Ella Boyd interviewed pioneering Malibu surfer Vicki Williams (formerly Vicki Flaxman) in 2022. Williams was 90.

I was born in Santa Monica, California, and I had two sisters. One was three years younger, and one was 14 years older. She was practically out of the house. My younger sister was not the least bit interested in sports and didn't care about the beach. I don't know what she cared about. She’s the opposite of me. I skipped two years of school, so even though I was just three years older than my sister, my friends were mostly five years older. Five years is a big difference. No, we didn't get along very well at all when we were young.

What were your parents like? Were they strict?

No, they weren’t strict, and I was a very good student, so they trusted me. When I was 14, I got a driver's license, because in those days there was a thing in California called a junior license, and you could get a driver's license at 14. You weren't supposed to drive at night. And I guess you were probably supposed to have an adult with you. Well, I was in high school already and I remember telling my parents I was going to go to a movie with some friends but instead we took the car and started driving to Santa Barbara for a football game. We got a flat on the way up. This was during the war. I think it was a ‘39 Chevy, and I remember thinking, “Oh my God, here we are sitting on Pacific Coast Highway with a flat tire.” We didn't know what to do.

We'd picked up two sailors that were hitchhiking. They were going to Ventura because there was a port there. You used to do that, I mean, it was the war and you just picked up people. In fact, we used to hitchhike ourselves before anybody had cars.

So one of the sailors and one of my friends hitchhiked to Oxnard and bought a tire. The sailor paid for the tire and they put it on the car. I said, “I promise, my dad will send you a check. Just give me your address.” Well, by the time all of this happened, of course, the game was almost over. So we just turned around and went back home. And my dad sent the sailors a check, as promised.

So that was how I grew up. I mean, it was easy times. Not for everybody. But for a lot of us in Los Angeles, at that time, it was easy.

I started during college. I grew up in Santa Monica canyon and went to SaMo High, then UCLA, and graduated from there. Santa Monica was just the best place in the world to grow up. There was no freeway at the time. Everything got screwed up when the freeway was built. It let the whole world into our little slice of paradise.

Anyway, I didn't really start surfing until I was about 18. I knew about surfing because a lot of the guys who came around State Beach, guys that we played volleyball with and hung out with and bodysurfed with, were surfers. Plus we knew all the lifeguards, and of course they all surfed too. But I didn't really think about it much until I was down at State Beach one morning and ran into this guy, Pete Peterson. He was a lifeguard, a captain, and probably the best waterman ever. I mean, he was just incredible, he could swim, paddle, surf, sail, anything having to do with the ocean, Pete was good at. So we were down on State Beach and Pete said, “I'm gonna go up to Malibu and go surfing. Have you ever been there?” I said I hadn't. And he said, “well, do you wanna go? If you wanna go, we'll drive up and try some tandem surfing.” I said, “Okay.” I knew his wife, Barbara Cooper. It wasn't like a date. Pete was quite a bit older than me. So we went up there and went tandem, and I was hooked. That was it.

1949. But I didn't start surfing on my own until 1950. Before that, I liked it but didn't know how to go about it. I didn't know the ins and outs of it. Then in 1950 I ordered a board from Joe Quigg and spent that whole summer just having a great time, surfing and just being at Malibu.

I knew Joe from earlier, because there were a bunch of lifeguards that played paddleboard polo—Joe, Dave Rochlen Tommy Zahn, Matt Kivlin, and some others—they played in the big pool down there by USC. They'd play games against other lifeguards, and we'd go watch. So I kind of knew him from that. But we really got to be friends that summer, the summer of '50, when we had kind of a group. Joe was going out with Aggie Quigg, Matt Kivlin was going out with Diane Griffith, I was going out with Ted Crane, and Claire Cassidy was going out with Fred Harrison. We had this group and I think Aggie got Joe's first board that he made. Or no, actually, the first board was for Rocky Cooper, Gary Cooper's wife. And then he made Aggie a board, then he made one for me, then Claire.

Claire and I went to UCLA together. Robin used to come up to Malibu with Ricky, her brother, and then Aggie was in high school. Aggie was 15, and she'd come up with her older brother, Don, and she and Joe met. Joe was just home from the service. There was an age gap there, between Joe and Aggie, but they fell in love and were together for the rest of their lives.

Did you know pretty much everyone who surfed Malibu?

Yes, pretty much. Unless they were from the Valley. There's a kind of famous photo of a whole bunch of people standing on the beach looking out at the surf. Joe took the picture, and that was part of our beach gang. I know everybody in that shot and I was there that day, but I was in the water when the photo was taken.

