Surfing Heritage & Culture Center

George Greenough with his "Big Wednesday" camera rig. Needless to say, it's not light. The camera and housing is now at SHACC as part of the Croul Collection. Seeing it in person provides an even better sense of just how ahead of his time Greenough's cinematic efforts really were. Photo: Merkel

Surf Guide magazine (V2#9, Oct. 64) featuring a young Karen Gallagher cruising at San Onofre on the cover.

Wally Froiseth and George Downing having fun changing the game. Along with John Kelly and Fran Heath, they were responsible for the creation of the modified "Hot Curl" surfboards, the first true high performance models of their day. Photo: Downing Collection

Taken at SHACC a few years back, Starman with what he says is the first surfboard he ever airbrushed. A Mike Hynson down-railer, Starman’s psychedelic airbrush art was a signature of the acid-washed Laguna scene of the 1960s. His artistic voyage began in 1961 when he first started painting t-shirts inspired by Ed "Big Daddy" Roth. Eventually he fell in with Hyson, Johnny Gale, the Brotherhood and Rainbow Surfboards. Throughout his cosmic career he’s created personal stage clothing for luminary rock acts such as Led Zeppelin, Paul and Linda McCartney, George Harrison, The Allman Brothers Band and Bob Dylan to name a few. Photo: Barry Haun

Multiple fins, concave, rocker, the use of fiberglass cloth and resin, by the end of the 1940s Bob Simmons had set surfing and the need for speed on a completely new trajectory that continues to inspire and drive surfboard innovation more than 70 years down the tracks.

A very happy 49th birthday to the greatest to every play the game, the ageless Mr. Kelly Slater. Photo: Flame

It's Friday night and you can go to a theater and see any surf movie with all of your friends. What are you going to see?

Yesterday Kelly Slater paddled out for his 28th Pipe Masters on an all back 5'6" twin-fin and ruled Backdoor. "A little tip of the cap to Dane Kealoha riding twin-fins at Backdoor back in the day," explained Slater after flying through his opening heat. Photos: WSL/Flame

Another on the long list of incredible surfers emanating from the Florida hot bed of surfing, Cocoa Beach. Bruce Valluzzi (1948-1987) started surfing in 1963 at the age of 14. In 1966, he was the men’s division runner-up at the East Coast Surfing Championships and competed in the World Championships. In ’67, ’68 and ’69 he was invited to compete in the Duke Kahanamoku Invitational in Hawaii. Valluzzi earned his reputation in Hawaii as a big-wave rider and was featured on the ...cover of Surfing Illustrated riding a wave at Sunset Beach. He was the first East Coast surfer to be featured on the cover of a West Coast publication. While on Greg Noll’s surf team, he helped develop the Hawaiian Noll Rider design. He would soon team up with East Coast Hall of Famer Mike Tabeling to travel the world. During that time, he started a new career as a writer. From ’67 till his death in 1987 Valluzzi published more the 20 articles, mostly with Surfer Magazine. His best known article was ’82’s Morocco: Surf Madness and 1001 Moorish Days and Nightmares. Valluzzi was a member of the East Coast Surfing Hall of Fame’s first class in 1996.

Who wore one of these?

Margo Oberg at the Hang Ten Women’s International Pro Surfing Championships at Malibu in September of 1975. The defending champ, she was defeated by upstart Linda Westfall before the final, as the Surfer Magazine article points out, after taking her husband’s advice on heat strategy. For the effort she earned $150enough to pay for hubby’s cab ride back to their hotel.

