Surfing 4: Gidget
Goes to the Movies
Kathy Kohner was a petite 15-year-old when she bought a $35 surfboard and began surfing at Malibu in 1956. The other surfers, mostly male, called her "Gidget," for "girl midget."
Gidget kept a diary about her experiences at Malibu. She told her father, screenwriter Fred Kohner, that she thought she could write a story based on the diary. But that didn’t work out, so her father wrote a novel instead. It was an instant success. Within six weeks of its publication, a movie starring Sandra Dee, James Darren, and Cliff Robertson was being shot.
The success of the movie led to a torrent of surfing and beach movies, which in turn led to a torrent of teen-agers seeking out beaches and surf. Surfing was quickly transformed from a recreation for an elite few to a fad for virtually every adolescent within driving distance of the surf. The number of surfers in California grew from about 5,000 in 1956 to more than 100,000 in 1962.
Surf music also became a rage in the early 1960s. At first, most of it came from the movie soundtracks, but soon surf music groups sprang up. Among them were Dick Dale and the Del Tones, Jan and Dean, and the Beach Boys.
Like many activities that have inspired enthusiasm among teenagers, surfing got a lot of bad press. Surfers were generally portrayed as doped-up beach bums, a marked contrast to the cute, mildly mischievous, but wholesome characters portrayed by Dee, Darren, Annette Funicello, Frankie Avalon and others in the teen-oriented movies.
"Real surfers" rejected both the media stereotype and the Hollywood stereotype. Something of an antidote arrived in 1964: Bruce Brown’s classic movie, Endless Summer, the story of two surfers traveling around the world, searching for the perfect wave. Rebuffed by distributors who said the movie could draw audiences only on the California coast, Brown showed the film in Wichita, Kansas, where it outdrew My Fair Lady and The Great Race. It eventually grossed $8 million.
The success of Endless Summer led to a number of other "pure" surfer movies, among them Pacific Vibrations, The Morning of the Earth, and Paul Witzig's trilogy, Hot Generation, Evolution, and Sea of Joy. In keeping with the whole youth subculture of the 1960s, surfers were portrayed as heroic seekers after an ideal, seeking a oneness with nature by becoming a part of the wave.
That, in fact, was the style of the better American surfers, but it was in sharp contrast to the Australian style. Australian surfing developed in an unusual way. Until the late 1950s, surfing in Australia was linked to the Surf Life Saving Association. Claude West, who had been Duke Kahanamoku’s chief pupil in 1915, pioneered the use of the surfboard in making rescues.
While American surfers, by and large, sought to be one with the wave, Australians saw waves as the enemy, and it showed in the aggressive way in which they surfed. The Australians attacked the waves, as Bernard "Midget" Farrelly demonstrated while winning the 1962 Makaha International Surfing Championship in Hawaii. Another competitor, Mike Doyle, said of Farrelly’s performance, "Midget rode thirty inside waves, just ripping and tearing upside-down and sideways. He didn't score a lot of points on each wave, but he got so many waves that after a while he burned an impression on the judges' minds."
The Hawaiians and Californians wrote that off as a fluke. And, when Farrelly won the first world championship, staged at Manly, Australia, in 1964, it was chalked up to the home surf advantage. But another Aussie, Robert "Nat" Young, dominated the 1966 world championship and people began to think maybe there was something to be said for the attacking style from down under.
One component of the Australians’ success was the use of a smaller board, which was quickly adopted by other surfers. Between 1964 and 1970, the length of the average surfboard was reduced from about 10 feet to only 6 feet. The so-called "shortboard era" lasted well into the 1980s, though the longboards never totally disappeared.
Shortboards are much more maneuverable than longboards. The tradeoff is that they are not as buoyant, so they’re not as good for paddling, and they’re not as good at handling smaller waves. While top competitors still use shortboards, ranging from 5 feet, 6 inches to 7 feet in length, many recreational surfers prefer longboards, from 9 to 12 feet in length. Also popular are the so-called "fun boards," which are intermediate in length and generally wider and thicker than high-performance boards.
Within the short and long categories, there are a number of variations. The most commonly used shortboard, known as a "thruster," has three fins, a pointed nose, and a slightly rounded tail. The fish is a somewhat shorter and wider version of the thruster. It usually has two or four fins. The egg is a shortboard with a rounded nose.
The standard longboard, also known as the "Malibu," also has a rounded nose and usually just one fin. While a Malibu is generally more than 9 feet long, the so-called Mini-Mal ranges from just over 7 feet up to 9 feet in length. The gun is a longboard shaped much like a shortboard but with a sharply pointed tail, for riding on very large waves.
Those are just the more common variations. The possibilities are almost endless.