Drew Kampion interview California surfing pioneer Lorrin "Whitey" Harrison for Surfing magazine in 1982. Harrison was 69 years old.

You've been surfing in California for 55 years. Is it true that the waves here used to be better?

Oh yeah. I think Corona del Mar had the best surf I've ever seen in the world, and I've been all over. Or the most consistent surf, anyway. The water would get cold, but we had that west breakwater that knocked out a lot of the wind. The waves would break 20- to 25-feet way out by the bell buoys, and we'd ride across the end of the east breakwater towards Corona del Mar beach. Even a two-foot swell would jump up to six-foot when it hit that smooth wall at an angle. You could ride for 800 yards! All the way down to the bathhouse. That's where I spent all my time during high school.

Were other breaks better back then, too?

Well, everybody went there, to Corona del Mar. That was the best. We surfed Palos Verdes too, though. We'd get a whole load in a Model-T Ford and go up there, and it was more of a paddleboard thing most of the time. But when it got big, it was great. Tom Blake always liked the place; he made those paddleboards and liked to ride 'em, those hollow boards, but you had to be a genius to balance on them.

Yeah! Hell yeah! I've built boards for my kids from three-foot on up, and I rode anything that anybody had at the beach.

Who were some of the guys you surfed with back in the '20s and '30s?

Oh well, there's a lot of 'em dead and gone. Gardner Lippincott; W.I. Hollingsworth, who owns a whole city block up in L.A.; Bill Herwig, he was part Hawaiian, he came down to Corona del Mar with Duke Kahanamoku. There was Jack Pyle and Wally Burton and Keller Watson, who was the California champion in 1929. Keller owned two drugstores and had a surfboard rack on the beach at Corona with just like in Hawaii. And then there was John Paia, who we called Hawkshaw. When he first came over from Hawaii, he was the greatest surfer I've ever seen.

He just was a clown on a board. He'd stand on his head, he'd do all sorts of things. And he was the most outstanding beachboy. A lot of other Hawaiians didn't like John 'cause he'd clown around and make more money than them. But the kids liked him and the families liked him. He would climb a coconut tree and throw coconuts down to the kids. And when the ships came in—there weren't any planes way back then, it was all steamers and freighters—John would climb way up to the top of the ship and people would give him money and he'd do a one-and-a-half or something off the top as the boat was going into the harbor! He was a musician too. And it was a comedy to watch him surf. John came over here and stayed. He worked in movies—doubled for Indians or whatever. He was famous.

Performance surfing has changed a lot since then.

It's just a different style of riding, and with a different board you can do all these new things. The boards we had were mainly for speed. If you got the speed, you could go across the wave five times as far as guys can do today with these short boards. All they're doing is going down to the bottom, up to the top, down to the bottom, and they're still back in the curl of the wave. We didn't want to ride way back in the curl. We'd shoot across, and the idea was to go as far as we could.

So the whole concept of in-the-tube surfing was foreign to you?

Yeah, the idea in my day was to get a smooth ride and go as far as you could go, and if the wave went down to almost nothing, you just kept riding. It was like that at Castles Surf at Waikiki: on a big day you could take off way out there and ride through Public Baths, go across Cunha's, and almost make it through Queens. And that was enough to last you a day, just that one wave!

Do you feel there's much of a connection between the surfers of today and those of you who pioneered the sport?

Well, I can take a solid redwood board that weighs maybe 80 pounds down to the beach and put it in the sand and ask anybody there to ride it, and I'll bet they can't. They will absolutely fall on their face! Because we had a whole different method of steering and handling a board. Now, the board does it all for you, all you have to do is lean over to do a turn. The other way, our way, on the old boards, you'd drag a leg to turn, or you could learn to turn with your feet. People today don't know anything about that. So I figure anybody that surfed in my day—Pete Peterson, for instance—could handle any board that comes their way, long or short, old or new. Anybody that started way back has the advantage, if they kept on surfing, of knowing these other techniques. And I'm not saying the thing we did were better, 'cause guys are doing 360s and all that stuff now. But we did a lot of things that guys today can't do.

How about the way surfers act now; is that much different from surfers of your generation?

I don't know. It seems to me like they're not having as much fun. There's too much friction; you have a lot of guys who want to hog the waves; guys who've been surfing four or five years and they think they know it all. But they've got a lot to learn, I'll tell you that.

Well, there's a lot of guys who say they're surfers, but they're not really. They're "pleasure boys," mostly just hanging out on the beach. There's a lot of that. But there's plenty of surfers in the water, that's true; maybe too many.

Would you still spend your life as a surfer if you were younger and starting out today, or would you go into something else?

Oh no. I'll always choose surfing. It keeps you in perfect shape, and I think it's the best sport there is.

Who did you know that had a big effect on the direction of surfing?

Bob Simmons was the most radical thinker. He's the guy who revolutionized boards. He worked at one of the big airplane companies—Douglas, I think—and he had all these theories about how things moved through water. Before, boards were flat on the top and round on the bottom with round sides. That was the type of shape we all had back in the 1930s. Maybe there was a little rocker fore and aft. But Simmons showed up one day and all his boards, starting about two feet back from the nose, were shaped like the top of an airplane wing. Same curve, same rocker. I took one out and couldn't believe it! He had three boards, and I tried 'em all; he was pretty sure that he was on to something, and he was! And he was a top surfer. But he got killed down at Windansea in La Jolla, surfing out there in a big fog and trying to beat the break. I guess he got hit with his own board. Nobody ever spotted him, and his board washed into the beach. But Bob Simmons was the first guy to come up with all these radical designs. He made a lot of boards, and he lived in his car, and he'd travel up and down the coast shaping boards out of his car.

I put a fin on a board in 1935, then later in '37. For a couple years after that, there was a big argument; a lot of guys said boards were faster without the fin because of the drag. We were still able to slide a steep wave without a fin, you know, because the back of the board had a narrow tail with a sharp V in the bottom. These were the original hot curl boards.

You mentioned earlier that you turned these boards by dragging a leg, but then you could also steer with your feet, which is more like turning boards today. How did that come about?

When I was in Hawaii in '32 I watched this Japanese surfer named Akamine; he had a 14-foot solid redwood plank and he'd steer with his feet, and it looked real good to me. So I kept trying and trying that style, and the guys would all laugh at me until finally I got it! Got so I could do it real good. Then I told Pete (Peterson) about it, and he got onto it right away too. Then the two of us came back to Corona del Mar and we could cut back and zig-zag all over the place. Everybody wanted to know how we did it, so we showed 'em, and pretty soon everybody was on to it. Gard Chapin, Mickey Dora's stepfather, he got super good at doing it, and Don Okey of La Jolla, and Dorian Paskowitz. I knew 'em all. I surfed with 'em all. I knew every guy that ever surfed years ago. Y’know, every car full of surfers that drove down the highway, I knew ‘em.

Lorrin Harrison

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