John Heath "Doc" Ball (1907-2001)

Doc grew up in Redlands, California, the son of Genevieve – a natural child psychologist – and Archibald E. Ball, DDS, a graduate of the University Of Michigan School Of Dentistry.[3]  While as a boy, photography became part of John Heath’s life.

“Most of my lifetime, I guess,” he told me, “I’d had a camera for some reason or another… I started with a little thing about four or five inches; maybe less than that; a little tiny camera box that they made.  I guess it was for kids or something.  It was black and white stuff.  Take it on bike hikes and everything.  That was when I was about eight years old.  I got started ‘photography’ that way.”[4]

Doc’s introduction to the Pacific Ocean also came early in his life.  Out at Catalina Island, “at age 4,” Doc wrote, “I was taken along with my parents on a Redlands Elks Club party.  On arriving, my mom decides to take a swim in the little bay.  She also carried me out there and met another club member, Jake Suess (owner of a grocery in Redlands).  He says, ‘Let me take little Jack.  I’ll teach him to swim.’  She handed me over to him.  He wades out to hip depth and plops me down in that cold H20.  I went clear under before he grabbed me up.  And I start screaming ‘It’s salty!’  Anyway, that did not blot out my interest in the old salty, as our family vacationed at Hermosa Beach.  I learned to bodysurf, here.  Also, to make a few dimes catching and selling sand crabs to be bait for fishermen.”[5]

Doc’s water direction was kept alive, back in the Redlands during the school year, when he later became a junior lifeguard at the Redlands Municipal Pool.  Duke Kahanamoku visited the pool as a master of ceremonies for an inauguration and made an impression on Doc that was never lost.[6]

By 1924, Doc held the Redlands High School pole vault record of 11-feet 6-inches, using a bamboo pole.  He continued playing sports in school when he played left end on the University of Redlands football team (1928).[7]  “The next wild experience here,” Doc wrote about the aquatic side of high school sports, “was learning how to do a one-and-a-half flip over from the 20-foot high diving platform.  It was a blast!”[8]

Following his father’s profession, Doc enrolled at the University of Southern California Dental School in 1929.  “This is where I learned to put my hands in people’s mouths,” Doc recalled, “and not get bit.”  It’s also where Doc got his nickname.[9]

“By this time,” Doc added, “I also set another record.  A 20-foot exhaust pipe for my strip-down Model T Ford (rode the thing on the gas tank) – was given the thing for cleaning up a friend’s backyard of weed overgrowth.  Weeds had almost swallowed the old T.  It had no body or fenders or front tires.  I drove it home and got it in shape to drive.  When they did some repair work on the Kingsbury Grade School roofing was when I got that 20-foot pipe – put the end of it on skate wheels and attached it to my Model T Ford.  Got a blast when classmates went to look at the skate wheel towing attachment.  I would pop the thing [pop the clutch] with a backfire which caused them to jump sky high.”[10]

Doc recalled that “when I went down to USC Dental College, I had a little canoe I used to ride up in the Redlands area, in the lakes and rivers and whatever – canals [even].  So, I figured, ‘why not?’ [try it in the ocean].  Oh, we had lived in Hermosa Beach, there, in the summertime, way back [beginning in] 1920-21.  So, I knew the beach and I was interested in salt water and so –” he laughed, “I took that canoe, went out and paddled around; finally found out I could catch some waves with it!”[11]

When we think of a “canoe” nowadays, an image of a nicely constructed, mass-produced, well-marketed product comes to mind.  But, back then, a canoe could mean something you bought, but most likely meant something you made.  Doc’s was a custom job he called “The Bull Squid.”[12]

“I made it with bicycle rims – wooden rims, in those days,” Doc told me.  “The canoe was mostly made – what they had were some [train] car strips that they would use for packing oranges; great big orange boxes in the flat cars in the freight trains; just big long strips [of wood].  They just fit together perfect.

“So, I made the sides out of wood and put a little canvas covering over the front and back and that kept the waves from crashing over both the bow and, ah – stern.

“Anyway, it was a pretty good little surfing canoe; 6-foot, 6-inches long.”[13]

With The Bull Squid, Doc not only spent time sliding the surf, but diving for abalone.  The rest of the time was spent on classes and studying.[14]

“Remember your first surfboard?” I asked Doc.

