Gary Lynch interviewed Joe Quigg in 1990, at Quigg’s home in Hawaii. Quotes from this interview were used for “In Trim: Joe Quigg,” a 1994 Longboard magazine article. The version below has been edited and shortened from the original transcript. Throughout the interview, Quigg and Lynch are looking at photographs from Quigg’s scrapbooks and from Nat Young's "History of Surfing."

Yes, and I started about four years of age. My mother loved to swim, so she'd take us to the beach. I liked swimming, but it was boring compared to surfing, so I learned to ride my little belly board before I could really swim.

No, Santa Monica. Up and down the beaches there.

You lived right there near the beach, right?

When I was about five years old, four or five years old. Just these little bellyboards. They were pretty crude, of course. But here's something I remember. This always comes up with Tom Blake, you know, because he's been telling people for years how he invented the fin. But I saw fins on boards when I was a kid, and I put fins on my bellyboards.

Wow, I've never heard about anybody doing fins before Tom.

One day I was talking to Pete Peterson, and I asked him about what Blake was saying, and him being first to put a fin on a board. And Peterson said, "the guy's crazy!" Didn't you tell me that [Whitey] Harrison said the same thing?

Whitey told me he put fins on his boards. He says nobody really knows who did the first fin.

I know! He's right. In the '20s, as far back as I can remember, some boards had fins on them. I think Peterson said he did his first fin when he was 19, or something like that. But he said there had been fins even then. He never claimed he was first.

The more time goes by, the harder it is to figure some of these things out.

Nobody knows about that [prewar] era, and hardly anybody is even asking about it anymore. Even if they were—I mean, Pete Peterson is dead. Tom Blake is senile. Gard Chapin is dead. A lot of this history is going down the drain.

[Change subject, points to a photo in Nat Young's "History of Surfing"] Looks like you guys are having a good time in this picture.

Oh, yes. Kids at the beach now, they'll say, "Oh, Mr. Quigg, it's too bad you had to ride those old wooden boards." But you can see here, yeah, we're having a great time. It's just that you couldn't turn the boards. Even later, with our Simmons boards, you couldn't really do anything. They were lighter but they still didn't turn very well. No tail rocker, and these long, straight rails.

Yeah. So, look, the thing I'd like to get credit for, and maybe I'm being big-headed, I don't know, but the thing I'd like to get credit for is this board of Tom's, right here.

Not only is this board shorter, it also has rocker throughout, and it started a new era of being able to turn in waves like this [Malibu], whereas earlier, if your board went a little off track you just jumped off. So this board of Tom's was a big deal.

No, not the first. There was always rocker, or at least some rocker, here and there. The Redondo guys had boards with rocker—in fact, I copied one of their boards when I was in junior high school. But this board Tommy is riding was way later. This is the first time rocker was nicely carved all the way throughout the board, end to end.

Yeah. The tails before this had been real flat. Simmons' boards always were, you know. Long, straight, flat tails, round on the deck; sort of humpback-looking. My boards had real tail rocker. So the thing I want to say is, I didn't really invent much. What I did was throw out the bad stuff and put all the good stuff into one board. That's what we started calling the "complete combination."

[Still looking at Zahn picture] When did you build this board?

That's it. That's what you're looking at. [Note: Quigg himself sometimes called this board the "Easyrider."]

Tell me how this board is different from what Simmons was doing.

Look, my whole thing was getting up to speed smoothly and coming down off of speed smoothly; that's what the rocker deal was all about. You gotta put curve in the rail to do that. And Simmons never did. That's why I dragged out these pictures. See, in this one [points to a photo]—this is the last board Simmons ever made, right there at the end before he died, and it's still straight-arrow, straight rails, straight plan shape, straight bottom. And that's 

Windansea [where Simmons drowned in 1954] sucks out over that reef, and I just have a vision of Windansea sucking out and that straight tail of his, with those straight rails—he just got launched on takeoff. I know that's what happened. Simmons wasn't respectful of anything. But back to what I was saying. My theories on boardmaking were entirely different from his. I pinched in the tail. Not on the Darrylin board, which was a novice board, for a beginner. But another board that I want to tell you about, the pintail, that I made a little later. I wanted to tuck the outline in and kick it up. So that's what I did. Those two things, the Darrylin board and the pintail; that's what I changed in terms of surfboard design.