Mary Ann Hawkins / 1939 / Photo: Doc Ball The most prominent thing that comes to mind in speaking of Mary Ann is that there have been great swimming ladies and great board surfing ladies there’s very few bodysurfing ladies, by the way. But, I think she is probably the finest I was gonna say ‘water man!’ water person of the last several generations. I haven’t seen or heard of anybody with her versatility. - Tommy Zahn

Gerry Lopez: Everything that Brewer and I were doing were really straight rocker out the tail. The Hynson boards, for that period, had pretty extreme tail rocker. The nose rocker was still pretty flat, but the rocker through the back of the board made a huge difference. We showed them to Brewer and for a long time had problems with our down rail designs until we looked closely at the Hynson designs and started to pay more attention to the tail rocker. Nobody ever measured roc...ker back then. Almost through the whole ’70s nobody really paid attention to it. Clark offered it, but there was no such thing as a custom rocker. You just got the blank and used the rocker that was built into the blank. From the early ‘70s on, Brewer had a 7’4 and an 8’1 Clark blank, that hardly had any tail rocker. The Diffenderfer blank had more tail rocker, but it had a lot of roll in the bottom, so when you’re trying to make a flat-bottom board it was hard to shape that roll out. So we always ended up using the Brewer blank. It took us a long time to figure out that tail rocker was pretty essential to make a surfboard work better. Sometimes you accidentally shaped more rocker into one board than the other. And we were using a lot of vee in the bottom as well. The fins were hardly a science as well. You’d use all the fiberglass scraps and lay up your own panel, then you’d cut a fin out. Nobody had a bandsaw, we just had this chicken shit jigsaw, and if you didn’t have that you had an exact-o knife and you had to cut the fin out while the glass was still curing. Then you’d grind it down. Back then, that was it. If you had a fin that worked pretty good, when the board broke in half, and they all did, then you grinded that fin off and used it on the next board. Every single board was different than the one before it. Brewer and Diffenderfer were good enough shapers to make the same thing time and time again, but the rest of us, every board was just an experiment. You’d just have at it and go out and see how it rides. Some rode better than others. Some didn’t work at all. Photo: Divine

For all you lovers of surfboards and photography, don't miss "Surfboard," the latest solo exhibition by Joni Sternbach at the Von Lintel Gallery in L.A. "I capture how surfboards, as primitive vehicles of sport and transport, take on and fulfill totemic and archetypal meaning and force," explains Joni. Some of the boards featured come from the SHACC collection and can be seen when our doors open back up again. Enjoy all of Joni's "Surfboard" exhibition here: http://www.vonlintel.com/2020_10_Joni_Ste/Viewing_Room.html

The City of Dana Point unveiled the latest bronze statue within Watermen’s Plaza, celebrating the life and accomplishments of John Severson, founder of SURFER magazine and a patriarch of the modern surf media. This latest memorial joins statues of Bruce Brown, Hobie Alter and Phil Edwards, all located within the plaza planned to honor prominent watermen and women in Dana Point’s history. Severson launched SURFER magazine in 1960 out of a small Dana Point office. The life-sized sculptures of local surf industry legends are being created by artist Bill Limebrook. The City Council also recently commissioned a statue of American surfer and pioneer Joyce Hoffman to be installed at Waterman’s Plaza in 2021.

This is the way it happened with us: A guy named Whitey Harrison he and Gene Smith (pictured) went out to Hale‘iwa one day. This was, like, around ‘37 or ‘38, whatever it was. They went out to Hale‘iwa. It was a big day. And they both almost drowned. - Wally Froiseth on the first surfari to the North Shore of Oahu

At Long Last Loehr: Born in Brooklyn, New York, Greg Loehr landed in Cocoa Beach, Florida, the hotbed of East Coast Surfing, in the 1960s. Quickly displaying an exceptional level of talent in the water, the legendary Mike Tabeling astutely added him to the Weber surf team. In 1974, Loehr won the East Coast Championships. Then, after moving to Hawaii, he became standout and a top-notch international competitor, winning the Lacanau Pro in France in ’79. Working with the Natural Art crew, he became a much sought-after shaper, but his greatest influence may be his innovative use and production of epoxy resin for the surfboard manufacturing industry. Loehr was inducted into the East Coast Surfing Hall of Fame and the International Shapers Hall of Fame in 2016. In 2020, Loehr joined SHACC as an Advisory Council member. Photo: Darrell Jones

Last November SHACC co-founder and all around legendary human Dick Metz sat down for a chat on The Longboardarian Podcast to talk story and share the immense history he's been fortunate enough to be part of throughout his 90-plus years on this blue planet. So, if you're interested in the way it was, spend an hour listening to the man that lived it all.