You know, we weren't even supposed to be on the beach at Malibu. There had originally been a big wire fence because of that estate right on the point. It's still there. It was a big mansion, and they'd fenced everything off but we tore the fence down, and that's how we got to the beach.

What about Topanga Point? It's right on the way from your house to Malibu, did you surf there at all?

Topanga wasn't much of anything in those days. Sometimes we’d go, just for the heck of it, but Topanga was kind of weird. It was already kind of a hippie conclave. It was a shorter ride than Malibu, and it wasn't anything special. So mostly we didn't bother with it. Why go to Topanga? We had Malibu, you know?

Did you guys all stick together as a group?

Yes. Absolutely. We surfed together. We traveled together. We barbecued and partied together. From the time the school was out until school started, it was an everyday thing. Just put your board on the car and go to Malibu. There was a shack up there. Somebody got some old lumber, and whatever they found: palm leaves or whatever. They built this shack and we'd have parties. Like on a warm summer night, you know, we'd have these parties, and everybody was of age, just about. We would have wine and we would cook things.

I've got pictures of us sitting around the shack, maybe 20 or 25 of us having kind of a Luau. I'm holding a bottle of Mateus wine, and some guys from Hawaii were with us, cooking a pig. Everyone had a ukulele or a guitar and we’d sing Hawaiian songs.

We all lived at home. That was the deal. People didn't have apartments and all that. I lived at home, even during college.

Sure. Peter Lawford was one of the guys who used to hang out with us at Malibu, and he lived on Sunset Boulevard. He'd have parties now and then and we'd all go.

Yes, and he was friends with the Kennedys. He'd bring celebrities up to Malibu once in a while. He brought Montgomery Clift, and one time he brought Marilyn Monroe. We didn't know who the hell she was, but he brought her up and she just hung out with the rest of us.

We kind of thought they were weird. They were older and they didn't surf. The Malibu scene was local, very local.

Do you think people even knew about you guys surfing or did they just not pay much attention?

Nobody paid any attention. They didn't know what it was, or what we were doing. They'd see the surfboards on the car, but they didn't really know.

Do you remember when Nick Gabaldon showed up?

Yes. When Nick came up, everyone welcomed him. He was a really nice guy. And very intent on learning to surf, which he did.

[Note: Gabaldon is often cited as mainland America's first black surfer; he died while surfing Malibu in 1951, after hitting the pier]

No, thank God. I was in summer school and didn't go that day. But Claire was there, and I called her around two that afternoon. I was sure she wouldn't be home, because of course she'd be up in Malibu. But she picked the phone up and said, “Nick hit the pier and they can't find him.” Everybody was looking for him, running around on the pier, swimming as close as they could to the pier. And they couldn't find him.

About five days later his body washed up.

It was terrible. I'm glad I wasn't there that day either.

Did that change the vibe of Malibu for a little bit?

No, not really. Everyone was grieving because they liked him and it was a terrible accident. And it was scary. Someone said, “Oh yeah, he was trying to shoot the pier.” I said, “you can't shoot the Malibu Pier. The pilings are too close, you can't get through.” That's what I always thought, anyway.

That's where we hung out when we didn't go up to Malibu. It wasn't really a surfing place, but it was good for bodysurfing. In those days, there was lots of sea life right off the beach. You could swim out from State with a spear or whatever. We used to get abalone from one of our gang that lived in Santa Monica canyon. We’d go over to his house after the beach and open the abalone and pound it and dredge it, roll it in egg and flour batter, and cook it. Those dinners were absolutely out of this world. And you could get big lobsters out there too. Everything's gone now, but there was a lot of stuff out there to eat. Sometimes we'd cook it all up on the beach.

Did you travel up and down the coast much?

We went on a summer trip that year. A big group of us. We took off from Malibu and went down the coast and stopped at all the surfing spots all the way down into Baja. We went down in a bunch of different cars. We took our horsemeat steaks and our nuts, some canned corn, salad, beer and whatever else. We cooked along the way; we'd stop and camp.

We did, and everybody laughed at our boards!

‘Cause we had these new balsa boards, which were smaller, and the guys down at Sano laughed and said, “Oh my God, how do you ride those potato chips? How do you ride the soup?” And we said, “We don't ride the soup; we're in the curl, honey!”

What kind of boards were the Sano guys on?

Just these big, huge things. They'd mostly go straight. They'd just take off and ride whitewater, heading for the beach. Maybe a little angling here and there. I said, “No, we don't surf that way.”

We went down to Windansea. It was Fourth of July. They were having a big luau and had some friends in from Hawaii. From Windansea we went to Sunset Cliffs, and from there we went into Baja, but I don't remember where. I'm sure it's a big-name break now, but when we were there, there was nothing whatsoever on the point, no houses, no stores; nothing for miles. Just a bluff and we camped out. There was a really nice right slide out front. Every once in a while a couple of local kids would show up on the bluff and watch us.