Oh yeah, sure, most of the time. Except he wasn't always the easiest guy to get along with. I remember a few times, staying up all night to talk about his board theories, of which he had a million. Simmons would talk all night long about surf theory. We'd go round and round about these things. He'd scream at me; he didn't like my theories too well.

Eventually he'd calm down. I glassed a lot of Simmons' boards. Shaped the rails and glassed them. I used to drive up to Rincon with him to go surfing. Did you hear about the time Simmons went to the North Shore?

I know he went there, but that's about it.

Nineteen-fifty-one, Walt Hoffman and Flippy Hoffman and a bunch of those guys, and Bob Simmons, paddled out to what they now call Pipeline. They called it Banzai at the time. Simmons got pitched so hard there, he just came home in tears. He'd been pushing this macho big-wave thing all his life, so to get into some really hard-breaking big waves and have that happen. I mean, of course it happened, the tail on his board was 18 or 20 inches wide, and concave, so to go out at Pipeline with a tail like that, he just got launched. And the poor thing, he came home in tears. This whole series of boards he built were no good. But he just kept riding 'em, and I swear that's why he died at Windansea, it was the wide tail.

You mentioned there were two breakthrough boards. The Darrylin one was first, and then the pintail?

[Looking at a photo of Tom Blake with a pintail paddleboard] Was it a newer and better version of this?

No, no. This board here is 14' and probably a hundred pounds, and it was just a pig. Square rails. I mean, yes, it has a pointed tail, but this has nothing to do with a modern pintail. I mean, these boards were just—they would literally go the opposite of the way you wanted to turn, because of the square rail. They were a nightmare.

Tom could paddle fast and was a good athlete. He made a pretty good hollow paddleboard right there in 1930.

There were people making better ones. Like when Zahn and I learned to surf, there was a place under the Santa Monica Pier where you could rent boards, and we'd rent these paddleboards. The last thing on earth we would rent would be a Tom Blake paddleboard. They were just so heavy and straight, thick, square rails—no thanks.

Yeah, this thing here [still looking at photo], this would scare the hell out of me just to try to get it out to the lineup.

And he put this handle on the back of the board, to haul it through the waves. I guess you had to jump off and just hang on.

I mean, geez, there'd be no way you would want to do that. Would you want to try and hang onto that beast? See, that's why I get a little upset. Blake wrote his book [

, 1935], and he's a big talker, so he gets a lot of time in the magazines and so forth. But these guys here [points to a photo showing a lineup of surfers from Southern California] were all better surfers than Blake ever dreamed of being. Every one of them was a better surfer than Blake.

What about Pete Peterson? Did you surf much with him?

A lot of people say Pete was the best pre-World War II surfer in California.

That's probably right. Peterson surfed good. Although for us younger guys—I don't know. The older surfers, it was the style to stand like a statue and just angle, you know? Pete did that. But I also remember that once in a while he'd take out some kid's board, whatever he could find on the beach, a little board, and he could just tear it up if he wanted to. He just never wanted to. But yeah, he was the greatest for a lot of years there. It's too bad somebody like you didn't get a hold of Peterson before he died. Although he didn't talk much, as I recall.

No, not really. But I do remember, as a kid, going to the beach to fish and watching Pete surf. Then one day I got a real treat. I was six or seven years old, standing down at the edge of the water with my fishing pole, and Whitey Harrison had come up from Dana Point and was out there next to the pier with Pete. I was running back and forth on the beach, watching 'em. It was just magic. At that point I was bellyboarding a lot, and bodysurfing, and my older brother Jack was starting to learn to surf. So the whole deal wasn't new to me. But to see the two kings was just something else. Harrison was the big guy from the south, Pete was the big guy from the north.

Harrison, at the time, was a lot wilder than Peterson. Not quite as wild as Chapin, but close. He was a hot surfer when he was young. He settled down as he got older, of course. Pete was smooth, very smooth. Classy. Kind of a cruiser in the way surfed. Even back then, Pete liked to take people tandem and everything. But when he'd borrow a small board, like I said, he could really tear around.

