SoCal After WWII
In Europe, the Allies landed on the Normandy coast on June 6, 1944 to begin the push on to Berlin . Nearly a year later, on May 7, 1945, Germany surrendered. “V.E. Day” ended all war in Europe on the following day.
Ending the debate amongst the Allies on endinb the war in the Pacific by having to invade Japan , the United States dropped atomic bombs on two Japanese cities in early August 1945. The Japanese government subsequently surrendered unconditionally on August 15, 1945. The world breathed a collective sigh of relief – followed by memorable celebrations. The total cost in human life during the five year period of Axis (Germany , Japan , Italy ) attempts at world domination: approximately 35 million combatants, plus ten million Nazi concentration camp victims.[1]
What war’s end meant for many soldier surfers was the return to surfing itself. For their friends, it was the gradual return of their surf buddies to the lineups. Significantly, the end of World War II set the stage for technological advances in surfboard design and a gradually increasing stream of mainland surfers on surfari to Hawaii .
After World War II ended and the surfer servicemen “started coming back in late ‘45 and early ‘46,” Duke Kahanamoku recalled, “surfing once again took an upturn. But it was slow, for the military returnees were occupied with finding jobs or returning to their interrupted education chores.”[2] Many Southern California surfers went back to school on the G.I. bill.
Flood Control’s Demise
Along with human casualties, the Second World War resulted in the destruction of one of the favored surf spots of the 1930s –
“In a rush of patriotism, defense planning and commerce during World War II,” wrote Steve Barilotti in a 1997 issue of Surfer magazine, the Navy built a breakwater in San Pedro Bay, at Long Beach, “effectively choking off south-facing Long Beach from swell action and turning the once wave-rich waters of Belmont Shores into a placid, sometimes stinking harbor dotted with oil platforms thinly disquised with fake palm trees as tropical atolls.”[4]
Today, besides the fact there is no longer any surf at Flood Control, the area is high in pollutants. “One of the major problems is that the Los Angeles River empties out into Long Beach ,” explains Long Beach Surfrider Foundation activist Robert Palmer. “The breakwater holds all the inland garbage and scum that comes down the flood-control channel. You go west of 55th Street toward downtown and the beach sand is marbeled with oil, Styrofoam, you name it. You don’t even want to walk on it.”[5]
From the 1910s and throughout the 1930s, Flood Control had been a prime spot for surf. In California
“Flood Control was an excellent right that used to break where the Queen Mary is now on any good-size swell. It was rideable up to 15 to 20 feet. In September of 1939 we rode a huge chubasco-driven swell that was pushing over 15 feet. Ted Sizemore (an excellent surfer of the time and a Long Beach lifeguard) said that on a good south swell they had more rescues along parts of Long Beach than anywhere else on the Southern California coast. But during the war we all went away and they built the breakwater. There wasn’t much we could do about it.”[7]
“The Army Corps of Engineers built the Long Beach breakwater from 1942 to 1949,” continued Barliotti, “to house the Pacific Fleet along ‘Battleship Row,’ south of Palos Verdes and north of Seal Beach . At two and a half miles, it is the world’s longest breakwater.”[8]
Malibu
During the 1940s,
Before Europeans settled the area, the Chumash Indians had lived along the beach at “Malibu Surfrider Beach Pueblo de las Canoas ,” village of the canoes. They were still there in the 1700s when the Spanish arrived and attempted to “civilize” them.
As for the first surfers to ride Malibu , it was in the year 1926. The riders were Tom Blake and Sam Reid; both lifeguards then, at Santa Monica Beach Malibu was difficult to reach until the State of California opened the highway through the Rindge Ranch a few years later, in 1929, after a long fight with the owners.[9]
“The 1930’s brought surfers, but not many,” remembered Cal Porter. “If you didn’t want to surf alone you brought friends with you. My first experience there was in the late 30’s and five or so surfers at one time was a pretty good crowd, and that was on a good summer day with a decent south swell running. Early morning was best when there was no one in the water. The Adamson House was there on the point as it is today, having been built in 1929 for the daughter of the Rindge family and her husband. It is now a museum open to the public. The famous Malibu Wall where we leaned our boards was built in 1932 and is still there in part. It once ran almost down to the pier. The old two lane highway ran alongside the wall and is now a parking lot.
