Surfing 3:
Southern Cal Becomes Capital
There was a lot of traffic between California and Hawaii during the 1930s. Duke Kahanamoku had helped set the stage. Beginning in 1925, he lived in California a good part of the time, appeared in several movies, and introduced surfing to quite a few Hollywood types. Tom Blake was also something of a commuter. In 1928, he established the Pacific Coast Surfriding Championships at Corona del Mar.
While Waikiki remained surfing’s Mecca, Southern California became the sport’s center. The first hot spot was San Onofre, between Los Angeles and San Diego. A grass shack had been left on the beach after a movie was shot there. It became the center of the surfers’ activities. They could park their jalopies safely above the high tide mark, use the shack as a changing room, and lounge on the beach when they weren’t testing their skill on the waves. Some of the more avid surfers camped out on the beach for long periods of time.
Soon after San Onofre became popular, other surfers discovered Malibu, just north of Los Angeles. Malibu was to make surfing famous, largely because of its Hollywood connections. A number of film stars took up surfing, among them Ronald Colman and Joel McCrea. Other stars came out to watch the surfers. And some of them vacationed in Hawaii and checked out the Waikiki surf scene while they were there.
A number of California surfers, including Pete Peterson, who won the Pacific Coast Surfriding Championship four times, also made the pilgrimage to Waikiki. The Hawaiian surfers weren’t particularly welcoming to outsiders at the time, yet some of the visitors, such as John Kelly and Woody Brown of "Hot Curl" fame, settled down at Waikiki.
During World War II, surfing was basically put on hold. Many potential surfers were in the service, and the best surfing beaches were criss-crossed by barbed wire to discourage invaders. Ultimately, though, the war benefited the sport by introducing thousands of servicemen to Hawaii and the Pacific and by creating technology and materials that would revolutionize surfboard design.
Bob Simmons came up with the first important postwar design, which he called a "hydrodynamic planing hull." After suffering a serious injury to his left arm in a cycling accident, Simmons had taken up surfing in 1939 as physical therapy, and he had fallen in love with the sport. During the war, he worked for Douglas Aircraft. When the war ended, he began making conventional redwood surfboards in his garage while also studying naval wartime research on hydrodynamics.
In the meantime, Preston "Pete" Peterson built the first fiberglass surfboard, using two hollow fiberglass halves with a central stringer of redwood, sometime in 1946. As Simmons began to put his new knowledge of hydrodynamics to work by experimentally shaping surfboards, he decided to work with fiberglass because it was much easier to shape than wood. He developed a "sandwich board" of plywood, styrofoam, and fiberglass. He eventually got the weight of a board down to about 25 pounds, compared to 150 pounds or so for a solid wood board and about 100 pounds for one of Tom Blake’s hollow boards.
Joe Quigg, who at times worked with Simmons, was also interested in shaping boards, but he preferred to work with balsa wood. Because balsa is very porous, he sealed his surfboards with resin and fiberglass. They were beautifully made, with fins of fiberglassed white pine, and they became quite popular at Malibu. Because they were relatively small, thin, and light both in weight and in color, they were christened "potato chips" by San Onofre surfers, most of whom were still using heavy redwood boards.
Quite a few surfers, including Simmons, felt that heavy boards were better. But it soon became obvious to most that the balsa boards were faster and more maneuverable. In 1953, Dale Velzy and Harold "Hap" Jacobs began building balsa boards in Hermosa Beach. Velzy was a master promoter. He paid well-known surfers to use his boards and he made small boards that could be handled by surfers as young as 12. This younger group became known as "gremmies," a diminutive of "gremlins."
Balsa had its drawbacks, though. It was relatively expensive; its quality varied greatly; and it quickly became waterlogged if there was the slightest breach in the exterior seal.
Lorrin Harrison and Dave Sweet began to experiment with polyurethane foam in the mid-1950s. The foam was lighter and more durable than balsa, and at least as easy to shape, but manufacturers molded it only in very small quantities at the time. After several explosions, a 25-year-old Californian named Hobie Alter, with the help of Gordon "Grubby" Clark, in 1958 figured out how to mold a polyurethane blank large enough to be shaped into a surfboard.
Alter came from a well-to-do family that had a summer home at Laguna Beach. He had taken up surfing about 1950, while in high school, and he began building balsa surfboards in 1953. After Alter went to a junior college, his father suggested that he should go into the board building business full time and he advanced some money to get him started.
With the polyurethane problem solved, Alter opened a shop in Dana Point and hired some shapers, including Joe Quigg. Shortly afterward, Clark started his own company, Clark Foam, to manufacture the blanks that would be shaped into finished surfboards.