“Pretty much.  It wasn’t mine, but it was one we could use.  There was a guy who came down to the beach, there, to go surfin’.  He’d been to Hawai‘i and he brought this board back.  A big 10-foot redwood.  He didn’t know what to do with it during the week, cuz he knew he’d only come down on the weekend.  So, by that time I had another buddy whose mother and father owned a restaurant right on the beach – right on the cement walk, there, on the ocean front.

“We went in and made a deal with him.  If the guy would let Norm [Brown] and I use his board during the week, they’d let him store it in their restaurant (‘Walt & Mize Hamburgers’).  It was kind of an attraction!  It helped them out and it helped us out.  That was the first board.”[15]

Encouraged by Sam Apoliana, a Hawaiian classmate,[16] Doc went on to build a plank-style surfboard.  He carved it out of a large slab of redwood, hewn with an adze.[17]

“Then,” Doc told me of this development, “Norm and I decided we better have one of our own, so we went down and got some lumber.”  Doc paused and asked me if I knew what an adze is.  “You have to stand with your legs spread pretty good,” Doc cautioned about use of the adze.  “Some of the guys we’d been told – in the logging industry – they’d pretty near chopped their ankle off.

“It’s a horizontal [blade, as opposed to an axe’s vertical].  Well, we hacked us out a couple of boards with that.  That was really the first one [we made ourselves and were our own].”[18]

In the late 1980s, Doc passed this same adze on to big wave legend Greg Noll, appointing him as “keeper of the flame.”  As for Doc’s first surfboard when he first hacked it out, he colored it white and decorated it with copper sheeting in the shape form of a shield with the words “Na Alii,” Hawaiian for “The King.”[19]  Copper studs kept it solidly pressed to the board’s surface.  “In time,” Doc said with some regret, “it was stolen out of our Hermosa Beach house backyard.”[20]

“Then ole Norm,” Doc told me, “he decides he’s gonna make one after Blake’s type [hollow paddleboard].  He started making 14-foot paddleboards.  I bought one of those from him and that was my board for a long time.”

“You liked the increased flotation?” I surmised.

“Oh, definitely,” Doc agreed.  “Yeah!”[21]

Like many surfers of his time, Doc revered Duke Paoa Kahanamoku.  “He was one of our heroes in that time,” Doc told me.  “He came here and toured around a little bit, but I didn’t get to see him too much.”[22]

About a year or two after he got started surfing, Doc had an opportunity to surf with Duke down at Corona del Mar.[23]  One of Doc’s most vivid memories of Duke was in the early 1930s, at a surf contest at Santa Monica:

“They had a big thing at Santa Monica – a whole gathering of surfers giving out awards from the contest they’d had,” Doc recalled.  “Ol’ Duke was in there.  And, son-of-a-gun, when I got in there and sat down, here’s Duke.  He’s sitting right in front of me.”  Doc was laughing about it as he remembered the day.  “And I said, ‘Duke… Duke… Duke…’ [trying to engage him in conversation].  Never even turned his head.”  To get Duke’s attention, Doc resorted to the little Hawaiian lingo he knew.  In Hawaiian, Doc said, loud enough for Duke to hear: ‘To the up righteousness of the State.’[24]  “And, man, he whipped around like a shot!”  Doc laughed some more, then told me they got into active conversation.  “We had a blast…”[25]

A hero more accessible and even a close friend was Tom Blake.[26]  “He was my surfin’ buddy for all those years,” Doc told me of the 1930s and ’40s.  “We rejoiced together in the picture shootin’ [photography] and everything.”[27]

I mentioned to Doc that I’d heard there were only about 30 surfers in Southern California at the end of the 1920s.[28]

“That sounds a little extra, to me,” he responded.  “When I started, there were probably 15 or 20 around the whole coast.  But, they were mostly all in Southern California where the water was warm.”

I asked Doc who the earliest surfers were that he could remember.