Widely credited as the sport’s first premier tube-rider, Conrad Canha was born on Maui in 1932. He began surfing when he was 15 and by the ’50s he was one of Hawaii’s most influential performance surfers. Talented in waves both large and small, he was a regular at Makaha, where he won the 1956 Makaha Invitational. But his favorite break was Ala Moana, where he used a backfoot-heavy stance to duck his black balsa board into the barrel more frequently than anyone in the early- to mid-’60s. Photo: Tim McCullough

"Midget Farrelly was the best in every sense of the word. I learned first hand of Midget's dignity and honor as a gentleman in Puerto Rico in 1968. He pioneered modern day performance surfing in Australia and was truly the best. Australia should always remember Midget with pride. Surfing has been enriched by his life." Fred Hemmings / Photo: Grannis

A contemporary of Gidget in the mid-1950s, Eve Fletcher, originally an East Coaster, moved with her family to the San Fernando Valley at age 10, where she became an avid swimmer when her parents joined the local country club. In 1957, at the age of 30, Fletcher ventured down to San Onofre. Toting her first surfboard, a gift from actor Johnny Sheffield, who played Boy in several Tarzan films, she happened to meet Marge Calhoun. When Fletcher asked her for advice, Calhoun said..., "You just paddle and then stand up!" An animator at Disney's Ink & Paint department, after a year, she cashed in her vacation time and packed up for a month-long Hawaiian "surf-ari" with Calhoun. Professionally, Fletcher contributed to films like Cinderella and Alice in Wonderland. She was an animation supervisor for the company, where she continued to work through the 1989 feature The Little Mermaid. She received the Animation Guild's Golden Award in 2005. A longtime member of the San Onofre Surf Club, she was also a familiar face on the beaches of Malibu and Rincon. This photo is of Fletcher tempting fate at Makaha in 1958.

Looking for the dream board to add to your collection? The NJvintagesurfauction may have the magic you're after. They've unfortunately had to put their live auction plans on ice due to current covid-related health concerns, but you can still pick up the board of your dreams via their online auction. The final day for bidding will be October 10, 2020. https://www.njvintagesurfauction.com/

The Newport Beach Film Festival is going digital this week...and you're not going to want to miss this one: "Lost & Found: The Film Archives of Greg Noll."

Born in Memphis, Tennessee, Mike Tabeling (1949-2014) started surfing in 1962 after moving to Cocoa Beach. One of the first to surf Sebastian Inlet, he quickly became a savvy competitor. Tabeling won the Junior division of the East Coast Championships in ’67 and ’68, as well as the Laguna Masters in Redondo Beach in ’67. In ’68 he finished second to David Nuuhiwa at the U.S. Championship. For a brief period in the early 1970s, Mike was the best surfer in the world and I s...aw them all, once said Greg Loehr. Tabeling was part of the legendary East Coast Hobie team that Dick Catri formed in the ’60s. Transcending his Florida roots, he had a feature role in John Severson's Pacific Vibrations, where he was filmed surfing the empty perfection of the Hollister Ranch. Traveling throughout the ‘70s and ’80s, he eventually settled in Jeffreys Bay, South Africa, with his family, where they lived for 10 years. Tabeling eventually returned to the U.S., first to Florida and then California, where he worked in the surf industry for many years. He was the first East Coaster to make the cover of Surfer Mag and was inducted into the East Coast Hall of Fame in ’98. He succumbed to cancer in 2014. He was 65. Photo: Larry Pope

You know, it's not all doom and gloom out there. Here's some good news. A near two-decades-long battle to permanently protect San Onofre State Beach from road development came to an end on Friday night when California Governor Gavin Newsom signed Assembly Bill 1426, prohibiting the development of any roadway(s) that might impact or encroach upon the state beach.

Here's to sliding into the week with casual grace like this unidentified soul cruiser. Photo by 2020 Follow The Light winner Paul Greene.