Just two or three days, until the food and water started to run out, and then we just worked our way back up the coast.

Yes. We weren't nice a lot of the time. There was a guy who used to come up to Malibu on a motorcycle with his wife. They were the most unattractive couple you could ever imagine. They were grubby, snaggle-toothed, just absolutely horrible. And they were nasty people. We couldn't stand them and somebody decided to put sand or sugar in their gas tank. Two guys did it. I was the lookout, and this other gal, Patty Wellman—I can't remember what she was doing, but she was involved. Her father was a big Hollywood director.

[Note: William "Wild Bill" Wellman, World War I flying ace and original Hollywood bad boy, directed the Oscar-winning Wings, as well as Public Enemy, and the original A Star is Born.]

So there I am by the motorcycle looking left, right, everywhere, while the guys were putting in the sand or sugar or whatever. It was easy. Then lo and behold, three or four weeks later, the police are at my front door.

This is incredible. What happened was, other people, not us, had already been doing bad stuff to this guy’s motorcycle. I don't know who. Not our gang. So the guy had climbed across the highway, up on the hill, and he was looking down, waiting, with a little Brownie camera. So we went off the police station and there we were, on film, the two guys putting sand in the gas tank while I'm the lookout. Patty and I had to go to the Malibu court with our parents because we were under 21, and I think we had to pay a $50 fine, something like that. That was sort of bratty stuff we did. We didn't really hurt anybody, we just did bratty stuff like that.

Was there ever any fighting on the beach?

There were a few fist fights here and there, of course, because on hot days we'd be sitting around and people would walk across the street to the Malibu market and come back with wine or beer or whatever. People got drunk and things happened.

Hmmm. Let's put it this way. I was better than all the mediocre guys. There were some really good surfers at Malibu, but there were also a lot of random ones. Way more of those. And I was a better surfer than them. I was doing it every day, you know? Or every day that there was surf. We were loyal to the place, we were there all the time. This was the summer of ‘50.

They were great when we first started. Before people paired off, they were gracious. Welcoming. They'd let us in waves and would encourage us; they thought it was great that the girls were surfing. Even as the summer wore on and people paired off, and you had a boyfriend or whatever—they were still nice. Everybody was nice.

No, I guess not. There were always a couple of guys who weren't nice. Bob Simmons was never nice. He was just a jerk. He never talked to us. Didn't pay any attention to us whatsoever. He was really jerky. Buzzy Trent wasn't very nice either. He just was kind of a macho chauvinist, and he would cut us off if he could. I remember him cutting me off on a really big wave one time. He cut right in front of me and I just rolled down the face of this big wave. I was furious. But what are you gonna do? Nothing. Not with Buzzy, anyway. Other guys, I'd do something.

I was bad. If anybody took off in front of me, I'd push their board out of the way. I remember one time, this guy really pissed me off and I just jumped off my board and just grabbed him around the neck, pulled him off his board and said, “Don't 

 take off in front of me again!” I was nasty in those days. And I was a big gal, I was very muscular at the time, from surfing. I probably weighed 160 pounds, and I didn't put up with people. I was a brat. And I was egotistical.

One time we were sitting around, all the girls, and Matt Kivlin said, "You know who's gonna be the best surfer by the end of this summer, don't you?" And we all said, “No, who?” Matt said, "Claire." And I said, "No, she's not. I am.”

Was that the general tone at Malibu, with your gang, to be competitive like that?

 was sure competitive. Most of us got along—but we didn't much care for Robin Grigg. She was a pain.

She's just always been a pain. I mean, she was a pain then and she grew up to be a pain. I used to run into her in Hawaii, this was years and years later, and she was just—I don't know what it was, exactly.

[Note: 1966 Duke winner and big-wave pioneer Ricky Grigg was Robin Grigg's little brother]

I adored Ricky; he and I got along great. We loved each other. I just couldn't stand her. And she didn't like me either.

You know, I think it went back to this one paddling race.

They'd have these tandem paddling races, and Robin used to paddle with Tommy Zahn. I wasn't doing them. But I went down there to Santa Monica Pier for this one race, just to watch, and a guy named Bob Hogan was there. He said, "The gal that was supposed to paddle with me bailed out, will you paddle with me?" I told him I'd never even been on a paddleboard before, but he said, "No big deal; let's just do it.”

Vicki Williams (Flaxman)

Subscribe or Login

Subscribe or Login

Encyclopedia of Surfing

History of Surfing

Interviews

Features

The Sunday Joint

Videos