“Some of the local guys.  Johnny Kerwin and his family, Jim Bailey [and] lifeguards.  They had a big pier there [Hermosa], ya know.  You go out there and that’s where you run into the lifeguards.  Most of the time, some of these other guys were out there; goin’ fishin’ or just checkin’ the situation out.”[29]

Most respected of these lifeguards was Rusty Williams.  “Anytime the waves got good, why, he’d be out there.  He was the one who was always telling us to watch out for the pilings on the pier.”[30]

About Johnny Kerwin, Doc said, “He was one of the first, there, at Hermosa Beach; the Kerwin family.  He had three brothers and a sister… We used to get together to go surfing, abalone diving, lobster diving and, boy, you name it.  His folks had a big bakery down there at Hermosa Beach and so that’s where we went to get all our cookies, bread, cakes… it was really an ‘in’ thing.

“He was a real friend...”[31]

John “Doc” Ball certainly was not the first person to photograph surfers.  One has only to visit any surfing museum to see evidence of predecessors.  There are shots taken of surfers going back to the late 1800s.  Frenchmen Auguste and Louis Lumiere invented the motion-picture camera in 1895[32] and by 1898, motion pictures of surfers at Waikiki were taken by Thomas Edison, inventor of the light bulb and the phonograph.[33]

Notable during the 1910s was Alfred Gurrey, Jr., in Honolulu.  Sometime shortly after 1903, he opened Gurrey’s Ltd: Fine and Oriental Art, which became a hub of Honolulu’s art scene; “the haunt of artists and patrons,” as a Honolulu Commercial Advertiser later put it.[34]

It was while operating the gallery that Gurrey photographed surfers and then had some of his surfing photographs published in magazines like Alexander Hume Ford’s Mid-Pacific Magazine.[35]  It was Gurrey’s photographs of Duke, especially, that gained a large audience not only in the Islands, but on the U.S. Mainland and in Australia.  His best work can be seen in one of surfing’s most scarce collectibles: The Surf Riders of Hawaii.

Surf Riders of Hawaii was originally self-published by Gurrey as a handmade booklet photo compilation of surfing photographs in 1914.  It was later reprinted in St. Nicholas Magazine, Volume XLII, Number 10, August 1915.  The booklet combined artistically-rendered prints with romantic poetry from Lord Byron and also prose by Gurrey himself.[i]

Unfortunately, Gurrey quit photography shortly after publication of Surf Riders of Hawaii.  His art gallery struggled financially through the second half of the 1910s and on into the 1920s, finally shutting its doors in 1923.  After a year of unemployment, Alfred, Jr. joined his father in the insurance business.  He died a few years later at the relatively young age of 53.[36]

Photographs of surfers continued to be taken through the first two decades of the century – the beginning two decades of the rebirth of surfing.  Surfer, inventor and philosopher Tom Blake took many photographs, some of which can be seen in his first book Hawaiian Surfboard.  And, in a notable milestone, Blake had the first surf layout printed in an edition of National Geographic., published the same year (1935).  Like Doc Ball, Don James also began surf photography in the 1930s, shooting many a photo between the ‘30s and 1960s.[37]

The significant role Doc Ball plays in surf photography, however, is that he was the first truly dedicated “surf photog,” as he called himself.  His surfing experience was framed by the camera’s lens from many angles.  Sure, he surfed and spearheaded the Palos Verdes Surfing Club, but more than that, he took photographs of surfers, surfing and surf culture.  He was the first to take this approach as his primary focus.  It began like this:

In 1926, Doc was given a Kodak Autographic camera by his father’s dental assistant.  “My dad was a dentist,” he reminded me, “and his office gal brought in a folding Autographic.  She didn’t want it anymore, so she gave it to my dad and he gave it to me.  I took that down to the beach, there, and when I went to school.”[38]

“I started [taking pictures of surfers surfing] after we started going down to the beach.  I said, ‘Oh, man, I gotta take a picture of some of these guys.’  That’s when I started using that folding Autographic.”[39]

One of Doc’s earliest surf-related photographs was taken the same time he started riding waves with a canoe and then a surfboard.  Around 1929, Doc took some pictures of his mother on a board at Palos Verdes Cove.  “My mother was a beautiful chicken,” is how he put it to Gary Lynch, “you have to admit it, a natural child psychologist.  She raised us right,” he added in appreciation.[40]