Who else do you remember from before the war?

Tulie Clark. He was a Hermosa guy. And he could surf pretty good in general, but the one thing he could do better than anybody was he could kick out of a wave really fast, which was a big deal then.

I built a few, but that was Wally Froiseth's deal. Wally and a couple of his friends.

No, Georgie was still just a kid at this time. Grammar school or something. Maybe a little older. Wally and John Kelly were the two main hot curl guys, I think.

Wally told me he started building those at the end of the 1930s. Maybe not the full hot curl, but narrower in the tail.

Could be. What happened in Waikiki pretty often back then is that the little kids along the beach would do new stuff with their boards, and the older guys would see those kids and try to copy what they were doing, but in bigger surf. So I don't know how much of that is Wally's invention. It doesn't really matter. Actually, now that I think about it, Pete Peterson made some narrow-tail boards in California, too. No skeg, of course, like Wally. But Wally for sure refined the hot curl to where they could take those boards out and ride pretty big waves, even without a fin. I never liked those boards all that much. I tried but didn't have much luck.

Twenty, maybe? Less than 20. And in California I'm still getting blamed for those skegless boards!

There's another thing Bob Simmons gets too much credit for. It was Matt Kivlin's idea to make plywood boards with Styrofoam inside. He did it with Simmons, but Matt thought of it.

The first board with foam. They call those "sandwich boards" now, the collectors. They're hard to find.

Back to the Darrylin board for a second. Was it all balsa?

Right. But I went to five lumberyards to find the lightest redwood and the lightest balsa, so even though it did have redwood, it was pretty light.

It was originally built for Darrylin Zanuck. Did she ever even get it? Everybody liked it so much, and it kind of got passed around, from what I hear.

Yeah, that's true, but no, she got it and learned to surf on it, and she probably thinks of herself as the original Gidget.

Darrylin was really the first girl to buy a board and a convertible and stick the board in back and drive up to Malibu to surf. She was there before all the others.

Okay, but hold on just a second. I wanted to mention again that the Darrylin board was a total novice board, and a lot of builders don't like to admit they build novice boards. Have you ever noticed that? When we talked the other day, you kind of pooh-poohed Hobie for making all those chunky-looking boards. But, hey, the beginners at Doheny loved them. They wanted a board they could learn on. So I'm with Hobie there. I'm not ashamed of building that kind of board, and neither was Hobie. On the other hand, we both also wanted to make radical boards, too.

The pintail, at first, was just for myself, because I was glad to try real weird things. The very first one I made was just a razor blade; small, low-rails, thin, just a spacey board for the time. The very first one I made!

Also 1947. Just a few months after the Darrylin board. So that's why I want to get credit for these two boards, see, because they're such extremes, one to the other, and also because they happened almost at the same time. Where the Darrylin board was fat and a floater, and the pintail I made was thinner and very refined, and just really ahead of its time. You could scale it down to 6' 6" and Derek Ho could ride it at Pipeline today. You can't do that with a Blake board.

Oh my god. The guys at San Onofre and Hawaii ridiculed me so bad for that board, I was embarrassed to take it to the beach. It just looked so different. [Looking at a sketchbook with drawings of his early boards] This board here is about the fourth or fifth pintail I built. Later I sold it to Mickey Dora. It was his first board, I think, not counting one his father made for him. But this was Mickey's first modern Malibu board. I cut it down from one of those pintails. That board weighed 19 pounds when it was finished, which was just incredible for the time. Nobody, 

Georgie was still doing hot curls with Wally. No skeg. I had built all these boards before he ever built that pintail with a fin.

That's the one. That was a great board, and he rode some huge waves on it. But that came after the boards we're looking at here. I'll tell you something else. There was a pintail I made in that first series, Dale Velzy was so in love with this board that he said, "Oh, my God, that's beautiful. I'm going into the surfboard business." And then Gard Chapin, my hero, was at Malibu that summer when I launched that first pintail, and he paddled over to give me all these compliments. Said that he had planned to do one like it for years, but never got around to it. So I was real pleased that my hero gave said those nice things.

Joe Quigg (1990)

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