The surf was up again this week, as the latest in a series of powerful storms in the Eastern Pacific reached the Southern California Coast. An experienced local doesn’t need to check the surf report to know when there are waves: the size of the swell can be calculated from the number of cars parked on PCH at popular surf breaks like Nicholas Beach, Surfrider, and Topanga.
At Malibu’s Surfrider Beach the waves were four to six feet, with some bigger sets, and the lineup was packed: old surfers with longboards, beginners with soft-top boards, hotshots hotdogging on shortboards. Novices struggled to paddle out at First Point, near the Malibu Pier. The experts gathered at Third Point, where the waves are biggest. On the famous Malibu Wall, built in the early 1930s, when the nearby Adamson House was built, a colorful array of boards are propped.
That wall is so well known that the makers of the 1979 surf film Big Wednesday recreated it at another beach—the real Surfrider beach was too popular and crowded to accommodate a film shoot. The wall, the beach, the surfbreak with its three points, are all part of surfing legend.
“A lot of surf culture came from right here in Malibu,” longtime Malibu resident and lifelong surf enthusiast John Mazza told me.
John has a formidable collection of historic surfboards and an encyclopedic knowledge of surfboard history. Thirty of his boards are on permanent loan to Pepperdine University’s Payson Library, where they tell the story of the modern surfboard. He explains that the evolution of the surfboard is rooted right here on the Southern California Coast. He shared some of that history with me in an informal interview at his home in Malibu.
This conversation was taking place because I recently found a photograph of Malibu Colony resident and silent film era “It Girl” Clara Bow goofing off in a sombrero, with a revolver in her hand and a surfboard at her side. The board had a design on it that looked like a stylized drawing of its owner. I reached out to John to find out more about the board, and learned that he had one almost exactly like it from the same time, also with custom artwork.
It’s a Hawaiian-made board,” he told me.
One thing I quickly learned was that there are an astonishing variety of surfboards. The boards at the Surfride Beach Wall on any day when the surf is up reflect the skill level, size, budget, and tastes of the surfers who own them, but they represent a small fraction of all of the styles, and variations out there.
Contemporary surfers have a lot of options. Variables include size, width, weight; number, type and placement of fins; and the shape of the nose, tail rocker, rails, and bottom contour; the choice of colors, decorations, and paint finishes, and custom vs mass-produced.
There is also surfboard-adjacent equipment that includes kneeboards, surf mats, skimboards, paddle boards, boogie boards, and lift foils, and surf gear like wetsuits and clothing. It’s a multi-billion-dollar industry, but in the beginning, there was just one kind of surfboard: the plank. The oldest one found so far dates from the 1600s, and was found in 1905 with other burial goods in the tomb of Hawaiian Princess Kaneamuna. It looks remarkably like the one owned 300 years later by Clara Bow.
“It was made of koa wood,” John said, adding that most of the other surviving early boards are later, dating to the early 1800s.
Early boards did not have fins, or any kind of rocker—the curved banana-like shape of modern boards that controls how it travels through the water. Early surfers usually rode straight in towards shore. John clarified that these ancient-style boards could turn, but that the technique was very different from modern boards and took considerable skill. “It wasn’t easy,” he said.
Before colonization, Hawaiians of all ages and social status surfed. “The biggest boards, “olos,” were ridden by the kings, but everyone surfed.”
Christian missionaries tried to eliminate surfing in the early 1900s along with other traditional culture, describing it as immoral and frivolous.
“There wasn’t a whole lot of surfing for a while,” John explained. However, the tradition didn’t completely die out. When it was revived at the end of the nineteenth century, boards began to be made out of redwood imported from Northern California And then, the introduction of redwood from California, the first innovation in hundreds of years. “Redwood boards were lighter, easier to obtain,” John said.
The redwood boards were still very much in the style of the ancient boards. This is the kind of board that would make a sensation as the first wave of surfing popularity swept the world in the early twentieth century. Early surfing enthusiasts included British mystery writer Agatha Christie, who learned to surf in South Africa in 1922, and American novelist Jack London.
“Jack London surfed in Hawaii,” John said.
The popular author’s 1907 essay “Riding the South Sea Surf” helped popularize the Hawaiian sport, but two Hawaiian surfers had the biggest role in introducing surfing to the rest of the world. George Freeth arrived in Southern California in 1907. He was billed as “The Man Who Walks on Water,” and the “Hawaiian Wonder,” and not only gave surfing performances but also taught swimming, surfing, and lifesaving techniques.
In 1912, Freeth was joined in Redondo Beach by Duke Kahanamoku, the handsome, charismatic, young Hawaiian Olympic Gold Medalist who was completing a victory lap around the world following his success at the 1912 Olympic Games, and showcasing the ancient Hawaiian art of surfing everywhere he could. Surfing soon began to gain popularity in California, Australia and South Africa—places where there was both good weather and good surf breaks.
The next innovation was developed by Tom Blake, a surfer who was born in Minnesota in 1902. Blake met Kahanamoku during that 1912 victory tour. He gravitated to California, where he learned to swim and to surf in Santa Monica and became a lifeguard. Blake spent most of 1922 in Hawaii, where he surfed and studied the ancient boards at the Bernice Pauahi Bishop Museum. Years later, he would restore them. Blake went on to develop the first hollow surfboard. It was based on the ancient designs but lighter and more maneuverable than solid plank boards. He later refined the design to be chambered.
“Most of Blake’s boards were paddleboards,” Mazza said. “They were long and hollow. They became popular with lifeguards, because there was room on the board for the person the lifeguard was rescuing, and paddleboarding was also a popular sport.”
