear shoes an’ I never see you wear ’em even one time?”


You hear about those of us who began surfing during that era as the "pioneers" of modern surfing,” but I don’t think any of us had any sense of history in terms of what we were doing. We were having fun. It does intrigue me, however, that our era produced so many distinct individuals. I don’t see that happening as much today. Maybe it’s because there are just too many people and the whole thing gets lost. Surfing still allows you to become your own person, as long as you don’t let the hype get in your way. The sport itself hasn’t changed, I don't think, but for some people, the reason for doing it has changed.

Once Bob Simmons got into surfing, his engineering background surfaced and he immediately started working on better ways to build boards. His boards were an instant success. Simmons always paddled on his knees. With his ginked-up arm [from a bicycling accident a few years earlier], he had one good dig on one side and a little scratch on the other. His boards were wide because of his handicap. His style of surfing was to just slide across the face of the wave without much maneuvering.

Matt Kivlin and Joe Quigg did some shaping in Simmons’ shop. They took the same principles Simmons used and applied them to balsa wood and to the needs of the average surfer. That’s how the Malibu board evolved. Velzy came in behind them. I was behind Velzy by about three years.

During this period, surfboards went through some radical design changes. Within a three-to-four-year period, we’re talking about going from redwoods to the Simmons-type board to the Malibu board. The Malibu board was a lightweight balsa board designed off the Simmons theory of reducing the weight, but it went a step further by improving the shape and thus the maneuverability of the board.

At one time, Simmons’ boards were in such demand that the pressure of meeting orders almost became too much for him. Like most of us, he really just wanted to surf. I remember once, he had something like thirty-four boards on back-order. Velzy and I both had had a Simmons board on back-order for three months. Simmons wouldn’t answer his phone, so Velzy decided that we would check out the situation in person.

Going to Simmons’ shop was just as much an experience as riding one of his boards. The shop was on a side street in Venice Beach. It was an absolute goddamn mess. He never cleaned up the balsa shavings, so you’d have to make a path through all the debris to get from one place in the shop to another.

Velzy and I arrived about five o’clock one afternoon. The place looked shut down. We pounded on the door. No reply. Velzy noticed the door wasn’t locked, so he opened it and called out, “Simmons?”

No reply. We walked in cautiously through the shavings. “Simmons, where are you?” Finally we heard a gruff voice from a corner: “Whaddaya want.” We followed the voice and found Simmons sitting in the corner, eating beans out of a can, using a big balsa-wood shaving for a spoon.

Simmons was eccentric. When he’d worn holes through the soles of his shoes, he’d cut out a piece of plywood and tape it onto his shoe. With his perpetually uncombed hair, skinny physique and gimpy arm, he truly looked like a mad scientist.

He didn’t like many people, but he liked Velzy better than most because Velzy rode Simmons’ boards and rode them well. Besides that, he just liked Velzy. Simmons at that point was upset that Kivlin and Quigg were adapting his board design to the quicker, more maneuverable Malibu style. I remember him saying, “That’s not what you want to do.” I later realized that he was building boards for himself. He thought that the rest of us should all ride the way he did.

Simmons was a loner. He had a habit of going off by himself to surf. He hated any type of crowd. He liked Salt Creek, below Laguna Beach. It wasn’t unusual to go there and find Simmons, by himself. Or someplace else, like Tijuana Sloughs. Places that the usual surfing crowd didn’t go. He spent a year or so on the North Shore, living at Sunset Beach when everyone else was oriented to Makaha. I remember Buzzy Trent saying that he’d drive by Sunset and see Simmons sitting out there all alone. The story got around that, whenever you went to a surf spot, expecting to have the place to yourself, Simmons would already be there. Even if it was a stormy, rainy day, you’d see Simmons, sitting out in the water by himself.

One day, I ditched school and talked Simmons into taking me with him to Salt Creek. He didn’t like kids any more than he liked adults, but I also rode one of his boards, so he tolerated me. He’d be really quiet, then start quizzing me. “Why are you going to school? What are you going to do with your education? Why don’t you get out and do something with your life?” He was provocative and he was smart. A real individual.

Bob Simmons was killed at Windansea, in San Diego, in 1954. Got slapped on the head by his own board and that was it. The irony of it is that it was only a six-or eight-foot day. That’s the way it always goes. For the most part, it’s not the big waves that get a guy. It’s always some quirky thing.

One of the reasons that Kivlin and Quigg were so successful with the Malibu board is that they had the perfect testing ground. The Malibu wave is like a made-to-order perfect tube. They could test their designs on these uncrowded, machinelike waves, then come in and make improvements. During that short period of a few years, thanks to Malibu and all the great people involved with making boards at the time, surfboard design made a leap like going from horse and buggy to motorcars.

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