The year 1931 was when Doc really hit a turning point in his life; a turn that would unite his recreational time with both surfing and photography.  At the start of the year, the Los Angeles Times printed a sepia-toned, full spread rotogravure photograph of four surfers at Waikiki.  Taken by Tom Blake with his new waterproof camera housing, “Riders of Sunset Seas” grabbed hold of Doc’s imagination at the same time it provided viewers with a unique perspective of waves and surfers at an angle never before.[41]

From that point on, “Doc became dedicated,” surf historian Gary Lynch wrote, “to the pursuit of artistically recording the California surfing scene.”[42]

About the Kodak folding Autographic and why it was called that, Doc told me: “You could sign the thing and it registered right on the film; had a little place down at the bottom of the camera case.  I used to carry that out to the Palos Verdes Cove… I finally got to the point where I carried it in my teeth with a towel around my neck, getting’ drowned an’ everything.”[43]

“Doc started,” Gary Lynch wrote, “producing photographs of surfers surfing, their boards, cars, girlfriends, parties, surf board construction, living quarters, club houses and just about all activities related to this new breed of Californian.  Comedy often played a part in the composition of Doc photographs.”[44]

Doc graduated from the USC Dental College in 1933.  Shortly afterward, on Monday, March 19, 1934, he opened an office at 4010 1/2 South Vermont Avenue, in Los Angeles.  “He rented a second story, five room suite above a movie theatre that then stood at that address,” wrote Gary Lynch. “On a surviving photograph of the office and theatre beneath, the marquee clearly informs us that the movie ‘Algiers’ was showing, starring Charles Boyer and Hedy Lamarr.  One room was dedicated to working on his patients and one room served as his bedroom, office, darkroom, and laboratory.”[45]  A third room constituted the Palos Verdes Surfing Club, after it was formed in 1935.[46]  The landlord gave Doc the first two months rent free, due to the Depression, and charged forty dollars a month thereafter.[47]

“In those days,” Doc told Gary, “I didn’t have enough money to rent another building to sleep in.  We made our own boards and swimming trunks, camera tripods, and copy stands.  We bought very little.  It was good for you.  After all that, you really knew how to get there from here.  It was a do-it-yourself age.”[48]

A year after he got going in his dentist practice, Doc got together with Adie Bayer to found the Palos Verdes Surfing Club.  “He was one of the big ones,” Doc told me, referring to Adie Bayer as one of the top surfers of the era.[49]  Bayer was a champion platform diver, swimmer, tennis player, as well as surfer.[50]

“He was real energetic and everything,” Doc affirmed. “He helped do organizings, too.”[51]

Because it helped sponsor the first annual Pacific Coast Surfing Championship, the Corona del Mar Surf Board Club was probably the first surf club to form on the U.S. Mainland. It was “the largest club of this kind in America,” according to The Santa Ana Daily Register, July 31, 1928.[52]  The Hermosa Beach Surfing Club was probably second, organizing around 1934.  They had about 18 members, including “the old ones plus Don Grannis, Ted Davies, and others.”[53]

The following year was “A banner year,” “Chuck A Luck” Ehlers recalled of 1935.  To the south, “the Palos Verdes Surfing Club was formed – with Tulie Clark, ‘Doc’ Ball, Hoppy Swarts, LeRoy Grannis, along with transferred surfers Matt Davies, Jim Bailey, Johnny Gates, Tom Blake, Gard Chapin and others.”[54]

Doc remembered that it was Johnny Kerwin who got the Hermosa Beach Surfing Club going, but he said it was “a little after we formed.  Palos Verdes was one of the first ones that organized.  After that was Hermosa and then Manhattan and then Santa Monica.  From there on it went up the coast and kept going after that.”[55]

I asked Doc if there were any significant differences between the surf clubs that sprang up in this period.  “Not especially, as far as I know,” he responded.  “They all had their little banquets here and there and times of celebration; same things we did, too, in our Palos Verdes [club].”[56]

Doc was being typically modest in his comparison of the PVSC to other surf clubs.  The fact was that the Palos Verdes Surfing Club was more sophisticated and organized than any other club.  It’s organization would be impressive even compared to today’s standards.  Certainly, Doc’s photography played a large part in establishing the PVSC as the dominant surf club of the decade.[57]

“We also had, among the clubs,” Doc added, “the Catalina Island-to-Santa Monica Paddle Race.  It was on those [hollow Blake-style] 14-foot paddleboards.  Whew!  That was a long paddle, but [at least] it was a relay.”[58]  What Blake, Peterson and Burton had started had evidently continued.