The Malibu pier had been there since 1905, built as a shipping wharf. Before 1938 a surfer’s goal was to reach the end of the pier at the conclusion of the ride, but that took a very large wave. After 1938 that became impossible when the pier was extended to its present length of 780 feet. A storm in 1943 wiped out the end of the pier and it was rebuilt to what we see today. There were no businesses or restaurants near the area in the 1930’s. The Malibu Inn that has been across the street for so many years was at that time located on the old Malibu Road across from the Colony.”[10]
World War II made it difficult to surf Malibu . With reports of Japanese subs off the coastline, the U.S. Coast Guard established a headquarters in the pool house of the Adamson estate, and the pier was used as a lookout post. Barbed wire went up and the beach was under constant surveillance. Dale Velzy made it out a time or two but not many more did. Malibu was blacked out at night with no house or car lights allowed. Long military convoys passed Malibu Surfrider almost daily.
At the end of the war in 1945, as many as ten surfers were seen in the water at one time. The crowd steadily increased and then in the mid-1950s “Gidget arrived and attendance soon after exploded. It increased so much that the State of California took over the beach and asked the County of Los Angeles
Before this time, life at Surfrider Beach California Coast
“… The Point still faces due south and cranks out some of the best waves anywhere. A nice summer south swell works best, but first, second and third points are all ridden year around.”[11]
Craig Stecyk wrote of an incident that took place just before the outbreak of war. The particular moment at Malibu , October 5, 1941, tells a lot about the surfers there at the time:
“A confrontation is in progress. With only three guys in the water, Gard Chapin has forced the altercation over a drop in. This is typical behavior for Chapin, a gifted surfer, who turns and cuts alone in an era when almost everyone else trims. Gard’s verbose tactics alienate more than a few and his radical board designs aren’t really appreciated. One who wasn’t intimidated is Robert Simmons who bought his first surfboard from Chapin. Eventually, Bob went to work in the Chapin wood shop and there had his initial board building experiences. Other velocity-maneuverability standouts in those dark age days were Bud Morrisey and Dave Sykes. Morrisey contributed down-the-line shapes and was considered by many to be the first to walk the board at Malibu . Topanga dweller Sykes’ finely honed speed lines and turning were years in advance of others. Sykes delighted in perfect planing surfaces and placed 15 layers of hand rubbed lacquer over his boards creating a hard shelled outer surface many years before the discovery of fiberglass and resin. To this day, Chapin, Morrisey and Sykes occupy prominent spots in the Malibu pantheon of innovators.”[12]
Pete After the War
Even though the war ended on all fronts, it took many servicemen a while before making it back home. For Pete Peterson, it took him over a half a year to return.
On the way back, at one of the islands the U.S.S. Pandemusvisited, Pete bartered for an outrigger canoe that he was allowed to keep on the fore deck of the ship’s cargo hatch. In his off-watch hours, when other crewmen relaxed in their bunks smoking, reading or playing cards, Pete would lower the outrigger overboard and sail around the various lagoons, diving and trading odds and ends to villagers in exchange for breadfruit and coconuts.
It took the U.S.S. Pandemus seven months to finally return to its homeport of New Orleans . Pete was discharged with $142.01 separation pay, of which $99.65 went to bus fare to get back to Santa Monica . Fortunately, his old job as Lifeguard Lieutenant on the beaches of Santa Monica was still waiting for him. Finding housing was a different story. With thousands of G.I.’s returning home before him, local housing was nearly nonexistent.
Captain of the Santa Monica lifeguards, Cap Watkins again came to his rescue. He offered the use of one of Santa Monica ’s rescue boats so that Pete would not only have a place to stay, but also be able to bring his son John under his wing again. John, then eight years old, had been staying with family friends since 1943. Now, father and son reunited in a new home, albeit small. They had tiny berths in the rescue boat’s cabin, a tiny galley and showers at the lifeguard headquarters.