In addition to developing the first hollow boards, Blake was the first to add fins, an innovation that greatly increased the surfer’s control over the board in the water.
Blake always claimed that he and his friend, fellow surfer Sam Reid, were the first surfers to ride the wave at Malibu Point, in September of 1926.
“We took our 10′ redwoods out of the Essex rumble seat and paddled the mile to a beautiful white crescent-shaped beach that didn’t have a foot print on it,” he wrote in his memoir. “There was no audience but the seagulls.”
Until the 1930s, all surfboards were handmade in small numbers. In the 1930s a Los Angeles pre-fabricated home manufacturing company became the first commercial surfboard manufacturer. Pacific System Homes (originally Pacific Ready-Cut Homes) began experimenting with manufacturing surfboards.
“One of the owner’s kids was a surfer, he said ‘let’s make surfboards,’” John said. Just like Tom Blake, Meyers Butte, the son of Pacific owner William Butte, returned from Hawaii inspired to innovate lighter board designs.
The family’s manufacturing facility had all of the equipment necessary to make boards The Buttes experimented with super lightweight balsa wood, and found that it wasn’t tough enough on its own—”it would rot,” John said—but that it could be combined with redwood to create a lightweight, composite board with balsa for the boards and rails and nose made of redwood. “Because balsa soaked up water, the boards were coated with varnish.”
Once the design was perfected the boards could be mass produced on a scale not previously possible.
WWII put an end to surfing for a decade, but technological advances made in aircraft design and manufacture would revolutionize surfboard design after the war, and many of the US troops stationed in the Pacific brought back a new enthusiasm for surfing, along with a passion for Polynesian culture.
Many of the major aircraft manufacturers were located in the Los Angeles area. Inventions that came out of what would become the aerospace industry include composite materials, resins, glues, and fiberglass.
“Bob Simmons invented fiberglass-coated boards and the use of aerodynamic shapes,” Mazza said. “He went to Caltech, had an engineering background, and took this new material and used it to shape boards. He invented the modern board.”
Malibu surfer and surfboard maker Joe Quigg made a custom surfboard for Darylin Zanuck, the daughter of film producer Daryl Zanuck. She was dating lifeguard Tommy Zahn at the time—1947—and wanted to learn to surf. Quigg made a shorter, more maneuverable balsa board, sometimes referred to as a “girl board”. It would become the prototype for the lightweight, fast, maneuverable, Malibu board.
Surfboard shapers like Quigg and Simmons also began experimenting with another new material: lightweight styrofoam, another product invented during WWII. Foam lent itself even better to mass production than Pacific System’s balsa and redwood boards. “Instead of making a few boards a year it was now possible to make hundreds,” Mazza said.
He credits Gidget with igniting America’s passion for surfing. The original Gidget was a lightly fictionalized version of Kathy Kohner-Zuckerman, the daughter of writer Frederick Kohner and an avid Malibu surfer. Frederick Kohner published his fictional account of her adventures in the 1957 novel Gidget, The Little Girl with Big Ideas. The first film version debuted in 1959, and was a massive hit.
“I started surfing in 1956 at Newport Beach,” John said. “Before Gidget, there were just a few surfers. After the Gidget movie there were suddenly thousands.”
Surfing innovations continued to be made. Accurate wave prediction was a huge advance. This technology was developed by oceanographers at Scripps Institute in the 1940s. Their work, which included contributions by geophysicist Walter Munk, famously helped the Allies time the Normandy Invasion in WWII. It continues to help surfers know when waves are on the way.
Better surfing gear like neoprene wetsuits, and inflatable life-preserver vests make surfing safer and more comfortable. Fortunes have been made selling surf clothing to people who will likely never surf but who still dream of the thrill of riding waves, and more people than ever are interested in the sport. Men’s and women’s shortboard surfing was added to the 2024 Summer Olympics, and will be back in 2028, when the games return to Los Angeles, and surfers will compete at Trestles State Beach near San Clemente—another of California’s top surf breaks.
John doesn’t have a high opinion of surfing as a professional sport. For him it’s about the joy of going out on the water and catching a wave.
For many surfers, surfing is more than a sport. It’s a lifestyle. The reward isn’t who surfs best or how much money that might be worth, but spending time on the water, and the thrill and challenge of catching a wave, whether the surfer is an expert or a beginner.
Perhaps that’s why many California surfers have also been environmental activists, fighting for clean water and public access to beaches. In ancient Hawaii, surfing was a sacred activity as well as a thrilling one. For many today, surfing is still a spiritual experience, one that incorporates the Aloha spirit of the ancient surfing tradition, including the patience needed to wait for a wave, respect for the power of the ocean, and a kind of California devil-may-care nonchalance.
Trends come and go. Shorter, ancient-style wooden plank boards called paipo are in demand again, handmade from planks of wood, or modern iterations made of composites. Longboards never went away after the shortboard revolution, but there were fewer of them. Now they are back, in more variety than ever.
Surfers like John Matta value the old custom-made boards shaped by legendary shapers, not only because they are good boards, or historically important, but also because they are works of art—graceful, beautiful, elegant—symbols of the surfing cultural revolution.
“It’s still cool to be a surfer,” John says. He should know. He’s lived the surfer dream his whole life, from surfing at Newport’s “Wedge” as a kid, to Waikiki Beach before it was a major tourist destination, to a life in Malibu, where he can hear the surf at night from his open window when there’s a Southern swell.
“Surfing is a Hawaiian invention and tradition, but a lot of surf culture came from Malibu and Southern California,” he says. “Malibu is the best wave.”
