Matt Warshaw interviewed Patti Paniccia by email in 2023.


I'm the daughter of immigrants. My father was born in Italy and my mother was born shortly after her family arrived in the US. He was a cabinet maker and then later became a contractor. He grew up during the Depression and didn't finish high school—or maybe even elementary school—but he was really smart and hardworking, and I respected him tremendously.

My background is so unlike any surfer I’ve ever met, most of whom grew up on the beach. I was born in Cyprus Park, a pretty poor neighborhood in East Los Angeles. In fact, my “front yard” was a billboard, and across the street were the train tracks and junkyards. The hubcap junkyard—I thought that was beautiful. I didn’t know any better. The hubcaps were all hanging up on these giant walls and they glistened in the sun like a fairy tale.

We lived in one half of a tiny duplex, right where three major boulevards intersected. Our tiny front yard extended into the middle of the intersection, so there were cars driving past, constantly, in all directions. The billboard I mentioned—I climbed that for fun. I wonder what the people driving by thought. I was only six or seven, but thinking back now, the feeling I had doing that was very similar to the feeling I later got while riding big waves—the risk, the daredevil attitude. I got a lot of splinters.

Sometime around 1960, we moved to Eagle Rock, a modest lower-middle-class neighborhood nearby. This was a step up for the family. I have a distinct memory of running around the house the night we moved in, shouting, “We’re rich! We’re rich! We have a bathtub!” My dad's business kept doing better and better, and a few years later he put a pool in our backyard. Imagine! After that, I spent every day in that pool.


My grandparents moved to Huntington Beach and during summer I would often go stay with them. In the late '50s and early '60s, Huntington was not an expensive place to live. My grandparents lived in a small duplex a block off the beach on 8th and Walnut, just north of the pier. I loved visiting them. I'd fish with my grandmother every morning off the pier, next to the bait house. Not for fun, but for lunch or dinner. We'd catch small halibut, which were plentiful back then. Then we'd walk home and she would drink wine and fall asleep, and I'd go back to the beach alone and watch the surfers. Leashes weren't invented yet, so when somebody wiped out their board would wash in. I'd run over, grab it, wade back into the water toward the surfer and ask, "Can I try your board?” Only two ever said yes.


My dad’s work brought him to Hawaii in the mid-1960s, and sometimes the rest of the family traveled with him. So from an early age, I was living two very different lives. One in Los Angeles and the other in Hawaii. I continue to do that to this day. Two lives. Back and forth. I even took the bar in both states. I have family and close friends in California and Hawaii, and also Italy—in fact I have dual citizenship, in America and Italy. My neighbors in Waialua have been my neighbors for more than 50 years, but I’m not always there because my and my husband’s careers keep us in California a lot.

I prefer Hawaii. I prefer hanging with the local guys and gals I hung out with in my teen years—really formative years for surfing. When I first arrived in Waialua, it was a non-expensive residential area of the North Shore with only local people living there—workers at the Waialua Sugar Mill. I still deeply love Waialua but the Sunset Beach crowd has been moving in lately along with a lot of new people from the Mainland, so it’s changing. Here in California, I still have friends from Eagle Rock, from law school, and from my CNN years.


I usually sucked in competition because I could only surf North Shore Waves well, and they almost always sent the women out in small sloppy waves. In those conditions, I never knew what to do with myself. I was good at carving big bottom turns and making steep drops, but in the surf contests for women at that time, you scored points for doing a lot of little maneuvers with practically no bottom turn. That's not an excuse because a great surfer can surf in any conditions. That wasn't me.

The first pro contest I surfed in was the 1975 WISA event at Malibu but the waves were pretty small and I didn’t advance. Later that year I surfed in the Smirnoff, at Sunset, against the men. Eddie Aikau, Sammy Hawk, Owl Chapman and Terry Fitzgerald were all in my heat. The waves were really big. There was no priority rule back then, it was just a free for all; whoever caught the wave closest to the peak had priority. I caught two waves, which was pretty good considering who was competing with me to catch them. But they scored your top three waves so I got last in the heat.

And of course, I surfed on the first women's world pro surfing tour, in 1976. The tour where, at the end, Fred Hemmings and the IPS decided to not declare a women's champion, mostly because there wasn't enough money involved. Only six of us went to all the tour stops: me, Becky Benson, Sally Prange, Jericho Poppler, Rell Sunn and Claudia Bates. Jericho and Becky won the contests.

People often ask me why, even though the first IPS world tour was in 1976, no women’s champion was named until 1977. It's kind of a mess, and complicated. But, basically, it was Fred’s decision and I was unaware of it until the announcement was made that were would not be a women's champ. I think it’s because some of the contests on the tour had promised to meet the IPS minimum for prizemoney, then changed their mind after we arrived and paid us far less. If Fred had included points for those contests, then Jericho had the most points that year and would have been named world champion. But if you added up just those contests that 

 meet the IPS minimum, then Margo would have been champion because she got the most points for those events, most of which were in Hawaii. Margo didn’t travel on the tour but she did well in those contests that counted.