Even though gasoline was no longer rationed, automobiles, like housing, were hard to get. No matter, Pete was still able to score a clean 1941 Plymouth coupe. It did not take father and son long to utilize it to hit favorite surf spots and rekindle friendships amongst those who were lucky enough to make it through the war alive. When Pete got together again with Whitey Harrison, his surfing shifted more to the south, with San Onofre being a focal point. It was not long before Pete was surfing San Onofre with Whitey and his group on a regular basis on weekends when Pete and John could stay overnight.[13]
Pete eventually found a small house for himself and his son. Even though it looked like their lives and those of their friends were getting back to normal, there was no returning to the good old days of the 1930s. They had been lean years and ones where people often had to make do with what they had, but they were pristine years for surfing. The post-WWII period was markedly different than the pre-World War II era. The Depression was a thing of the past and its passing was understandably regretted by no one. But something of high intangible value was lost as the productivity fostered by the war continued unabated. The United States became not only the leading country on the planet, but also the richest. In California , this was clearly in evidence by the state’s population explosion and sprouting of buildings and highways everywhere. The spirit of the 1930s was replaced by a more materialistic culture that rode on the crest of an unprecedented period of prosperity.
Plastic Board, 1946
World War II had not only bread American prosperity, but introduced many new technological advances. One new wartime technology that would have a great impact on water sports was the development of “plastics” – specifically fiberglass, phenols, mono and polyester resins that had begun during the war and had already significantly aided the war effort. Pete found himself on the inside track of the use of these materials in the repair and making of surfboards due to his friendship with engineer Brant Goldsworthy.
Brant “had been a wartime aircraft parts sub contractor. Goldsworthy had developed a practical working knowledge about resins and fiberglass application and had been in touch with the marketing departments of chemical firms such as Owens-Corning, who had patented ‘Fiberglas’ (one ‘s’) in 1936, and Dupont’s chemical engineer Carleton Ellis, who had patented the first polyester resin the same year.”[14]
All over the country, large corporations like Owens-Corning and Dupont were converting their industrial facilities from wartime production into civilian. Market research indicated to Owens-Corning and Dupont that fiberglass and resin would sell the best to the building industry, commercial aviation, and the small boat industry.[15]
“Brant Goldsworthy is certainly the ‘godfather of fiberglass’ in the world,” attested Hobie Alter who, in the late 1950s, became the key man in the development of the polyurethane foam surfboard for mass production. “He is looked at as the ‘godfather’ of reinforced plastics.”[16]
Goldsworthy and his partner Ted Thal would, a little later on, become the first ones to sell fiberglass and resin for surfboard construction.
Tom Blake protégé, champion paddler and legendary lifeguard Tommy Zahn said of the Brant Goldsworthy/Pete Peterson connection that Pete and Goldsworthy were more than just acquaintances. “Pete had been a lifetime friend of Brant Goldsworthy’s.”[17]
Pete recognized the potential for lighter boards using fiberglass. Before the war, he had made balsa boards to that end. These had to be coated with varnish to keep them from getting water-logged. Varnish, however, while flexible and organic, succumbs to ultra violet rays, breaking down in sunlight and lacking in tensile strength.[18] Not so with fiberglass and this is how Pete’s famous “Plastic Board” came about:
Working with Goldsworthy, Pete used a release coat on an existing paddleboard, laying up two halves in a clamshell configuration. They pulled the two parts off and used these to create a female mold. The subsequent male molds were then bonded to an inch-and-a-half redwood stringer, sanded and glass taped to seal the joint.[19] The seam was then sealed with fiberglass tape.[20] The result was the first hollow fiberglass paddleboard. Hollow board creator Tom Blake was so impressed he soon drew up board plans for “all fiberglass construction” of his own designs.[21]
Pete’s first fiberglassed board was constructed in June of 1946. Brant Goldsworthy helped and Joe Quigg ‑ along with Pete ‑ tested it out in the water.[22]
“Pete had two boards,” at the time he made his fiberglass paddleboard, recalled Tommy Zahn. “One was ‘The Pete Board’ and the other was this [prototype of the hollow fiberglass] board, which was redwood/balsa… It was just balsa wood with redwood rails. It wasn’t ‘The Pete Board’ ‑ which was balsa with a redwood deck. And this prototype, which was wood, was the one he used in big waves. He didn’t use ‘The Pete Board’ in big waves.