Soon after forming, the Palos Verdes Surfing Club moved its headquarters into one of the rooms Doc rented.  A small room that separated the clubhouse from the dental office was Doc’s storeroom, bedroom and darkroom.[59]

“The interior of the club room,” reconstructed Gary from Doc’s personal photographs, “was elaborately decorated with photographs of all members with their boards, trophies won by club members, surfing paintings, a president’s desk with gavel, and a set of shark’s jaws that housed the club creed.”[60]

The Palos Verdes Surfing Club creed went like this:

“I as a member of the Palos Verdes Surfing Club, Do solemnly swear:

For non-members, entrance into the PVSC club room was by invitation only.  The club had a sergeant-at-arms and no smoking was allowed in the club room.  “We forbid any cigarette smoking in the club,” Doc explained for me.  “There were some that did, though.  One was [Gene] Hornbeck and another was Jean [Depue].  They never did have any cigarettes when they came to the club, but once in a while, outside, you’d catch ‘em.  Finally, Jean – he tried to go out Hermosa Beach in the big surf and he couldn’t make it out; couldn’t punch through like the rest of us.  He ran out of breath.  That slew the cigarettes on his behalf; never touched ‘em again.”[62]

“The Palos Verdes club members were just regular guys,” remembered LeRoy Grannis of his own participation.  “We worked or went to school, and were pretty much on our own.  We were all like little animals.  Nobody had much or any money, so there was no incentive to go looking for places to spend money and have fun.  We just stayed on the beach and everybody was happy.  I was an apprentice carpenter for my dad, building houses along the oceanfront in Hermosa.  If the surf was good and my friend Hoppy Swarts came by, ready to go, and my dad wasn’t there, it was really hard for me to stay on the job.  Three days later I’d come back and my dad would be madder than hell.”[63]

The PVSC went on to organize paddling races, paddleboard water polo matches, and surfing contests.[64]  The club’s influence went far beyond Palos Verdes.  “When the surf was flat there in Southern Cal,” Doc said of the surf safaris club members would take and the PVSC influence on the rebirth of surfing in Santa Cruz, “we’d make these trips out around, up the coast and down.  One of them went up to Santa Cruz.  They’d not seen that activity (surfing) up there [before]!  Our guys were the ones who initiated it in Santa Cruz.”[65]

E.J. Oshier was the main PVSC guy to help get surfing going again in Santa Cruz.[66]

“The sport quickly took hold at Long Beach, Corona del Mar, San Onofre, Dana Point, and many Santa Monica Bay areas,” confirmed Duke Kahanamoku, “like Redondo, Hermosa, Manhattan and Palos Verdes Cove.  To thousands and thousands it has become a way of life.”[67]

In his limited edition California Surfriders, 1941 – later republished as California Surfriders and still in print – Doc documented “How All This Started.”  Below the title, the photo shows Doc “snapping one in the good old days when the camera was carried out by holding it between his teeth.  Towel was there just in case.”[68]  The photo below it, entitled “Straight Off,” featured “Paddleboards, hats and paddles, constituted the cove surfing gear back in 1934.”[69]

“Life was grand around the California beaches even though the Great Depression had drained the savings and expectations of many,” Gary Lynch wrote.  “For as little as $15-$25 one could build a hollow board or plank style surf board, sew a pair of swim trunks out of canvas and feel like a king at the beach.  When the swell was small, Palos Verdes Cove provided food as well as recreation for the surfers.  A number of interesting photographs taken by Doc demonstrate that a paddle board could be used as an abalone diving platform.  Green abalones were abundant and the limit was twenty a day.  Diving for abalone in combination with fishing made for a pleasant existence.  Driftwood still existed on the Southern California beaches and a warm fire often was the centerpiece for the daily gatherings.”[70]

One particular time stands out in Doc’s memory and it was less than pleasant.  “I was diving for abalones and every time I get down there – oh, about 8-feet of water – I had an abalone beneath a rock.  The thing was anchored there pretty solid.  Each time I’d get my iron in there to loosen him up, he’d get re-anchored.  I stayed down and stayed down – I plumb ran out of air!  Man, I began to black out and so I just dropped everything and came up and started to inhale a little water before I hit to where my surfboard was anchored up there.  I kinda flopped over onto the board and here comes this guy around the corner, at the Palos Verdes Cove.