As far as my own performance—I wasn't much of a competitor, all things considered. But I was out there, on the North Shore, when it was big, and most of the other women were not. Sally, Becky and her sister Blanche, and myself—we were the regulars when the surf was bigger. The guys who were around at the time remember me.


I worked at Kentucky Fried Chicken in Los Angeles starting at age 15. My parents had to sign a work permit because I was underage. I hated the job but needed the money. In the early '70s, after moving to Hawaii, I worked as a waitress at Jerry’s Sweet Shop in Haleiwa. It was a local breakfast and lunch dive. Any surfer who was around the North Shore back then will remember it. When the Kuilima opened (now the Turtle Bay Resort), I left Jerry’s to work there as a banquet server. And of course, I ran the women’s division of International Professional Surfing (IPS) beginning in 1976. I got paid $100 a month. Not because Fred Hemmings was cheap. The fact is, he wasn’t making any money at that stage, and was paying me and Randy Rarick, who was running the men's division, out of his own pocket.


I left Hawaii for law school in the late 1970s. Walked away from the North Shore and competition, but not from surfing. I've never walked away from surfing. I chose Pepperdine Law School and started surfing Malibu and places north. It cost a lot, and it took years and years to pay off my student loans. I was a law clerk during the summer of 1980, just after my second year at Pepperdine, for a Honolulu law firm. I stayed in Hawaii for the Fall semester of my third year and got a full-time law clerk externship with a federal judge, and also took some classes at the University of Hawaii Richardson School of Law. When I came back to the mainland to finish up at Pepperdine, I clerked for the Criminal Division of the US Attorney’s Office in Los Angeles.


I got lawyer job offers both in Hawaii and California, but after passing the Hawaii and California bars, I decided to be a TV news reporter instead. I started working as a news writer for KTLA, then got my first on-air job at South Bay Cable News in Manhattan Beach as a reporter and anchor. It was like public access TV. We were all novices and the production quality was not great, but I cut my teeth and loved becoming immersed in the South Bay scene during that period. And unlike other news people, I always gave great surf reports! South Bay surfers would sometimes see me on stories and thank me for that.

Then I took a job at KEYT-ABC Santa Barbara where I stayed for a few years—and surfed a lot at Rincon and the Ranch. After that, I went to KCOP Channel 13 in Los Angeles, and that's where I began to cover a lot of serious, important news. Next was a job as a network correspondent for CNN in the Los Angeles Bureau. That began in 1989. My audience at that point grew to 83 countries and the stories I was doing had me traveling throughout the western United States.


In 1993, when I returned to work after having my second child, I was fired. Not for anything I did, work-wise, just because I was a mother. Such were the times, CNN's executive vice president, Ed Turner, actually put it in writing, telling me I should "think about mommydom for a career.” I went from being what he had publicly called “one of his strongest reporters” to being an undesirable mommy of babies. Even my bureau chief told me that I should “stay home and take care of my children.”

I sued them. I became the poster child for pregnancy discrimination. We battled it out for almost two years, and the story made national headlines. In the end, I won. I started a scholarship with some of the money to assist law students, men or women, who were primary caregivers for minor children while in law school. I never returned to broadcast news. Even though I appeared strong to others throughout, the truth is—and I’ve never shared this publicly—those two years of litigation knocked the wind out of me. Times have changed and employers can no longer do what happened to me, but CNN sent private investigators to explore every part of my life. They sent subpoenas to everyone around me. They made wild untruthful accusations. But in the end, everyone in the CNN Bureau testified for me, except for the two men I sued, and the wife of one of those men, and an entertainment reporter who was terrified of losing her job.


When it was over, I was afraid to take another news job because the lawsuit had affected people differently. I either walked on water or I was a she-devil. I was afraid my broadcast career would get sabotaged in ways I couldn’t imagine or predict. I was so exhausted from being challenged. CNN told the judge they had spent $400,000 on just their investigators and lawyers. Like I said, some of the things they did are no longer legal, like subpoenaing my gynecological records, parking private investigators across the street from my house, sending fake survey people to my door, on and on.

So I wrote a proposal for a book to help other women. I managed to sign with a respected New York City agent who sold my book to Ballantine, a division of Random House. They paid me to write it and sent me on a nationwide book tour in 2000. It was called 

WorkSmarts for Women: The Essential Sex Discrimination Survival Guide.

 But again, it was a different time and some interviewers were still really put off by a woman asking for equality in the workplace. It was interesting and eye-opening doing interviews around different parts of the country and getting challenged about that.

I started teaching law school at Pepperdine in 1987, part-time, just one class a semester, while I was still a journalist. I taught Media and Law, given my expertise as a journalist and because I'd been on a lot of ABA and California State Bar Committees and Task Forces having to do with the First Amendment. After the pregnancy discrimination case, I created a course titled “Gender and Law," and a few years after that instituted “Employment Discrimination.” I’ve also practiced employment and labor law, and I’m a commissioner for the Los Angeles County Employee Relations Commission. What I really want to do is retire—and just go back to Waialua, and get in the water more often!

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