“And so, when the fiberglass first came out, he thought, ‘hey, it would be a real neat idea to reinforce the nose of all these boards with fiberglass’ and [he] started doing that. Then he covered the whole [prototype] board with fiberglass. Then, he said, Brant talked him into making an all-fiberglass board. So he used it [the redwood/balsa big wave board] for a male mold and pulled that – this board [the ‘plastic’] off that one; then, put a center dividing strip of redwood, here, and nailed it on and glassed over that. Then, the whole board was effectively fiberglass except for this dividing strip – you could see light through the whole board.”[23]
It is possible that the first fiberglass paddleboard or surfboard could have an even earlier start date. Twentieth Century surfing innovator Tom Blake told his biographer Gary Lynch that “Before the war [World War II] started… [noted swimmer Jim Handy] had sent a board back East and had it fiberglassed… that’s what Tom swears. I’ve asked him three times about it, cuz everyone says it couldn’t be true. But, he said that before World War II, Jamison Handy already had a fiberglass board. I don’t know why he’d tell me that if it wasn’t true.”[24]
Early surfboard shapers who used fiberglass – guys like Hobie Alter ‑ tend to dismiss this East Coast connection, maintaining that fiberglass was developed on the West Coast for the war effort. Sending a board back to the East Coast to have it fiberglassed would not have made any sense.[25] However, it is true that the Whitmans, in Florida , were early on into fiberglass. It is possible that they got a hold of some before the war, after it and resin were invented in 1936.
Irrespective of Pete Peterson being the first verified surfer to completely fiberglass a board, this innovation went virtually unknown among surfers of the day. Even Hobie Alter admitted, “I always thought [Bob] Simmons was the first guy to use fiberglass on a surfboard.”[26] Anyway, Pete did not produce further fiberglass boards in any number that would have been noticed.[27]
Whitey After the War
After the war, board experimentation and manufacture continued its shift from Waikiki to
The Hot Curl design had proven effective in Hawaiian waters, but not functional for non-reef breaks like most all of California . At one point, SoCal surfer and fisherman Whitey Harrison erroneously adopted the design for California waves. “A lot of guys – like Whitey Harrison – when they came down and saw what our boards could do at Castle him and Pete Peterson cut their tails down – right there on goddamn Waikiki Beach
In 1946, at age 33, Whitey married his second wife, Cecilia Yorba, who came from one of California ’s pioneering Spanish families. Cecilia was “a descendent of the Yorba family that originally owned one of the largest Spanish land grants in old California ,” wrote Whitey’s daughter from his first marriage, Rosie. “She lived with her grandmother in the adobe Pryor homestead one half mile inland from Doheny. When her grandmother died, the house, which was built before the San Juan Capistrano Mission, was willed to her along with some acreage. I remember first meeting her. I thought she was very beautiful…”
“The Yorba family had an inherent fear of the ocean,” continued Rosie. “Cecilia didn’t even swim when my dad talked her into going surfing with him. That first ride resulted in a wreck. She fell on the board and cut her lip with her front teeth. But it didn’t stop her. She and my father were married in 1946 and went to Hawaii for their honeymoon. Where else?”[29]
Whitey recalled: “When I met Cecilia, she was walking down the beach at Doheny with her cousin, and I came ridin’ in on this board right to where she was standing. That had to be about 1945. She said, ‘That looks like fun.’ I said, ‘Yeah, you’ve gotta try it.’ So I spent a week talkin’ her into going surfing with me. She said, ‘Well, I don’t know, they’ve had such awful drownings in my family, nobody wanted to go near the ocean.’ So I said, ‘I’ve worked lifeguard for five years, I’m not gonna let you drown.’ A fella named Voss Harrington was surfing with me at the time I was going with her. We were in the abalone business together. Voss, Fritz and Burrhead worked abalone with me all up and down the coast of California ... I talked her into coming over and helping trim abalone at the cove. Then I got her to go surfin’ with me at Doheny. Voss had this 11’ board. I caught a wave with Cecilia and he was on the shoulder and jumped off when he saw us coming tandem. I was standing up, and his board flipped right over, hit on top of her head and shoved her teeth through her lower lip. So that’s how we started. Since then she got so she could ride real good.”[30]
Whitey and Cecilia raised their family in the Yorba family’s historic 200-year-old adobe in San Juan Capistrano . The adjacent “Lorrin’s Barn” – built around 1890 – became an important Southern California “research and development center” for experimentation with various watercraft in the 1930s and more after the war. Experimental designs covered a broad range of equipment, included diving gear, paddle boards and outrigger canoes, as well as surfboards.[31]
“When I came here [to Capistrano beach] we kept horses in [the barn] for the kids,” Whitey recalled. “Later I converted it into a surfboard shop where Fly and I built two hundred and sixty rental boards for Steamboat over in Waikiki . I’ve probably built twenty canoes here altogether. I built five that were 44’-11’’ long, right here in the barn.”[32]
Doc Ball After the War
After the war, “It just kinda exploded, again,”
“Thank goodness for that,” I said.