“‘Hey, Doc – What’re you tryin’ ta do?  Drown yourself?!’

“Holy mackeral!  Then it hit me; what was happening.  That was a wild experience.

“I had another one, too, down diving like that when a big shadow come over the top.  I look up and there’s this great big – 6-7-foot, white belly – leopard shark came swimming across.  Holy cow!  I got outta there!”[71]

Up until Tom Blake began drilling holes in redwood boards in 1926,[72] surfboard size and weight had remained the same since early on in the 1800s.  Further innovations in surfboard design and components continued during Doc’s time.  By the time the PVSC was underway, Blake had already gone to chambered hollow boards that reduced the weight even further.

Blake’s “Hawaiian Hollow Board” – the board that had begun this period of innovation – became known more commonly as “Blake’s Cigar.”[73]  Even though it was nearly laughed off the beach at first, almost every surfer in California and the budding East Coast began turning in their old spruce pine and redwood planks for the lighter, “Blake-style” boards once he went to a chambered hollow design.  “The trend [in surfing] soon changed,” noted a surfside analyst of the late 1930s, “due to its [the hollow board’s] extreme lightness, strength, durability and the greater ease in gaining speed, with much less effort.”[74]

Delbert “Bud” Higgins, a Huntington Beach lifeguard of those times, described the solid boards during this period.  “The “redwoods were really too heavy, about 125 pounds, plus another 10 pounds or so when they got wet.”  Yet, Higgins, who was the first man to ride through the pilings of the Huntington Beach Pier while standing on his head, swore by the old boards, saying they were, “so big and stable [that] you could do almost anything.”[75]

It was true that compared to the heavier solid wood boards, hollow boards had more steering and stability problems.  The hollows tended to “slide tail” or “slide ass,” in large part because the rails were not rounded and caught water rather than released it.  Except for simple angle turns – accomplished either by dragging one’s foot “Hawaiian style” off a board’s inside rail, or by stepping back and tilt-dancing the board around and out of its old course and into a new one – the hollow boards were still awkward and cumbersome.[76]

This situation ended later on in the decade, thanks to superior construction techniques.  By then, even hollow board rails incorporated a rounded edge.  Also, although they would not completely be embraced until the 1940s, keels (skegs, bottom fins) on surfboards eventually were universally accepted.[77]

The fixed fin was invented by Blake in 1935 in an effort to solve the problem of the hollow board’s tendency to “slide ass.”[78]  The skeg allowed surfers to track and pivot more freely and gave the board more lateral stability.  As a result, terms like “dead ahead,” “slide ass,” “all together now, turn,” and “straight off, Adolph,” gradually faded from surfers’ vocabularies.[79]

By 1937, Doc’s reputation as a surf photographer was well established.  That year, he built his first waterproof camera housing.  The watertight “shoots box” housed Doc’s replacement for the Kodak folding Autographic – a stripped down Series D Graflex.  Not only could he get closer to his wave sliding buddies, but the images were clearer.[80]

“By that time,” Doc told me, “I made a water box. I got a stripped down Series D Graflex camera – 3 ¼ x 4 ¼ – and put a water box around it.  So, that way, you could open it up and make your shot and then shut it up real quick and it didn’t get all wet.”  Doc laughed.  “That thing really did work.  I got some terrific shots with it.”[81]

Doc’s water box had a large brass handle attached so that when he was caught inside, large sets would not wrest it from his grasp.  Although the Graflex was big and bulky compared to today’s camera bodies used for surf photography, it used large format cut sheet film – 3 ¼ X 4 ¼ – which made for sharp enlargements.[82]  “I traded the chief of photography in the Los Angeles fire department arson squad for one of my Graflex cameras,” Doc told Gary.  “I made him a three-unit gold inlaid bridge,” in exchange.[83]