All quotes below are taken from an oral history of Joey Hamasaki compiled by the History of Women's Surfing website. The piece is undated, but may have gone up in the late 1990s; some of the quotes here have been slightly edited.


I started with redwood bellyboards—my uncle made them. He would take us, his sons and me, to the beach. We rode the bellyboards and saw surfing and wanted to do that too. So he made us balsa surfboards. I was about ten years old.

WORKING AS THE FIRST PRODUCTION-LEVEL FEMALE GLASSER AND GLOSSER


I didn’t think anything of it at the time. I just did it. It was something I enjoyed. Working with Raymond Patterson, Ronald Patterson and Phil Edwards was great. I remember one day, not long after I first got to California, Hobie [Alter] came to my house and I had about eight boards on the floor. He was surprised and wanted to know how come I had so many. I told him that Phil gave them to me to try. I didn’t know I had to give them back! (Laughs) I returned 'em right away because I didn’t want Hobie to think I was stealing them. I just didn’t know. This was all new to me.


In the beginning, there were just two contests that really mattered, Makaha and Huntington. I was on the Windansea Surf Club, and they paid for all of to fly over and compete at Makaha. Later there were more contests on the West Coast. We even went to Santa Cruz. Back then we [women] always got the worst waves during the contests. The slop. The guys always got the best waves.


When I first came to the Mainland, Joey Cabel took me surfing at Trestles. That’s when you weren’t supposed to surf there. We went in his dune buggy and hid it in the bushes. Joey taught me to look out for the poison oak, and also how to not get caught if the Marines came. There was no crowd at all because it was illegal to surf there.


I surfed Doheny a lot. I really like that place. It was so fun and the water was so clean. I used to go to the river there [the San Juan Creek] and pick cilantro. It grew wild. The water was crystal clear and you could see everything. I do miss California. It was so "country" back then, with all the rolling hills. Besides Trestles and Doheny, Malibu was one of my favorite spots, perfect waves that could be ridden forever.”


I didn’t make the team that year but went anyway. We drove across the country to Florida, then flew to Puerto Rico. It was a great experience to see all the different kinds of people along the way. I remember going into a restaurant in Benson, Arizona. We walked in and everybody was staring at us. It was a redneck place and we were surfers from California. The people working there ignored us and wouldn’t serve us so we left. Its sad people are like that. It happened to me another time in Florida, a year earlier. I went to eat with Dewey Weber and they wouldn’t serve us either. Dewey talked to the manager and fixed things.

In Puerto Rico, there was a place called Jobos that we surfed. You had to drive over a dirt road to get there. The waves were really good. A photographer followed us and got a shot of me that wound up as the centerspread in 

. We stayed in a house overlooking a beautiful valley and could see Tres Palmas. I remember walking down that valley one day, and it was so peaceful and beautiful. Linda Benson, Phyllis O’Donnell, Duline McGough, Penny Whiting, Sheri Crummer and I stayed there. [Crummer adds: "We went to a jazz club in San Juan one night and Joey sat in on drums. She rocked the house. She was good at everything she did.]

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