“You better believe it,” Doc affirmed.[33]
Surfer servicemen “started coming back in late ‘45 and early ‘46,” affirmed Duke Kahanamoku.[34]
“… when the war ended – Boom – we were back in the environment,” Malibu legend Dave Rochlen recalled. “It was devotion, like seeing a girl again… like, ‘I’m never gonna leave!’ We gave ourselves over to it entirely. I think it was because we spent four or five years in the war and we had survived. And it had all been bad. Now there was no question about what had us by the throat. It was the ocean. Everything else was secondary.”[35]
Doc Ball and his brood was just one of many families to regroup and attempt to restart life where it had been put in hibernation since 1941. Doc opened a dental office in Hermosa Beach and, rejoining his wife Evelyn, concentrated on raising their two sons, “Norman (man of the sea) and John (God has been gracious).”[36]
It didn’t take Doc long to get back to his surf photography, either. “Demand was still so great for Doc’s surfing photographs,” Doc biographer Gary Lynch wrote, “that he published the book, California California surfers, giving many a portrait in the book as well as showing the major surfing locations.” California Gary noted, “was $7.25 a book. Doc kept a complete and detailed list of who bought his book. This list still survives and provides an astonishing array of Who’s Who in the world of California surfing at the time. Names only hard core surf historians would recognize such as Bob French and Jamison Handy to other more familiar names like Preston Peterson and Peanuts Larsen fill the pages.”[37]
Eventually, the fifth and final edition of California Ventura ’s Jim Feuling copied the original, publishing it under the title of Early California Surfriders.[38] The images used for this latest edition were shot from the pages of Doc’s first edition and then enhanced by computer.[39]
“He did that without my permission,” Doc admitted to me with a laugh. “That’s a classic. It’s patented. So, I told him as much as he’d printed it, we needed to get the message out for surfers, anyway, and keep it going [knowledge of the California surf heritage]. And, so I said, ‘I won’t sue ya or anything.’ So, he sends me a royalty, now.”[40]That kind of reaction, on Doc’s part, was typical of the man. As surf historian Gary Lynch put it, Doc was the quintessential “troubadour of good will.”[41]
“By the mid 1940s,” Gary wrote, “Doc Ball’s photographs had been published world wide. National Geographic (September 1944), Encyclopedia Britannica (1952), photography magazines, news magazines, art galleries, and newspapers were among the places a Doc Ball photograph could be found.”[42]
An example of this is an image Doc labeled “The Mighty Ski Jump Roars in – December 22, 1940.” It showcases one of the best surf days of the year. “Al Holland, Oshier, Grannis and Bayer riding the 30-foot grinders that arrive here on an average of twice a year and rattle windows over a mile inland with their heavy concussion.” Doc, writing in 1946 in the third person, added, “This picture published in an Australian magazine, made its appearance in far away Noumea , New Caledonia
Granny After the War
“Immediately,” after World War II was won, Palos Verdes Surfing Club standout LeRoy “Granny” Grannis recalled, “my first week back [September 1945], I went to Malibu. We were walking along the beach and looked out and saw probably around 12 guys out. I turned to the guy [I was with and said], ‘Jeez, the place is ruined.’
“Before the war, you’d call somebody before you went to Malibu because you didn’t want to surf alone… What we considered to be a crowd, back then, would be a beautiful day, today.”
“Our old club members got together,” after the war, Granny continued. “We all got together again. We all got married and we all had to have jobs. About once a month, we’d get together and have a poker party or something like that. A lot of the guys joined the San Onofre Surf Club [in the 1950s] and that became our common meeting point after that, for most of us – in the summertime, anyway.”[44]
Even though he now rode the South Bay
A case in point of how Granny was remembered by others even after the war was Greg Noll. In his autobiography Da Bull, Noll recalled, “When I first started surfing… there was Matt Kivlin and Joe Quigg riding redwoods at Malibu . Doc Ball and the guys at the Palos Verdes Surfboard Club. Velzy, Leroy Grannis, Ted Kerwin, the Edgar brothers at Hermosa and Manhattan . Lorrin Harrison, Burrhead and the guys at San Onofre. A few guys down in La Jolla . The entire surfing population consisted of maybe a couple hundred guys, most of them riding redwood boards, paddleboards and balsa/redwoods.”[45]
Another example of LeRoy’s status and regard is how he and Doc Ball were looked at by waterman Mike Doyle in the mid-1950s. Doyle wrote in his autobiography, Morning Glass:
“One of the older surfers down at Manhattan Pier told me about a book called California Surfriders by Doc Ball. It focused on surfing in the 1930s and ‘40s… I took Doc Ball’s book home and studied each picture for an hour at a time, scrutinizing each grain in the black-and-white photos, the way the water flowed over the board, the way the wave was breaking – every detail – until I could feel what it was like trimming across a wall of water. I studied each of the surfers’ styles, their hand movements, the way their feet were placed on the boards, and I came to understand that each surfer in that era ‑ Hoppy Swarts, LeRoy Grannis, Pete Peterson – had his own individual style.
“I saw that the surfers in the book had a wonderful camaraderie that I didn’t have in my own life. They were healthy and joyful, and they enjoyed being with each other. I could see a community spirit there that I wanted to be a part of.”[46]
Opai, Rocky and Yater
One of the surfer servicemen returning to formal education after the war was Tom “Opai” Wert. Born in 1924 and a founding member of the San Onofre Surf Club, Opai had gotten into surfing while body surfing with the newly-invented swim fins of Owen Churchill, at San O. At ‘Nofre, he saw “older” guys riding boards. He borrowed one and was soon hooked. His new love was interrupted when he was called up for military service. During his service years, 1942-45, Opai recalled that all he could think about was surfing.
After the war, he moved to San Clemente and took advantage of the “GI Bill” by enrolling in Orange Coast College
Many other surfers more or less dropped out after the war, opting to continue with their surfing at all costs.
One of this later crew was Dave Rochlen. On April 3, 1946, after serving as a Marine in the South Pacific, Rochlen showed up at Malibu and was particularly taken to a surfboard made by “some crippled guy named Simmons.”[48]
“He’s got a great attitude,” said Rochlen of Simmons, “— he calls everyone ‘fucking pussies.’” About Simmons’ board shapes, “Rocky” Rochlen noted, “There’s something different going on here, the guy talks about particulated molecular masses moving up the face of the wave.” At Simmons’ house, on June 15, 1946, Simmons showed Rochlen and Joe Quigg his 12th creation. It was a redwood and he credited influence from Gard Chapin and Bud Morrisey. On the way home, Rochlen commented to Quigg that, “Yes indeed, something remarkable is afoot.”[49]
“What fueled Rochlen’s, and others’, great passion,” postulated John Grissim in his book Pure Stoke, “was their new independence, and an unwillingness to drop back into a regimented social system. The stance was not angry, it was go-it-alone, laissez-faire, unconsciously romantic, and a bit escapist. But that life was based on a clear, clean, passionate vision that was attainable – as were the waves. Whenever and wherever the swell was up, there was always plenty of room.”[50]
One gremmie missing the war was Rennie Yater who, by the mid-1940s, was riding a Pacific Ocean Ready Cut Homes board. “I picked up one of those Pacific System Homes boards, probably – I’ll say ‘46,” recalled Rennie. “The board was the classic one with the nose blocks and red pine wood rails, balsa center – what they called the kettle bottom round, flat deck. Tiny little fin. The Swastika model they made was a little thinner board than that. It wasn’t as big and bulky. It was smaller, thinner. I didn’t see those until later.
“The guy that had that business surfed San Onofre, apparently, and had the ability to make those things, along with the house projects. I don’t know how many of those things they made. A hundred? Two hundred? I have no idea. A hundred boards then was a lot of surfboards.
“Then I started going down and riding Doheny. You know, my dad would take me down there. I had to make a rack on the back of the car to get it in there. He’d take me and this other kid who lived up the street. We’d go down there, right straight off. Probably did that for a couple of years... mostly in the summer, because the winter really didn’t have much surf there.”[51]
Newport Beach , 1930-42
The post-war growth of